Tiit Ojasoo

03|02|21

The workshop with Tiit, in retrospect, has been one of the most interestingly challenging workshops for me so far (although not much left) in the course. It hasn’t been challenging in a way where I’ve felt totally lost or disrupted, rather it got me exploring a side of the work that I usually don’t spend much focussed time or energy with – one that, at the beginning, I felt very apprehensive to engage with. At the same time, I also feel like Tiit worked very in line with how we’ve worked in the past with warmup games and structured exercises, or, journeys. All this to say: it’s been a really enjoyable time as an artist.

The obvious centrepiece is this adapted notion of psychological gestures, which I wrote about previously in the earlier entry. Since writing that, I have come to realise for myself that these gestures need to be much more ingrained before you can really start using them effectively to experiment and play. This became quite clear in the attempt myself and Liisa made on using our gestures in set text. There may be a number of reasons why this didn’t work – the text was too loaded with context and inescapable, we didn’t know what we were trying to achieve, the gestures didn’t match with the text etc.

Though, I think ultimately so much came down to the fact that we just didn’t know these gestures well enough. At least for me, I was still having to go into myself to access some of the emotions tied to the gestures – whereas the point of them is so that you don’t necessarily have to do this. I think Maiken or Liis pointed out that when you’re focussing your attention and energy on the other performer, then you’re making good work. In this situation, this became much more difficult. Even in the line/confrontation structure, this was an issue. I’d be very interested to re-visit this at some point.

I also think this workshop has been really beneficial to me, as someone who doesn’t give too much attention to the performance of emotion. Now, I can genuinely see the benefit the gesture work may give me going forward, for myself as well as those I’m directing. Some of the gestures were vapid, but honestly some of them did trigger something in me. I also realised I had created a psychological gesture unknowingly on a bus late one night, without realising. I was able to bring this in, too. For something like STREAM, I’m also thinking it’s a possibility to have a specific gesture for everyone that brings them to a certain feeling. Something they can keep coming back to throughout the rehearsal period, and then in the performance as a motif. My only concern is that if the gesture is imposed on them, will they have the same response? I think I’ll still try and see, but then it’ll require a bit more nuance in how I bring them to this. 

The gestures are also quite amazing in that you can just imagine yourself making them, and you’ll still have a response. This might get a little too deep into neuroscience, but it’s been proven that imagining yourself doing a physical action still activates the same neural links (?) in your brain as actually doing the action. This is something I think we’ve all been taught in sports or similar: just envision the jump/kick/spin a few times, and it’ll help. Now, I guess it works here too. 

At a brief point in the workshop, we also came to a discussion on body and mind performance, and that they don’t necessarily equate each-other. An example was given: a performer who jumps down, gives a few hearty push-ups til they’re feeling warm and puffed, and then believes they’re ready for the performance. This might get their physical body a little more loaded, but the act of push-ups does very little to put the performer in the right headspace. This came up after the exercise of moving your body on the beat playing, and I hoped we had been able to repeat the exercise after this conversation, too, because I think there may have been a whole other side to that journey that I wasn’t allowing access to. For me the movement side, though strenuous, wasn’t difficult per se, so mentally I was quite comfortable the whole time. I could’ve given myself much more permission to let go mentally and start engaging in a more ‘back of the head’ way, that might’ve allowed me more range of movement style. Instead, I was actively trying to find new ways of moving, which counterintuitively pushes me deeper into habits.

For further practice, it again brings up some good questions. How do you prepare yourself mentally for a role? Not that this is a totally new question, but instead of knowing how you’re going to go on and perform a certain quality, you could prepare yourself by putting yourself into this quality ahead of time and then letting yourself sink into it through the performance. I’m sure the latter is much more engaging to watch. 

Yet again, this brings me back to this STREAM project. Especially with younger performers, how can I get them into a certain headspace for the work, that’s not “we’re a bunch of enthusiastic young performers doing a show, yay.” Maybe it’s not something I can necessarily achieve except by leading an example myself and with the core group. Maybe, it comes to this gesture we may develop together. 

There’s a lot of thoughts, and this is all a lot more sporadic and surface level than I am hoping to go with it all – ultimately, I’m yet again feeling much more spurred on artistically by this, and that is always something worth celebrating.

28|01|21

Coming into this week with Tiit Ojasoo, I wasn’t sure what I was going to experience – but I didn’t think it was this. Not that I say this in a negative way at all, I just realise that I had such an idea in my mind about who Tiit was that I really expected him to be working with us on a specific methodology or practice that he has used throughout his career. 

It’s actually quite refreshing to be working with him in a way that he is so clearly still trying to work through something artistically, creatively, poetically. I think the only other artist who has had this quality was Sasha – the pretence of being a teacher isn’t there, rather just an artist working with other artists.

This is a bigger conversation, but a few of us were speaking while walking home after class about how it’s encouraging to see someone who is really quite accomplished still be fired up by an artistic pursuit. To be honest, a number of guest artists we have, especially those from very established companies, feel quite resigned to what they’ve always done, and likely will keep doing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – again, I don’t know how much I endorse this notion of always having to reinvent yourself or keep doing new things to stay artistically relevant – but there’s a different energy, that isn’t as active.

In terms of the work we’re doing; at first I shuddered thinking about psychological gestures/hooks, as a tool that I have been aware of for a while, but never really delved into. I think I had always seen them as a very “traditional” acting tool, and a little too personal for the sort of work I enjoyed. Something about finding a gesture to express an emotion also, for whatever reason, feels a little ‘high-school drama class’ – and in some ways it still does.

In saying this, I have come to an understanding of the psychological hooks – and I will say that using the word hook helps – that gives me a motivation for using them. I treat them in the same way I would a trigger sentence that gets you into an accent. As in, for some accents I have a specific string of words I say, and it helps me drop into that accent. In this way, tying up a certain emotion to a specific movement can have the same effect. It’s like we’re Pavlov dogging ourselves.

So far, I can say that it has worked to an extent. I still think there’s a certain abstract and comically over-reaching quality that comes with trying to boil down a poem of great expressiveness and emotion into a gesture (but like Tiit says, it’s not really about the gesture, more the feeling that you expose through it), but I have felt that now when I go back to certain gestures I can find the emotion still there, even if only a small flame of it. 

The next step I am hoping to see before the week is out, is how we can then utilise these gestures into performative work like scenes or compositions.