Week 1
Winter is the perfect time of year to work
on a play about love, death and time.
Bright landscapes of glittering snow banks
unfold for you on your way to rehearsal. Dark evenings greet you when you step
outside at the end of the day.
In one short week we’ve gone from initial
table read of Hannah Moscovitch’s script to a full out run of the play. On the
other end of those five days it now feels as if we’ve already lived through
several lives.
Amy Rutherford (Carmen) and Paul Braunstein
(Elliot), returning cast members who performed in the original production of Infinity in 2015, have had to wade back
into the membranes of old ghosts. They’ve
been joined by new cast member Vivien Endicott-Douglas (Sarah Jean), whose presence is incidentally throwing a
pretty awesome ‘alternate-universe’ factor into the story-world of the Infinity rehearsal room.
Amy Rutherford plays Carmen Green & Paul Braunstein plays Elliot Green
Director Ross Manson is approaching Hannah’s play
with some new thoughts this time round and Hannah herself has done some
rewriting. She has created more of a presence for the character of Carmen and
her music in the play. The epiphany
Elliot has about his own life is now more closely linked with the way he
perceives the role of time in the universe.
Music and physics are, for each of these characters, different ways of
expressing the universe, and so for our purposes these things also become
expressions of the characters themselves.
Ross started off the week with two sessions
devoted to physical character work. He
offered the idea that a performer knows more about their character after a
first reading of a play than they think they know, but they can’t get at this
knowledge through table work; the knowledge is in the body. The “corridor exercise”, which Ross and the
cast began with, is durational work that is done in silence. Its purpose is to
engage a performer’s intuitive knowledge.
The actor is given a narrow corridor of
space to explore in. They begin with a
limited vocabulary to work with: start,
stop and change levels. As time
goes on, the facilitator of the exercise layers on more vocabulary in the form
of verbs. For example: reach, balance, carve, stumble, dance. The actor’s task is simply to explore these
movements, completely free from the pressure to perform or to assume a
character. There is no need to manufacture anything. Some of these movements
may naturally begin to inform character physicality or create a shorthand vocabulary
for the upcoming scene work.
Next, Ross guided the cast through the
creation of three archetypal gestures for their respective characters. A
gesture is a combination of a physical movement and something that is
vocalized. It has a beginning, a middle and an end, and its final picture is a
motionless sculpture. Once first
versions of these gestures are created they can continue to be shaped and honed
until they work for that particular
character.
So, for instance, Ross asked Vivien to play
with her gesture for Sarah Jean’s The
Judge archetype (it involved pushing some invisible thing away and to the
side, while speaking the word, ‘loser!’) by making the gesture larger, then by
making it smaller and more naturalistic, then by taking away the text. Kate Alton later integrated a version of Sarah
Jean’s gesture into the choreographed dance that happens midway through Infinity. This gesture was then changed almost entirely
by Ross so that it became something that more closely resembled trying to
resist a rising flood of water – the steady push quality of the movement
remained in tact but the meaning it suggested had transformed.
Vivien Endicott-Douglas plays the role of Sarah Jean Green
Good gestural movements, Ross explained,
work best when they are just out of the audience’s reach, but not too far that
the audience feels alienated. A good gesture
can give us a visceral insight into the psychological and emotional world of a
character while also creating the space for poetry to happen and all that which
eludes us about other people.
Gesture is also a very real part of human
behaviour. Ross had once watched a documentary about two Canadian WW2 veterans who
returned to the beaches of Normandy they for the first time since the end of
the war. With utter composure and an
unnervingly easy conversational tone, these men gave the film crew a tour of
the events that had transpired on the beach at D-Day. So something like: We opened fire here. Tommy died over there. (Not a waver in the
voice.) Then we lost Doug here. (No
trace of any tear, not even that elusive glint in the eye that movies have
trained us to look for, not a muscle twitch that could evoke a the voice of lone
trumpet sounding somewhere in the distance.) If the filmmakers were looking for
catharsis on this beach they wouldn’t find it here.
Later the documentary picks up with the veterans continuing
their interview on the road. The old site of carnage is miles and miles behind
them and the conversation is as light and easy as ever. Then in mid-sentence one of the men suddenly
freezes, his breath caught in his throat, his mouth trembling like a baby
bird’s, one frail hand flapping wildly at his throat. In one swift moment his body is overwhelmed
by emotion, which has been released as if through a steam valve under immense
pressure. This, said Ross, is real people dealing with emotion.
Infinity is a play
in which love does not go well and death does not go well, either. As such, Ross is taking care to resist
creating moments of tidiness or sentimentality within the scenes he is staging. “Real people under emotional pressure react
inappropriately,” has become something like a mantra by the end of our first
week. So, Sarah Jean, who is not an
integrated human until the last beat of the play, minimizes and makes jokes out
of moments of trauma in her life. The staging of the hospital scene, which we
worked on this Friday, aims to tell a story of disconnect and - to use the vocabulary of the play – ‘fucked-up-ness’,
rather than offering emotional catharsis and closure. Gesture is an important tool actors can use to
suppress, channel, contain or divert emotion that would otherwise spill out
onto the surface of a character.
At the end of this Friday’s run, Paul
looked up from some kind of trance said to the room at large, “I understand why
I goof off so much in these rehearsals. When you are actually in the ride it’s a lot.”
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