Download Master class resource pack Energy first – analysis later when

 Master class resource pack
Energy first – analysis later when performing Shakespeare.
By Will Kerley
October 2015, Stratford TaPS
RESOURCES PACK
THE PLAY'S THE THING ENERGY FIRST - ANALYSIS LATER
in performing Shakespeare's Plays...
WILLIAM KERLEY
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By exploring practical techniques for finding an instinctive, spontaneous
approach to performing Shakespeare's text, this masterclass will examine how
we can immediately liberate Shakespeare's text from the page.
Too often, our first encounters with Shakespeare's plays start as exercises in
literary criticism. With too much head and not enough heart, the 400-year-old
words on the page can become confusing, or seem remote from our modern
world and our use of language in contemporary theatre-making.
What we need is a clear understanding that these works were written for a
company of actors Shakespeare knew well, under commercial pressures and to
a tight rehearsal deadline.
Shakespeare may have been a literary genius, but he was also a practical man
of the theatre. Literary analysis can be of great use to us, but it shouldn't be our
first way in to unlocking Shakespeare's theatricality.
With the right, combustible mixture of spontaneity and discipline,
Shakespeare's words can leap off the page and irresistibly fire our creative
imaginations.
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Some key phrases for this workshop:
- GENERATING ENERGY - TURNING IT ON WITHOUT POLICING IT.
- FEELING THE FEAR - AND DOING IT ANYWAY
- CREATING EVERY OPPORTUNITY FOR YOURSELF AND YOUR
COLLABORATORS TO ENGAGE IN THAT CREATIVE PARADOX:
“SERIOUS PLAY”
- FAKING IT IF YOU DON’T FEEL IT…
- USING CREATIVE ENERGY TO LIBERATE MATERIAL *BEFORE* ANALYSING IT
- CREATING COMPLICITY & CONFEDERACY AMONG PERFORMERS
- MAKING CREATIVE MISTAKES
- TAKING OWNERSHIP - FINDING MY OWN WAY OF DOING IT….
- BANISHING THE CRITIC FROM THE REHEARSAL ROOM
(and from your head) !!
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I have directed both plays and operas. Here, in Stratford-upon-Avon, at the
Royal Shakespeare Company I was assistant director on a production of THE
TAMING OF THE SHREW.
Opera people always say to me – so you direct ‘straight plays’ – they always say –
‘straight plays’ – what’s it like?
Theatre people say to me ‘what’s it like directing opera?’
The assumption is that the two are wholly different.
But I always say that the basic rules are the same. In both forms I am trying to
get a story onto the stage. On time (!) and in an engaging way. Always I am
seeking to enable every collaborator to do his or her best work. And I have to
know when to let them be free of my interference, so they can get on with their
jobs!
Theatre without musicality is dead.
Opera without theatricality is deadly.
But the first thing I’m looking for is positive energy, and a way to maximize the
chance that today’s rehearsal will be a good one, that today’s performance will be
the best so far…
Yes, the first thing I’m always looking for is the RIGHT ENERGY…
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This workshop aims to raise a series of questions for theatre practitioners as
they approach Shakespeare’s plays. I hope that together we will be able to
investigate some of them in a practical and exciting way. I will list some of the
questions the workshop aims to begin to address….
Whatever is useful to your practice: steal it & make it your own.
Creative artists are all magpies, searching for bright shiny things & taking them
back to our nests. We are improvisers: opportunist burglars – if we see a
window open, we must get in and nick stuff! In all our process we must be wellprepared – but ready to change tack when, in rehearsal, a better idea comes
along.
DOING THE KNOWLEDGE
How much do we actually know about William Shakespeare? How
many facts do we know about Shakespeare and the world in which he lived?
About his life? His background? His family? His friendships? His colleagues?
His competitors? His patrons?
How much do we know historical times in which he lived and worked? About
society, the law, the beliefs of ordinary people, the rich and the powerful?
How much do we know about work? As a writer? An Actor? A businessman? A
property owner? A theatrical entrepreneur?
His plays? His poems? The way in which they have been recorded? Published?
Preserved? The lost work?
How much is still obscured to us? How much is not known about him? What key
facts are missing?
How can we gather useful material which will help us in approaching his plays?
How can we research in a way that equips us to interpret his work – rather than
that blinds or bores us with the wrong kind of analysis?
ENERGY
Why did Shakespeare write his plays? His poems? For whom? What
motivated him to put pen to paper? How do we tap into that energy? How can we
harness it? How do we liberate his words from the page? How do we give life to
Shakespeare’s characters, even though they were created 400 years ago?
Was he working to a deadline? Did he have to make money? Was he writing
words for actors he knew? Did he write his plays and send them off to anonymous
playhouse managers? What kind of creative and commercial pressures was he
under? Who was depending on him? Colleagues? Friends? Family?
INDIVIDUALITY/CRAFT
Any creative artist is an individual. If any creative job – writer, actor,
director, set designer, costume designer, choreographer, lighting designer, sound
designer, voice coach, stage manager, technician – if these jobs are crafts – then
the way they are performed is as individual as the craftsman or craftswoman who
is doing the job. There will never be anyone who speaks a line, who directs a
scene, who dances a dance in exactly the way you do.
If this work is a craft, how do I equip myself to do my best work? How do I stand
a chance of doing my best work here, now, today in rehearsal? If this is a craft,
and I am a craftsperson – then I must have a toolbox. I must have a set of tools I
use to solve a creative problem. As a performer, my voice, my body, my intellect,
my specific abilities – horse-riding, juggling, fire-eating, singing, dancing the
tango – all of these are tools in my toolbox. How do I keep my tools sharp as a
creative artist? How do I maximize the chances that I will get to do my best
work?
No-one will ever do it exactly the way you do it. You are as individual as your
fingerprint, or the genetic code manifested in your DNA. Your work as a creative
artist is a gift. It has an appetite, it needs to grow, to develop. How can you feed
that gift?
INSPIRATION
Who is doing good work that I admire? Who is practising my craft –
acting/directing/choreography etc – in a way that inspires me? How can I get fed
by watching excellent practitioners? How can I learn new skills that I have seen
excellent practitioners deploy in their work? How can I teach myself to watch
excellent practitioners, without comparing my own skills to theirs in a negative
way? How can I stop myself from being demoralised when watching experts at
work?
How can I learn from people who are doing good work? Which companies do
they work for? How can I get closer to that work? How can I find out about those
companies and their education, outreach or training programmes? Stanislavsky’s
creation of The Method had its beginnings in one sudden intuition, when he saw
an actor who was a genius performing and wondered how he could train actors to
get closer to that genius.
How can I get better at my craft by studying experts in action?
ANALYSIS
Sometimes, when we approach rich and complex text, like the kind
Shakespeare uses in his plays – we feel we must begin by
understanding everything – that we must have the right intellectual
answers before we begin to speak and act his words. Too often our first
experience of Shakespeare has been via English Literature – which can give us a
marvellous understanding of the mechanics of Shakespeare’s writing, the
structure of his poetics – but which can mean we are too daunted to just get up
and have a go…
That’s why it’s best to start with energy first, and let analysis come later.
There’s no injunction here not to use analysis, or any of the skills that come from
the logical, intellectual brain.
When working on Shakespeare in the rehearsal room, it’s wonderful to be able to
have the wealth of scholarship and academic insights to inform what we do.
But we must remember that theatre is first and foremost ENERGY and ACTION
– and we must not let an intellectual paralysis stop us from getting to our feet
and speaking, moving and ACTING.
The best art is always head and heart working together to communicate dramatic
material.
IMAGINATION
Shakespeare’s plays were written to be performed in the open air,
with very little in the way of today’s arsenal of special effects. (When
they did try to use real stage gunpowder cannons in a performance of HENRY
VIII or ALL IS TRUE, the primitive firearm set fire to the thatch of the roof and
burned the theatre to the ground!) Shakespeare speaks, in the prologue to
HENRY V of ‘imaginary puissance’. The power of the human imagination. How
can we best enable our audiences to perform their work – to supply imagination
to create images for the words we speak?
When we were children we were happy to make spaceships out of cardboard
boxes. We still knew how to skip. How do we get in touch with our child-like
(not childish) imaginations – to bring the full power of imagination to our
creative work? How can we be the adults who haven’t forgotten how to skip?
How do we keep away from toxic people who don’t understand? How do we keep
at a distance the negativity (our own or other people’s) that can destroy an
imaginative venture? How can we get rid of what Augusto Boal called ‘the cop in
the head’ who polices our spontaneity, who sabotages our best intentions, who
traps us in creative intertia?
How can we find kindred spirits with similar imaginations and ‘grapple them to
us with hoops of steel’…
OWNERSHIP
Shakespeare’s plays belong to the theatre. They only come to life, not in
the library, but as they are played out in a theatre in front of an audience. The
words belong to the actors who speak them. It is easy to feel disenfranchised, to
feel that these crusty old works belong in libraries. That the old-fashioned words
are beyond us. How do we take possession of the words and speak them with
boldness and clarity, how do we launch them into the theatrical space – how do
we find the confidence and courage to do that?
Sometimes you have to fake it if you don’t feel it!
How many times have you come into a rehearsal room or a workshop space and
not felt ‘in the mood’ for work that day? How many times have you had to turn
on the right energy, even if you didn’t initially feel in the right frame of mind or
headspace? How often, in the course of a long run of a play, do actors have to
turn up and create energy out of nowhere, even when they are initially unsure
how they will find it?
THE PLAY’S THE THING
How many times have you been at a performance of a play, and
realised there was very little sense of ‘play’ – up there on stage? How
often have you been bored in a theatre?
Looked at your watch?
Lost
concentration? Worried about things outside the story being told in front of you
on the stage?
How many times have you been absolutely captivated by what’s on stage? How
frequently has time zoomed past, when you’ve been absolutely wrapped up in the
‘two hour traffic of our stage?’
What makes a good one? How do we, as creative artists, find that combustible
mixture of spontaneity and discipline that is present in any great art? It’s the
same in any art-form too. A really good painting has to have enough spontaneity
and enough discipline to satisfy both the heart and the head. How do we find a
way to have enough safety and enough risk, enough order and enough chaos, in
the way we tell our stories on stage?
GOOD FORTUNE
Even after 400 years, Shakespeare’s words demand to be spoken and acted.
It’s great work and someone’s got to do it.
Why not us?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Of course, hundreds and hundreds of books have been written about
Shakespeare and his world…. But here are a few recommendations.
Any book is only as good as its usefulness to you, right here, right now. Some
books become useful in time. Others are just, well, not to your taste, but may
appeal to others. Creative artists relish diversity. Life is rich & various and so
is literature!
The following four books are very good introductions to the subject:
William Shakespeare – A Very Short Introduction – Stanley Wells
30-Second Shakespeare – 50 Key Aspects of his Works, Life & Legacy,
each Explained in Half a Minute - Ros Barber
Shakespeare – The World as a Stage – Bill Bryson
The Faber Pocket Guide to Elizabethan & Jacobean Drama – Simon
Trussler
This one is more in depth…
The Age of Shakespeare – Frank Kermode
These two are favourites because they really do examine the actor’s process
from the inside & from particular projects that this actor, Sir Antony Sher, was
working on – kept in diary form. Full of honest insights about the joys and
woes of being an actor.
The Year of the King – Antony Sher
Year of the Fat Knight – Antony Sher
The next two are great for historical context – but not in a dry and dusty way –
very good at creating a picture of specific times in which Shakespeare lived.
1599 – A Year in the Life of Shakespeare – Frank Shapiro
1606 – And the Year of Lear – Frank Shapiro
This one I like for understanding a particular time in Shakespeare’s life in
London & I love, when I go to the Barbican Centre in London, to go on a little
pilgrimage to the site of Shakespeare’s house in Silver Street – now two storeys
down in an underground car park!
The Lodger – His Life on Silver Street – Charles Nicholl
Here is Stanley Wells again – who is a great explainer – this is good for
realizing what a fantastic richness of writing was going on & for thinking about
the competition & colleagues Shakespeare possessed in the theatrical world of
the time & how they spurred each other on to ever greater heights of invention:
Shakespeare & Co – Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben
Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in
His Story - Stanley Wells
I love working with the Arden Shakespeare Editions, when I am directing
Shakespeare productions. The extensive notes that come at the bottom of each
page of script are terrifically informative and useful. But what I love most is the
list of textual variations, between the Folio versions and the Quarto versions. I
love these because it means that, in rehearsal, we have a textual choice to make.
That Shakespeare’s immortal words are not set in stone. That he didn’t live long
enough to perfect some ‘authorised version’ of his literary opus. Thanks to John
Hemmings and Henry Condell (actors in his company) many of the plays that
only appear in the First Folio (1624) would have been lost to us completely.
There are still sad losses like CARDENIO – about which we know very little –
there are still hopes, of course, that a lost script might turn up one day!
These are the play-scripts I recommend:
Shakespeare’s Plays in Arden Editions