Week 15: The Storm
June 1, 2012
10 February 2012
We arrived at the rehearsal room in Clapham for a 10am start. The stage management team had been in earlier to clear all set and prop pieces for a movement session.
Choreographer Fin Walker was in charge of the morning sessions for every day this week, with the aim of finding a movement vocabulary we could use to stage the storm that opens The Tempest.
We dove straight into group stomping to Fin's refrain of 'down, down, down,' trying to ground our physical and emotional energies, and 'tune into our bodies.'
Our first task from Fin was to improvise physically in response to words she connected with being in a sea storm: 'stagger,' 'float,' 'stop,' and 'toss.' We were instructed to respond to these words, initially, without the emotional or narrative impulses of the story.
Once these physical motifs became more defined, we started to introduce the relationships of our characters in the story, their role on the ship, and their status within the narrative. I play a mariner, so this involved functional duties on the ship, directing passengers, and protecting Alonso, the king.
The next step was to take these movement ideas, and attach them to the Shakespearean tempest, the play's namesake. The goal: to make the movement language enhance the literary one, clarify the story, and install the actors and audience in the heart of the storm.
Our textual (provided by Shakespeare) and movement (provided by Director David Farr and Fin) script is starting to take shape.
BOATSWAIN: Take in the topsail. Tend to the master's whistle!
Mariners: stop, stop, stop
Blow till thou burst they wind, if room enough.
Exit Mariners and Enter Europeans in stagger
ALONSO: Good boatswain, have care. Where is the master?
In quick succession stop Alonso, stop Ferdinand and Francisco, stop Gonzalo, stop Antonio and Sebastian, stop Adrian and Stephano
BOATSWAIN: I pray now, keep below!
ANTONIO: Where is the master, boatswain?
BOATSWAIN: Keep you cabins
Toss stage left, toss stage right
Needless to say, every time 'toss' was mentioned, masturbatory allusions were made.
MARINERS: All lost! To prayers, to prayers! All lost!
BOATSWAIN: What, must our mouths be cold?
Float
The final hurdles: learn the moves so you don't toss or stagger in the wrong direction and head-butt a fellow actor, and place all this movement in the set's centrepiece — a glass cube five metres wide on each side.
Pronunciation tip: 'boatswain' is pronounced 'bo-sun.'
by Ankur Bahl
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