Caspar Schjelbred workshop
I had a great time this afternoon at an impro workshop led by Caspar Schjelbred. Caspar’s got a dance (ballet) background and so his workshop today was all about using physicality to tell the audience something. We did a few exercises based on the ideas of clown and mime. Caspar, who lives in Paris, has done a few workshops with Ira Sedenstein. I didn’t go to Ira’s workshop at Improvention 2011 but Cam did, so I was keen to see what sort of stuff she’d learned. Caspar was a genuinely fun guy to learn from and maintained the traditional impro teacher manner of “It’s not your fault if you fuck up, you’ve never done this before” and encouraged us to do things only to please ourselves rather than feel like we’ve got to obey the rules of the scene (spoken or unspoken) and that we should listen to our bodies and feelings.
We started out with a really tricky exercise which involved rhythmically moving our arms and legs in such a way that we were wrapping our hands around our faces while swaying gently with our legs. I guess the idea of this was to try to get us thinking about the fact that our bodies are more than just the way we stand or move our arms when talking. We did some neutral walking, raising our arms, coming to a stop, waiting a few seconds and then moving our entire body at once. We also learned about how to come up with various walks which could then inspire characters (so that we don’t always walk on to the stage as ourselves), how to move along each of the three axes to convey different reactions.
After a bit of learning how to move our entire body at once, we paired off and did some “What comes next?” This is an exercise where one person is the actor and can only move when the answer “What comes next?” is answered. The answers are usually “take two steps forward”, “lift your arms”, etc. but Caspar said that the actor has the freedom to interpret these directions however they want. For example, taking two steps forward can be done timidly by shuffling slowly, wringing one’s hands and looking around nervously, or by stamping ones feet twice, hands on hips and a defiant look on one’s face. The movement of everyone around the room became much more pronounced and we were no longer a room full of workshop attendees following the rules but a menagerie of characters having a diverse range of experiences with varying feelings.
We then developed these activities further by being our own directors, asking “What comes next?” and leading ourselves in very physical actions. Caspar said we all looked like great actors with integrity. We were no longer students doing menial mime tasks with disinterested expressions; we were in our own world, reacting to things in a way which was engaging to watch. After a bit of this we paired off again and reacted (deliberately rather than impulsively) to the actions of our partners. We didn’t have to tell a story, just react to things that were happening with our body (no voices).
It was interesting that there was such a big focus on not speaking. I think that too often we think that we have to be clever with our words, or that scenes must be packed full of dialogue to engage the audience (or to be packed full of jokes to get a laugh, to please them). By encouraging (forcing?) us to lead with our bodies (at least our gross motor skills) then our non-verbals and then finally our voices, the emphasis was on creating a character on stage who didn’t rely on talking to another person to express who they were, what they were feeling and what they would do. In fact, in our first paired exercise where speech was “allowed” we were only allowed to use personal pronouns and “yes”, “no” and “maybe”. This meant that we had to convey our offers via actions, whether it was miming something that we were inviting someone to participate in, attempting to give them a bunch of flowers or pleading forgiveness for having forgotten an anniversary.
We finished up with some scenework, spending 90 seconds on each, where the task was to establish the start of a scene with our physicality and to only speak with words that weren’t pronouns (or y/n/maybe) if speaking was deliberate, had intent, and was a crucial way of explaining what was going on. This meant really paying attention to how you were moving, how your partner in the scene was moving and taking the time to, not plan what you were going to say, but to make sure your words had an impact and were integral to the scene
I really enjoyed the scene I did in our last round of scenework where I walked on as an old man, stopped, checked my watch, looked around and spotted someone who had just spotted me, her face shining. “You?”, she enquired enthusiastically. “Yes?” I responded, holding my hand up to my ear to hear her better. “You?” again, nervous and looking at me with apprehension. I squinted and leaned closer, echoing her question, “You?” and I looked at my watch again. “OkCupid?” came the reply; she showed me her phone and looked resigned, “You”. I scrambled about in my pockets looking for my phone, pulled it out and held it up next to her face, squinting. “You”, she said, dejected; “older”.
It’s probably quite unnatural dialogue, but it got across the message of who we were without having to resort to hackneyed fakery like “Oh, hello, what are you doing?” “Oh, I’m just reading the paper while I wait for my blind date to arrive”. “Oh, how strange, I’m also meeting a blind date”, and so on. We would’ve got the message across that we were seeing each other for the first time after meeting online, but there would’ve been very little of that “what’s going to happen next?” feeling that is so important for the audience (and players!) to have in order to keep them interested in the scene. Two people standing around playing out worn-out jokes about blind dating is probably not interesting to watch and it’s not even that much fun to perform (it’s boring, safe and predictable).
I’m really thankful to ImproMafia and Caspar for putting on such a wonderful workshop today. I (re-)learned that my characters can be built from my physicality and how that physicality makes me feel rather than walking on as me (with my normal physicality of shoulders hunched and a nervous expression) and just reacting to whatever’s going on. It was also great to see the other players in the company pushed into using their physicality rather than their voice to tell a story, and there were a number of times in the scenework where it definitely looked like two people working together to tell a story with their bodies and movement, rather than their voices and dialogue, something which we don’t normally see very often. It was very much bodies first, actions second and vocalisation third.
