Joel Reitsma – a member of the acting ensemble of The Long Count (and all around lovely human being) – recently wrote about his experience of group mind in rehearsals on his blog. And then he said we could cross-post it here!
There is something to be said by intellectualizing your way through a piece of art, especially if you are a critic. To be able to take something, usually intangible, and pull it apart and analyze every piece down to the last detail. In theater, its all about staging, production, set, lighting, sound, setting, time period, costumes, actor types, delivery, blocking, plot devises, language, audience relationship; all things that must be specific and require definition and clarity.
The truth is, even me trying to explain this by writing it in a blog is almost going against the point, seeing as written communication is almost purely intellectual, except for the emotional meaning that you, the reader, places on each word, sentence, and idea. If only, I had a sort of body-blog, where you could simply log on at anytime and witness feelings, expression, movement, breath, sound, energy, and emotion.
At rehearsal for the Long Count, we (an ensemble of eight, and other company members) were given the task of staging a very complex and scene. A scene in which the main character would have to make her way through a maze, along the way, facing challenges. To say it sounds easy, to face a challenge or a riddle is only half of it. In life, when we solve a riddle, or crack a code, all we need to do is simply solve it, but we rarely have to encode the code, or make the riddle, which is a task that is completely taken for granted.
Since this piece is being built from basic texts, and skeleton scripts, and heavy viewpoints; exercises that I believe to be all about leaving your brain at the door and using only your subconscious, known for being impulsive and perceptive in a 360 degree heightened awareness. It is a task that, as a performer, encourages you to use the bodies and environment around you to affect you and the ideas that you have. It is on par with a flock of sparrows that seem to change direction on a dime and, with that, change leaders just as quickly. They swoop low to the ground and between buildings and all decide to land and rest in a tree together. When the decisions are made and who they are made by is usually unclear and it is almost better to think of each decision being made by the whole of the flock and by each member simultaneously at the in the same instant. The idea of a group mind. We take it step further than a group mind to a group imagination, where we, as a flock, explore the environment around us by filling and absorbing space and touching, smelling, feeling, hearing, and speaking, but also change that environment or travel to a new environment in our group imagination.
To me, viewpoints can serve as a tool just as any other, where, blocking a scene and scoring your scripts, or even doing repeat-Meisner-based exercises are tools as well. The interesting thing that I have found to come out of viewpoints, though, is that almost every time, the product of these exercises are purely human. In what is becoming a “green,” organic friendly, tree-hugging, air-cleansing culture, we are able to deliver a product (piece) that is naturally, purely, organically, human. Not only that, but it is a process all about the act of itself. Instead of “tell me what you think,” or “tell me your story,” its more of “Show me,” or “do it.” That’s the only way it can be communicated and how cool is that?
That being said, when we sat down to try and choreograph a maze full of riddles and puzzles, the first instinct was to hash it all out intellectually by planning what would happen in the maze: Why did she have to enter the maze? How would she get out of the maze? What would she learn inside? What did the maze look like? The ideas and questions were pouring out, but none of us had any concrete or unarguable answers. We may have spent nearly an hour on this process of deliberating and “yes, but..” and “Or it could…” After a while, we started to get too far inside our heads and started to conflict on ideas. We just didn’t have the answers. The group mind started to become fractured and separated, and we began breaking those subconscious connections that we had with each other in order to step into our conscious, brainstorming minds.
Finally, we reached a point where we needed to just get up and do it. How do you make a maze using nothing but bodies and imagination? How do you give up all those little brilliant ideas that you have of how it is supposed to look and function now? How do you cease control and begin to emit and receive without discrimination now?
Once we got it on our feet. We failed here and there, but only in the “well, that doesn’t work…” sort of way, and finally, within only an hour or so, the answer came to us all at the same time without a spoken word. It was something that we all wanted but never thought it would be, and may have never found any other way. To be able to find that answer with that calabur of complexity using a group consciousness is something absolutely remarkable to say the least. I have found it to be a force easily underestimated.
