Niraj Welikala, a member of both the Oxford and Cambridge alumni societies in Berlin, founded a play-reading and theater group in Berlin last summer and is looking to expand the group to fellow thespians and those who love the theater. The group’s objective is recreational play reading and perhaps one day putting on a production. Details from Nigel below. You can contact Nigel directly at niraj.welikala@gmail.com or fellow co-founder Nigel Luhman at nigel@luhman.de
Cheers,
Carl Kruse
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An Actor Prepares…
Calling actors and theatre enthusiasts!
We are a play reading group (in English), originally formed from members of the Oxford and Cambridge alumni clubs in Berlin and we are looking for new people to join us. We meet every 2 weeks on a weekday evening from 6-8 pm (usually on a Monday) at the Theaterhaus Mitte Berlin (https://www.theaterhaus-berlin.com/).
We aim to select and read a diverse range of plays. Plays we’ve read so far include Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, J. B. Priestley’s ‘An Inspector Calls’, ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ and we are currently in the middle of ‘The Crucible’. We usually start with a few minutes of warm-up exercises. During the reading, we switch characters to give people a chance to explore different roles and also experiment with different acting and directing techniques.
The play readings are meant to be recreational although we hope to put on a production as well. We have a range of experience in the group (from little or no experience to some with years of acting and directing experience). If you are interested, please send an email to: playreadingberlin@gmail.com, mentioning any previous acting experience (but this is not required) and we will send you more details including our WhatsApp group that we use to organise readings. You are welcome to come to a session and see if it’s for you.
Hope to see you there!
Niraj, Nigel, Kaya and Justin The Berlin Play Reading Group committee
This is a photograph of two women in front of a photograph of couples dancing.
You do not know these women.
What can we deduce from this image? Many a thing. The old woman is looking at the camera. She knows she is being watched. But it seems as though there is a roughness to her shape, potentially indicating that she has recently turned her head and only just observed her onlooker, thus her expression could be one of shock, or surprise. She is smiling – does she know her voyeur? Is she posing for them? Do we see a melancholy in her eye, something tired and weary of life? The woman turned away from us – does she know the old woman? Does she know she has been seen? Is she observing another photograph beside the one before her, or might she be gazing off in a reverie about the dancing people, or, perhaps, has she spotted someone else that she knows? And on the form of the photograph – is this a triptych of sorts, a three-part story in a zigzag pattern from right to left of young (the faceless woman), old (the old woman), and older, but likely passed from this world (the people in the photograph)? Are we being shown the course of life through this photograph? Is this a play on Magritte’s Le Chef-d’Oeuvre ou les Mystères de l’Horizon (1955), where all parties exist within the same frame and yet simultaneously exist within their own realities? Or maybe this is a feminist piece, one centred on revealing the beauty of old age as being in the wizened, knowing eyes and smile-creases on an elderly woman as opposed to the younger woman, whose beauty is in her flesh, her form, and so her face is not shown, as opposed to the women in the photograph whose beauty is used solely for the entertainment of the men they are dancing with?
All of these are tepid assumptions, just like most of those propounded in popular artistic and literary theory. But I’m sure you warmed to one or another, thinking it to bear some truth.
The woman looking to the camera is my mother’s mother, and the other woman is my mother. I took the photograph when we were visiting a gallery on a hot summer’s day in France, where my grandmother lives, and where my mother is from. You see how I was able to use this image to promulgate any theory I wished, any social cause that came to mind, any artistic vision that I could think of off of the top of my head. I could swindle you, tug you in to believe any narrative I wished just through using believable-sounding words.
Peter Brook, in his novel The Empty Space, asks this pertinent question: ‘Is it that we are living in an age of images?’. I think we do. As illustrated by my annoying and somewhat pretentious vernacular about the photograph above, it is clear that meaning can be gleaned without the need for language, for, as John Berger asserts in his text Ways of Seeing; ‘Seeing comes before words’, and further that ‘this seeing which comes before words [] can never quite be covered by them’. We are born with an innate propensity towards the visual, and it is from the visual that we oftentimes learn language.
We have known the significance of images as importers of meaning since the beginning of time; for what is a painting if not a meaning, an explanation of a feeling, a narrative without words? For what is a photograph, if not a condensing of words and emotions within a frame? But, perhaps, words can also exist as images. Perhaps we should not limit the term ‘image’ to denote something purely visual in this instance. Take the Noh play, for instance. Not much ‘happens’ in a Noh play. That is to say there are not many events within traditional Noh plays. A Noh play could be said to be a visualisation of a metaphor, peppered with historically prominent symbols and actions. Because of this, the dialogue in a Noh play tends to be limited, allowing space for meaning to be derived from the specificity of its choreography and instrumental accompaniment. The Noh play creates a series of images, images passed down generation after generation, whose perfect translation is facilitated by the use of masks on its performers. The specificity of the movement, music, and setting of a Noh play is strictly protected by the Nohgaku Performers’ Association (Nōgaku Kyōkai), and so it is indeed possible that a Noh play performed some 200 years ago may be a mirror image to the same play performed today.
What I know of Noh Theatre has mostly come from Toyoitiro and Toyoichirō Nogami’s comprehensive text Japanese Noh Plays: How to See Them (2005), which details the essential structural and artistic components of Noh Theatre. To avoid simply regurgitating the Nogami’s scripture, I shall describe the environment of Noh as best I can in my own words: there is the stage, where the actors perform; the back stage, where the musicians and prompters seat themselves; the veranda to the right, where the chorus performs; and the corridor to the left, where the musicians and actors journey to and from the stage. This corridor is also known as the Bridge. There is a pine tree painted onto the wall at the back of the stage. This tree is ever present in all Noh performances. The set does not change, regardless of which play is performed. It is up to the performers themselves to make something happen.
Why do I bring up Noh in my discussion of images? Consider my comment on assumptions and vernaculars propounded by popular literary and artistic theorists. While I was studying literature in Brighton, I came across many tedious commentaries made about such prolific writers as Shakespeare, Twain, and Hemingway. In the West, we are constantly preoccupied with finding the political issues, the social issues, the identity issues associated with art. We find this in both the literary and plastic arts. An image cannot simply be one, or simply be beheld for its beauty, or its enlightening insights on this fickle, strange thing we call life. In the West, we act as if it is of the utmost importance for us to reduce an image down to the gender, political leanings, and social status of its creator and of the characters they depict. We act as if this will give us a greater knowledge of art, but, in fact, it reduces art by looking behind the canvas, or the page, rather than at it. In the West, we decide that we can no longer look at certain books, certain artworks, certain buildings, because we believe that this act of erasure will make us better people. In the West, we decide to adapt pieces of work to make them more palatable to our audiences. Noh refuses this. Noh remains as Noh has always been; an image solidified through the centuries.
It is true that we are living in an age of image, as Brook believes, but it is also true that these images lack constancy – we are so hungry to find the images that we believe we want that we find ourselves inundated with such a vast amount of them that we no longer know where to look. Instagram, TikTok, adverts, YouTube, immersive gallery showings, memes, GIFs, emojis; these are the facilitators of our hunger for the perfect image, an image that supports our political and social leanings, an image whose creator is unproblematic, an image that satisfies us aesthetically. We are greedy, these days. It seems that we are beginning to lack the humility to acknowledge the potential of l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake; that is, that the fundamental value of art is separate from its political, moralistic, or ethically instructive function. Of course, that is not to say that art is meaningless, because it is surely not. Art, as Nietzsche asserts, is ‘the great stimulus of life’ (Twilight of the Idols: or How to Philosophize With a Hammer, 1889), and the meaning we glean from it is so subjective and personally driven that I simply argue that it is an insanity to try and pin down a work with its backstory, and further to reject or embrace it purely as a result of that backstory.
In Noh, we can look onto the stage, and realise that no matter how many images we destroy or create, nothing can change the fundamental things of life that Noh portrays, amongst them being love, death, and the magical mysteries of life itself. Noh unknowingly rejects our penchant towards the politicisation of art by presenting us with an unchangeable form, one which does not cater to our erratic political and didactic whims, and invites us simply to watch and see all the bountiful emotions and experiences that frame the oddity of our human existence.
Perhaps I am wrong. Of course, Noh addresses socio-political issues of its time, and other issues therein, because it is almost impossible to create an art that does not reflect one’s lived experience of the time one is living within. But, as Earle Ernst propounds, Noh is ‘an exquisitely precise theatre based on the artistic principle of reduction to essential forms’ (The Influence of Japanese Theatrical Style on Western Theatre, 1969); it is the form of Noh that is its artistic power, its inimitable fusion of voice, movement, dance, music, acting, poetry, and prose to create enduring images. It is Noh theatre that presents the ultimate challenge to our currents views about art. =========== The Carl Kruse Arts Blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.net Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com Other articles by Hazel Anna Rogers include When The Show Is Over, Finding My Clown, Acting and Art, and What Does it Mean to be Wealthy. Carl Kruse is also on Buzzfeed.
The mist has lifted, and life is back. It is an abyss, a swamp of unknowing and learning how to live without the glistening sheen of adrenaline that glosses over your eyes for the weeks and days preceding and encompassing a show. You lie flat, and all appears flat. Everything reminds you of it, and you are reminded of the loss of it. Life is back, and it is clear as day.
My company and I were reminded on the last day of the show that theatre is ‘live’, and that that is both the beauty and the curse of it. Its liveness is what can make it so much greater than any other acting form, and yet it is also its downfall – while simultaneously, if it is indeed great, it will be remembered, it must yet always live within the mind of its beholder, never to be looked upon again, and so its greatness dies a death after the final bow.
The stage is effortlessly alive. It is a space to breathe and swim in, and its heart is palpable, touchable, unlike the screen. I love film, and television, but theatre is a beast apart from these things. How wonderful to be able to reach out and brush the leg of the actor as they scurry in the round, to smell their skin and feel their breath on you as they pant and sweat and scream and whisper. How is it than an art so old can be breathed into and brought back to light out of the fetid dust it has oftentimes become. Theatre is a difficult place, a breeding ground for ham and cringe and fault. It demands much, and, if committed to, its reward is jubilance and a drug-like high. Laziness is all too obvious, all too noticeable on a stage. One cannot hide, one cannot be tired, one cannot be human, when one acts in the theatre. A missed beat hangs like a rotting beam of wood. A forgotten prop is befitted with mime, and it breaks the mind of the observer in half, letting reality seep through like worms pushing through a rain-covered mud. A bored actor stood in the corner of a stage stands out like a pustule, bringing all eyes to their ugly treason. There is no room for mediocrity in theatre, and yet mediocre theatre is made, making the art harder and harder to work within. One bad song can be skipped. But a bad play repulses like a disease. An hour trudges by as boots through a waterlogged field. An uncomfortable chair takes the attention’s precedence over the action afore the onlooker. This is why the inevitable end of the run of an astonishing play is so very sad. It is a tragedy that the world must keep turning, and that we can dwell but for a second on a moment so great.
I don’t know what to do with myself. My whole body has come crashing down. My bones feel heavy, and I can barely lift myself. The wild rush of the show run has left me crumpled while, at the time, it made me feel as though I could go on and on and on without stopping. Veins of fire turned ash, now. Still. What a dream it was. You know, I still pinch myself thinking on it. Me? Here? Doing this? I could but wish for others to feel what I have felt during this past week. My mind strays back to the day I was accepted, and then further on to the first night I spent in my home in London, then to the first day of the course, when I walked home teary-eyed. Many a moon that was ago. Today I skip and leap even with my fragile temperament. I am low, but am ready to be lifted high again. How endless the process of a show is. How panicked one becomes when one really realises the show is come upon them after weeks of tough drudgery through lines of text not altogether imaginable until they’re spat on stage. How suddenly it all ends.
Mother Courage and Her Children is an important play. An integral play. It speaks to an audience in a way quite unlike the war films and history books do. Though the adaptation we performed was set in 2080, it harkens to our lives today, to the wars that prevail around and through us, and to the depravity and beauty of our sorry world. My character, Kattrin, was at once the beacon of hope and compassion at the centre of the play, and yet ended the play as the very horror at the root of it, Mother Courage herself. We have all of these things within us. The kindness and softness of a child, and the brutality and violence of a mother who has lived through trauma so profound she knows not what else to be other than tough and sharp and cold. I will be forever thankful to have lived through Brecht’s world, and to have revealed it to others.
I could continue at lengths about theatre and the stage and Brecht’s play itself, but perhaps I should end this piece by speaking on something else. For those who don’t know the dressing room, and for whom its name speaks of secrets and celebrity and mystery, I shall tell you of it now. It is a warm place, filled with the oddity of bodies fueled by nervousness and tiredness and excitability. Bodies naked and clothed, passing around sticks of charcoal to dirty the edges of their faces, bodies coated in thick layers of sweat and grime and cloth. Bodies dancing to music off of a small black speaker, laughing together, hugging, weeping together. Women howling and singing and stretching before they go into the wings around the stage. Women cheering one another, eating together, sharing thoughts and jokes and love and pain. The dressing room is the place in which it all begins. A stage manager comes in and calls the ‘half’. The squirming commences, the jumping about, the endless anxious toilet visits, the swigs of tepid water from old plastic bottles, the hand squeezes, the giggling. A stage manager comes in and calls ‘beginners’. The performers become cool, collected, zoned in. They breathe as one. I leave them, and wish them well. One clasps me by the head and says to me: ‘You are the heartbeat’. I go down, alone, and enter the stage. The audience have not yet arrived. I sit inside the metal frames of the ice cream van in the centre of the room, and become her. The audience file in. Blackness. Silence. The play begins.
The fundamental reality of creation is solitude. This is what Lecoq tells us, and, when I turned around and faced the audience, clothed with my red nose for the first time, I did indeed feel very alone.
We had started doing clown the week before, but we only have one session a week with our Lecoq tutor, Ally Cologna, who had trained with Lecoq before his death in 1999. Clowning, as interpreted by French theater practitioner Jacques Lecoq, involves the smallest mask available to the actor: the little red nose, and normally comes last in a series of other more obscuring masks, including larval and expressive masks. Due to its smallness and thus its tendency to expose the actor beneath it, the red nose is often seen as the most challenging mask of all.
Jacques Lecoq
The week prior to my own attempt at clown, Ally had told us that we were to go up one at a time and complete a few basic tasks. The first was to walk around the space, without the red nose on, during which time a member of the audience would come up to the space and mimic our walk as best they could. Once a rhythm had been negotiated between actor and mimicker, the actor would turn round and watch their comrade’s impression of the walk. Then, when the time was right, the actor would go behind the mimicker and mimic their impression of their own walk. After this, the mimicker would leave the space and the actor was to continue walking in the particular fashion that had been observed by the mimicker in order to receive and experience the sensation of interpreting another’s perspective of their personal movement patterns.
Eventually, the actor would be instructed by Ally to walk as ‘themselves’ once more. For the actor in the space, discovering the unexpected picture which had been painted of them by the mimicker was often a cause for hilarity and a great method to release tension; for myself, the mere presence of a fellow actor in the space prior to entering into this new phase of our acting journey – clown – reassured me quite. Lecoq calls this practice ‘ways of walking’ and states that it can help the student to find their own characteristic walk which is a natural development from their own personal way of walking, not a forced comic walk which is artificially built from nothing. Lecoq also works with ‘forbidden gestures’, those which are not normally permitted for adults and which we quell and crush deep within our childhood so as to be more societally respected and, perhaps, ‘normal’, if there were such a thing. Lecoq suggests that the psychologically freeing nature of this work, whereby the actor will hopefully find himself much more open, less defensive, and more receptive, will allow the actor to find his ‘primary clown’, which, as Nathalie Ellis-Einhorn describes it, might be an access to ‘childish joy, curiosity and vulnerability to the world, [with the knowledge that] children are also spiteful’ (from her thesis: I.M. L.O.S.T! a show about clowns). The clown might be innocent and unguarded in his presence, but this does not mean that he is always kind or sympathetic to both his Monsieur Loyal or the other clowns which might join him in the space. This statement should not be interpreted insidiously, as, according to Lecoq, ‘the clown needs no conflict because he is in a permanent state of conflict, notably with himself’. Rather than making the clown inauthentically selfish or impudent, this inner conflict results from a desperate need for attention and love which might materialize in the clown blaming others for his ‘flops’ in order to gain praise for his own behavior, but this is not inherently egocentric or insolent conduct that comes from a protective societal mask.
After the walking exercise, Ally would instruct the actor in the space to turn around and put their red nose on. Ally was clear that neither the red nose nor the act of clowning must be referred to in the duration of the actor’s clowning practice, or else the illusion of the clown be broken. I suppose this makes sense; we do not usually refer to the characters we embody on stage, lest the Fourth Wall be irreparably shattered. It might make even MORE sense with a clown; as a clown is itself ‘the person underneath, stripped bare for us all to see’ (Lecoq, The Moving Body, p. 143), it makes sense that the person should not refer to their clown in case they become even insensitive to this vulnerable, exposed part of themselves, which might have been previously unseen by their colleagues. I don’t know. I’m merely hypothesizing.
My colleagues and I saw a few different clowns on the first day of our clown training. It is wonderful to watch someone grapple with the candidness and the verity that the red nose offers them, but this is a task that is sometimes too much for the actor to handle, at least on the first try. In fact, rather a large proportion of those first clowns ‘telephoned’, either a little or, God forbid, a hell of a lot. ‘Telephoning’ in clown occurs when the clown deliberately leads himself down a path of reactions and actions rather than being ‘entirely without defense…[and] always [] in a state of reaction and surprise’ as Lecoq encourages. If the clowns begins preceding his own intentions, one might say that the actor clowning had begun to play a role, or put on a coat, as opposed to being innocent and open to the possibilities of the moment. I ‘telephoned’ a few times during my own turn at clown, I think. But I’ll get on to that.
Students at the L’ecole Internationale de Theatre de Jacque Lecoq find their clown.
I want to comment for a moment on the character that our teacher Ally evolved into when she was provoking our clowns. She called it ‘Madame Provocateur’ after ‘Monsieur Loyal’ of circus and clowning tradition, otherwise known as the ringmaster or ringleader. During many difficult moments for my colleagues’ first clownings, ‘Madame Provocateur’ was capable of eliciting brilliantly authentic and, often, hilarious responses and actions out of the unseasoned young clowns before her. She was oftentimes brash, offensive, and extreme in her berating of the clowns, but one never felt unsafe or at all nervous in her presence due to the fact that Ally herself was unable to keep a completely straight face as she scolded the pitiful clowns on stage. Ally is a phenomenal teacher, and I shall surely miss her when the time comes for me to finish my training at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
I went up to clown during our second lesson of clowning with Ally. My walk, as displayed lovingly by my colleague, was rather more ‘sexy’ than I had previously believed. I was rather sure that I had more of a swagger, but I took on the exaggerated version of my walk produced by my colleague and strolled around with it for a while before shaking it off and going to put on my nose. I had thought fleetingly about what my clown might be and had concluded that it was likely going to be quite a grotesque or obnoxious clown, perhaps speaking back to Madame Provocateur or being generally unpleasant and profane (from a most unguarded state, of course). But what I discovered that day was sadness, and loneliness, and an inability to understand why my audience was laughing at me. I say this not to overemphasise the freedom that I found in my clown, for my clown was not entirely candid; as I said, I’m certain that I did ‘telephone’ a few times, for it is oddly difficult not to react defensively to some of the comments thrown towards one by Madame Provocateur. However, the sympathy with which my clown was received by the audience made me feel so very safe, safe enough that I was not afraid to feel sad and misunderstood and equally unafraid to display my desperation to be loved. How much I wanted to be loved and seen by my colleagues. How I wanted them to watch me and smile with me and love me. I suppose this clown is much like some personas which I indulge in in my personal life. My twin sister and I still continue the role-playing which we started when we were much younger, which involves myself as the younger, dumber, and more endearing character and my sister as the character of authority and tyranny. All the bravado and crudeness of my habitual social mask were stripped away by my clown, and all that was left was a timid, pitiful little clown who thought little of themselves. I wonder how I did not see this coming. My colleagues commented that they had not expected such a clown from me either and that they believed that they had now seen a side of me which they had only spotted in glimpses prior to then.
I am excited to see where I can go with my clown, but I sometimes fear that I will begin to orchestrate my clown’s reactions and tendencies should I get too comfortable with how my first clown was received by my audience. The novelty of my first clown lent itself well to honesty and openness, but even in my second attempt at clowning I found myself ‘telephoning’ a little more than I had the first time. In my third attempt, I found it difficult to put words into my clown’s feelings, and ended up being rather too silent and ‘meek’ compared to the other clowns, who readily answered Madame Provocateur’s provocations.
Despite my uncertainty about how this side of myself came to be that which lent itself to my clown, I believe that I know this ‘clown’ very well. It is that part of my being which believes that I am quite useless, however hard I try, and it indeed does try hard! Perhaps clowning is the safest place wherein I can explore this darkness and melancholy, for the clown mask enables one to experience a conflict of self in a way that does not linger on into the rest of one’s day, or week, or month. Lecoq speaks of the difficulty that might arise when exploring these intimate depths of emotion:
‘The student must be prevented from becoming too caught up in playing their clown, since it is the dramatic territory which brings them into closest contact with their own selves.’
And, importantly, that:
‘[T]he clown should never be hurtful for the actor.’
I wish that I could comfort my clown and tell it that it is worthy of the love it desires so intensely from its audience. But equally, I wish to exploit and indulge in the emotions that the clown allows me to experience while eliciting laughter and pitiful sighs and groans from the audience, because these small indications of validation might help me to understand that I, and this particular aspect of my being, are fundamentally ridiculous, and that this part of me is merely an essential part of what it is to be human.
(All quotations described as coming from Jacques Lecoq are from the book ‘The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre’, trans. David Bradby, Methuen, 2000, of which the original text, ‘Le Corps Poétique’, was published in 1997 by Actes Sud-Papiers.)
They are curled and strewn and spread and sprawled, as though they were dead.
But they are not.
Some breathe shallowly, quickly, as if their hearts fluttered about like moths.
Some breathe deeply, forcing air bull-like through their noses.
Others are almost inaudible, but, if you look closely, you will see their bodies heaving up and down, up and down, up and down.
These are the bodies of actors, and they are about to become animals.
A woman, sitting in the corner of the room with a notepad, begins counting down from ten. The actors start shuffling about in their sleep, yawning, groaning, growling, stretching. The woman calls out:
“One.”
The bodies spring up, and they begin to move. Each is a different animal, going about in the space unbeknownst to one another, acting as if isolated in their separate habitats. A body hangs from the ballet bar, chewing slowly: she is a sloth. Another rests on its back, fondling a ball on its chest and squeaking at intervals: he is an otter. Another prowls about, his shoulders rising above his head, his paws padding heavily, yet gracefully, into the sprung grey floor: he is a puma.
I am a gorilla. A silverback eastern mountain gorilla, one of the two subspecies of mountain gorilla known to exist. I grunt softly, and belch. I crawl around quadrupedally, resting my weight on my fists and keeping my lower body close to the ground so as to maintain the arch in my back. My buttocks are stuck out, and I collapse into them when I find a feeding place. My eyes do not dart, for I am considered, and controlled in my primate-hood. I need not rush, for I hold my place in the group without effort, without arrogance. I am a leader without raising a fist.
Save when I am threatened.
The woman plays a track on her phone. Sirens begin resounding around the four walls. The animals in the room begin to panic, except for those too slow to do so (I speak of the sloth and the slow loris). Big cats ready themselves to pounce; a giraffe and an orynx start to prance about in terror on their dainty hooves; a meerkat scurries away back to her burrow; two penguins begin honking and waving their beaks around in distress; the slow loris raises her arms above her head, for she has poisonous glands in her armpits.
Channeling Your Inner Animal
I begin my ritualized charge; hastening hooting, symbolic feeding, getting up on my hind legs and lurching forwards bipedally, throwing plants, beating my chest, doing one-legged kicks, running quadrupedally (but sideways), slapping and thrashing vegetation, and whacking the ground with my palms. My hooting turns into screeching and roaring, and I throw myself around the space, expanding my chest and attempting to intimidate whatever was causing the ruckus.
The woman turns the sound off and replaces it with the sounds of birds singing and rustling leaves, perhaps those of a rainforest. I do not think. I see leaves, leaves which I know will taste good, and I eat them. I sit unselfconsciously, my belly protruding and my legs open, revealing myself. I do not think; instinct rules me.
The woman speaks: she tells us to return to our nests and settle ourselves into slumber. We do. She counts down from ten;
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
And only humans remain.
I have been studying the silverback mountain gorilla for a few weeks now. When I eat my dinner alone in my apartment, I watch endless documentaries about these great apes. When researching in order to embody an animal, one has to pay close attention to specific movements and characteristics which the animal exerts without effort; it is no use attempting to caricature the animal. We might find a slow loris or a sloth cute, but this is not their intention, and thus should not be our own. A gorilla does not come to standing, albeit quadrupedally not bipedally, in the same way a human does; they roll on their voluptuous buttocks onto their fists and come up this way, whereas we might throw ourselves forwards and push onto the palms of our hands to stand. A gorilla does not take care not to salivate nor to keep their mouths shut as they chew on the stringy stems of bamboo and the pithy interior of the banana tree, so I cannot if I am to truly embody the gorilla in all its intricacies.
There is something remarkably freeing about relenting the militant control that we force upon our bodies in order to be acceptable within human society. This may be obvious, but to be an animal is to be unselfconscious, or at least not self-judging in the way a human is as a result of exterior influences. To be an animal is to feel no guilt for resting, to have no cause for arbitrary stress over the need to work and exert oneself, to have no worry other than in the presence of a predator or if in fear of one’s young’s life. To be an animal and then to emerge from it is to realize the ridiculousness of the human, and yet also to admire it for its odd insecurities and nonsensical ways of being.
Most documentaries I have seen about various primate populations have emphasized their tenderness and their so-called ‘humanistic’ tendencies, and this seemed odd to me; it was as though we would only be able to find empathy and compassion for a being if we could find points of comparison between ourselves and it. I suppose this is normal, though. We are intellectual beings after all. These documentaries did bear some interesting revelations on how life could be, or could have been, had humanity’s aim been geared towards the joy of the many as opposed to the plenty of the few; the black-crested macaque, which lives on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, lives almost entirely without conflict – due to the abundance of food generated by the island’s hot climate and copious monsoon rains, the macaques rarely fight, and almost all disagreements are resolved by kisses and hugs. These primates cuddle each other constantly, and also seem to smile regularly (at least according to our human conception of a ‘smile’).
Animal Studies, as a practice, was created by Lee Strasberg during the twentieth century, with the aim of eventually distilling the ‘pure’ animal practice into something more human, and, ultimately, a character, such as Marlon Brando’s Stanley of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, which was famously based on the study of apes. The strength in this practice lies in the precision of the initial practice; by being so accurate and detailed in one’s observation and imitation of an animal, including its thoughts and habitual patterns of life, one might be able to find a similar dedication in the realization of a character and in doing so create a more rounded and human portrayal of said character as opposed to them being simply an extension of oneself.
To end, I would like to suggest that perhaps, in finding the simple joy and beauty of exploring our natural world in such a visceral way, we might also learn to have more compassion for this fragile planet we call our own.
============ The Carl Kruse Arts Blog Homepage. Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com Other articles by Hazel include – Six Viewpoints, Metropolis, and the World of Wearable Art. The SEO folks insist on putting this Carl Kruse link here though this is not a site I am associated with.
