2E. Performance Score: Sound and Movement Solo

• Each of you will take a turn on the floor alone for two minutes. This a time for you to practice sound and movement action without the disturbance of others around you. Let one action cue the next. Stay inside yourself. Follow your inspiration. You're not working for the audience. This is your time. Breathe. The rest of us will be your audience. We will pass a watch, so that we can take turns timing each other.

Holding one's concentration with oneself during an improvisation, while holding the pressures of performance, is important. It takes practice. In these early days of the training, students have the opportu­nity to notice what arises when they're in front of the others. As they become comfortable with this experience, they can use that material as resource for building imagery.

In the training, we spend the majority of our time together explor­ing the exercises, rather than verbally talking about the work. This learn­ing occurs in the doing. To analyze would be to render students passive when the most important lessons will be learned while active. Nothing is being asked of students that is not inherent to their physical and men­tal capabilities. In that sense, all we need to know, we already know. In the act of doing, we remember that.

When we talk about "choices" during an improvisation we don't mean that before taking any action we must weigh all of our possibilities and, then, by educated judgment choose the most enlightened course of expression. Choice is a split second response to freedom. We can only be free when we're not afraid of fear. Freedom is the absence of fear of fear. When we can play with our fears — fear of exposure, fear of not being good enough, fear of reprisal, we approach the path of freedom. Fear of fear is the cork that bottles the body and imagination. When the cork is popped, choice exists.

Voice and movement are often separate. Day Two helps develop skill and consciousness in all areas at once. Students balance their atten­tion between what's coming out of their mouths and what's going through their bodies. They move toward integrating these two, and realizing more clearly when they should be separate.

Day Three

A Way to Proceed:Body, Imagination, Memory

3A. Falling Leaves/Rock with Movement, Sound and Dialogue

3B. Shape Alphabet

3C. Shape/Shape/Reshape

3D. Director/Actor: Shift with Movement, Sound and Language

3E. Performance Score: Two Up/Two Down

The headlights coming toward me are bright. Dropping down the hill, I see the trailing red snake tail lights. My eyes squint. I can feel my face crumbling. My skin is dry. Relax! I raise my spine and stretch it out. The wipers tap out a tack-a-shooshoo-tack rhythm. The air is thick and wet. Maybe there'll be a small audi­ence tonight. It's too wet and cold to go out. My body collapses and my breath speeds up, chest is tight. Park. Turn the key and be quiet. Sit. Don't go in yet. Listen to the rain. OK, go in. Pull the door handle. It's hard and cold. Twist around, get out of the car. Pull the coat up and walk. Sigh. I'm in the theater and it's comforting, familiar, and quiet. Breathe. Audience chatters muf­fled words and laughter. I feel a pulse. It's mine and fast. There's a black curtain between the stage and me. Pace to the window, then to the curtain, then to the window, and to the curtain again. My tongue glides over my lips. They're dry and my chest is tight. I pull apart the curtain and walk toward a spot on stage. My heart is fast. Breathe. Breathe and relax. Be still. Hold still. Stay still. Don't rush. My mouth and lips draw back. My mouth opens.

Our mind shifts its attention from object to object in erratic and irreverent ways. We can move from thought to feeling to imagin­ing to remembering to sound to thought to taste to vision to thought and on and on. The less we control and inhibit this movement and the more we watch and listen, the freer our minds are to play with this vast assortment.

On the other hand, we can worry, think, conjure, create, devise, imag­ine or cook up what we're going to do, say, or be next. While we're busy doing this, we're missing out on the present moment. We aren't in our bodies ie we're no longer aware of the information coming in through our senses. Our attention is on the future. When we reach the future, the actions thought up in the past are no longer relevant. While we were spending time thinking, our environment changed. Our context is different.

Thinking is too slow. When we're thinking about the future moment, we're thinking about what's next. "Next" is a thought. Whatever we think up lacks freshness. When we're thinking-as opposed to listening to ourselves with less attachment and staying with each moment-we never get beyond ourselves and the familiar.

Fresh material is a surprise response to the interaction between body, imagination and memory. There's a direct link between the three. Its kind of a body-heart-head thing. If my attention is on the sensations of my body, that awareness may elicit memories, feeling and imagination. It all happens at once, not up or down, no particular starting point.

This practice of Action Theater offers a way to proceed. It is a vis­ceral lead to linking body, imagination and memory; to opening up to fresh experience and expression.

Shift, Transform, Develop

Experience evolves. In the natural world, change occurs continuously. Change occurs at varying speeds from lightning fast to slow browning of leaves Sometimes change strikes abruptly without warning. Some­times, incrementally, step by step. And sometimes, change transpires so slowly that we don't see the change at all.

Since we're part of the natural world we are, also, continuously chang-ing. We change our minds, what we're doing and how we're feeling. We might change in an instant, shift from one state or condition to another. It's not always apparent why. But there's always an inner motivation, a hidden bridge that ties one experience to another.

When we change gradually, step by step, or evolve, we transform. It's apparent how one state or condition moves into another.

It might appear that we aren't changing at all. In such cases, change proceeds subtly, under the surface. During this type of change, we engage with the action we are in, we develop it.

Within this system, there are no other options. All events, actions, and situations either shift, transform or develop.

Imagine a situation where all three modes of change occur at the same time. For instance, I am talking on the telephone while cook­ing oatmeal on the stove. During the course of the conversation, my feelings gradually change due to what I'm hearing. I move from contentment to curiosity to anger to understanding to con­tentment, step by step (transform). The oatmeal gets too hot and threatens to burn. I stir more rapidly (transform), and, in panic, yank the pot from the stove (shift). All this while, I remain talk­ing on the telephone (develop).

Shifting, transforming and developing are ways to proceed that respond to awareness rather than thought. All are strategies of change.

Modes of change:

Shift stop the action and do something else.

Transform change the action incrementally until it becomes some­thing else. Develop continue the action.