PRACTICE and PLAY in the context of SPACE
When we pursuit work in the studio and call it Practice, we almost never achieve Play.
When we pursuit Play in the studio we rarely achieve anything practical.
Play occurs most spontaneously outside of the structure of “knowing” and the pursuit of “Technique.”
And yet, it is through Play that we explore, discover and perhaps even develop practical technique.
Useful practical research into Play, its usefulness as a tool and modality for performance, must take into consideration the space and overall environmental context of the space.
Play which is more fully realized through embodied associations and reflexes gives rise to natural, intuitive, and purposeful participation.
I have found it useful in practice to account for “Fields of Play” within the architecture of the specific environment we are using.
All of the mechanical actions of daily life are subdivided and guided by field boundaries, many of which are literally drawn into the landscapes of our daily environments.
Consider a performance studio or theatrical “space” is drawn to be just that, a special place for “rehearsing” or “performing.” Rehearsal is strained practice which leads to presentation under pressure of maintaining what was practiced. These kinds of environments elicit both excitement and fear. After a great deal of time, familiarity with the environment relieves this tension, but it is always renewed when new members come into the space of the practicing company.
Thanks for bringing up PLAY!
It only goes to show how serious-minded I am, that in all this writing about PRACTICE, I never mentioned play. Well, now I have made a new post category called “Play!” and I hope there will be more posts on play and play-full posts to come.
“When we pursuit work in the studio and call it Practice, we almost never achieve Play.”
I like this line, but I interpret it differently than I think you probably meant it. For me, the studio is a place to escape the kind of low-level “play” that I associated with “hanging out” or “joking around” in social contexts. This kind of play, for me, is banal and annoying. In the studio, I try to get to another kind of play that exists on the other side (for me) of some kind of technical rigor.
I find the same thing in the rest of life. In love, for example – the ability to really play together appears on the other side of a whole lot of practical work. I may sound very serious about “embodied practice” and things like that, but in fact this seriousness is the shell of an egg, on the inside of which is play. I also think that the word “play” can function as a shell for something very vulnerable, which is perhaps more where Jef is coming from… I don’t tend to work in that direction, but maybe I should!
Scratch that. I do work in that direction – all the time! It’s just that I don’t tend to WRITE in that direction. Of course, when I am teaching Introduction to Acting for college students, usually we start from play and then search for depth. (In my own studio work I usually prefer to start from silence and seriousness and gradually look for play.) But once I sit down to write, I get all serious and forget to write about play.
Why is this? Probably because of my position in academia and my desire to find a way of articulating play that will convince rigorous scholars of various stripes…
But another part of does feel – I know this may sound very conservative – that play has to be EARNED. That while play does occur outside of knowing and technique, it’s not so simple to directly go there. Personally I believe in finding play through and on the other side of knowing and technique.
What do others think about the SERIOUSNESS and/or PLAYFULNESS of art and practice? Are seriousness and play even opposed to one another? Maybe the place of simultaneous play and seriousness is related to the place of simultaneous art and practice…
I think you do not understand my meaning about Play. I do not mean “play” in any social sense of empty, purposeless behavior.
What I have found in my own research is that you cannot go into a cold space with the idea of achieving “play.” It requires a degree of freedom which is rarely present in this kind of setup.
Now, if by technical rigor, you mean the repetitious exercise of putting the body through mind-over-body drills, then yes something often occurs after the body tires and the mind relaxes. Not sure I call this Play. Maybe after warming up through familiar patterns of action and enjoying some satisfaction of doing what is assigned and expected of us we relax into some confidence to “let go” and explore. For me play is naive, driven, instinctual, drawing on intuition, not intellectual guidance.
I NEVER consider play as a shell for anything. For me, Play is the foundation of discovery.
In my view, the occidental “engineered” concept of the universe is what screws us up. It is not natural to suppose that we can engineer behavior or action first and then play into the flow of this hallucination of structure. Nature is wiggly, it is not square and yet we try to force expression into a system of codified structures and modalities that flatten and stifle the intuition of the play.
Starting with play and then searching for depth. How is this possible?
Play emerges from depth that the intellect cannot relate to. The intuition is beyond the intellect. Action which is manufactured from a process of thinking and clever ideas is not what I am referring to here.
Love, yes that is somewhere in the intuition. But the intuition can strike at any second. Like Love, it doesn’t require any pre-action or preparatory technique.. the universe in action.
This is why I am drawn to Clown. Spontaneous, instantaneous, intuitive.
The Space and my relationship to it, this is the foundation for my freedom and my discovery.
When action is learned, imitated and then repeated over and over again, I find the process of doing the action to be primarily a mental process. The objective task is learned and packaged in a specific way. And the way the behavior is accessed and called into action is flat. Our mind then tells us to give this flat experience some quality of “feeling”. In turn, the mind manufactures a layer of “feeling”…based on the hallucination of past experience. This feeling is not directly connected to or borne from the action itself, and the spectator can sense this.
When action is born from feeling, then something else happens, it feels organic or natural, it flows.
The key is to learn to manage the body so that it is alive and responsive in every moment of action. There are strategies for getting into a state of consciousness which is not one of performing tasks and achieving rehearsed actions. Even in repetition we have the possibility to feel the actions being born in every moment. It has to do with perception and the relationship of the subjective sense of self and the objective reality of the space I share with my observer.
Now, of course we can apply this to repeated and learned action..but we must be careful how we “learn” patterns of behavior and how we recall them into action in “playing” or performing them.
I spend a great deal of my time exploring subjective technique. Objective practice falls into place once the subjective is alive and well…and the work is always alive, vital , interesting.
I guess what I am suggesting is that too often in practice, people uncover superficial, sentimental behavior and then label it as expressive or purposeful.
When this makes its way into production and is called “a play” or even “theatre”…then I find myself confused and worried.