Connecting Mind and Body
- Samantha Robichaud
- Nov 18, 2015
- 2 min read
After the first few rehearsals the director and I decided that in order to really show Chekhov’s psychophysical gestures (Psychological Gesture) we needed to take the earlier small gestures and develop them by the use of the body.
This would prove to be the most difficult process for the actors. The idea of allowing you mind and body to connect in order to create imaginative and new gestures can be a difficult concept to grasp.
But one thing to consider within this process is to just allow your body to take control and take you to the imaginative terrain which according to Caracciolo (2008, pp.8-10) could only happen once the actor had found complete concentration, imagination and creative moments. Only then would they be able to reach this unfamiliar terrain.
The first few exercises the director tried were starting to open up this flow within the actors however these attempts faltered always at the end. The actors simply gave up on their lines because they were too heavily concentrating on the gestures. This meant that they were not allowing the flow of concentration to fully take over them.
I suggested in order for the actor to take these gestures they had created they needed to connect them to the text they were speaking. Not by literally doing what the text says but by simply reciting the text and then allowing their mind and body to connect again.
Once this was done another suggestion was made. I had a query as to why every time the actor sat on a chair, the movements became almost miniature. This was the complete opposite of what we set out to achieve. In order to try and stop the gestures from becoming smaller, I asked the director to stand directly in front of the actor when they were sat on the chair. I then gave a simple instruction to the actor, “if I cannot see your gesture with the director blocking you than I cannot see a gesture at all”.
After a few attempts at this, the actor finally made the connection between their mind and body. The gestures became big and almost exaggerated. They weren’t naturalistic but more symbolic and clear. The small gestures had vanished and made way for more creative and physical gestures.
Comments