So I taught class again today, which I usually post all kinds of positive shit about on Facebook because I'm so enthralled after class with how well these kids are taking to all the stuff I love: Viewpoints, Shakespearean text, improvisational skills, etc. Some of these kids are really mature enough to handle the stuff in Winter's Tale, which is exciting. I feel like I hit a bit of a wall today, though. My education director said that week 5 is a tricky one, especially with these kids. I'll take her word for it.
What I love about this class though is that even when it's not great, it's still pretty good. After warmups we focused on spatial relationships, getting them to awaken to being aware of an audience while they improvise and consider what was interesting to look at on stage. They took to that really well, though lost a lot of it when we switched to actually improvising things.
I always start this class with at least 20 minutes just playing catch in a circle. It's a good focus warm up, and as they've gotten better at it we've added more balls. Totally stole this from my undergrad advanced acting prof -- I'm sure others have done the same thing.
What I love about the exercise is it really activates all the skills you really need to be present in performance and in improvisation. You've got to have a soft focus, taking all your partners in, because one of them could send a ball your way any second. You've got to be loose, to accept balls and transfer their energy from the catch into your next throw. You've got to trust your other ensemble members, and release the ball maybe a second or two before you're really ready to. You've got to be ready for anything and work hard to make sure your partners succeed -- the goal is not to trick anyone or pelt the ball at someone's face. And these kids are taking well to it.
Once we went into improv mode, based on some monologues they wrote responding to Leontes' "Too hot, too hot" speech about jealousy, though, things got a lot tougher. I think it was hard for a lot of them to express what it truly felt to be jealous or angry. We got some interesting moments toward the end, and I started them on reading through the final scene, where Leontes is forgiven. Rereading the scene struck me with what may be the key word for the play, for me, which was a fun discovery, even if it was kinda just for me and not for the kids, who were focused more on just understanding what was being said.
So Leontes & co. are staring at the Hermione statue, (Hermione being Leontes' wife he orders to banish after he perceived her maybe cheating on him with his bro Polixenes, not Harry Potter's totally platonic ladyfriend badass witch, which causes her "death") and Paulina, Hermione's loyal friend, says she can make the totally-not-real statue move, on one proviso: Leontes will have to re-"awake his faith."
This struck me, maybe because I was in a Viewpointy mood and thinking about how important it is to trust everyone in the room to work together toward telling a story-in-becoming, that very much what Leontes does not have up until this statue test is faith, and in a way, asking him to believe Paulina has magic to reawaken his dead wife mirrors Shakespeare asking the audience to believe a) Leontes really did freak out that jealously to begin with & b) he believes this somehow-age-appropriately carved and almost-life-seeming statue is actually a statue, and not the living Hermione who'd been hiding out with Paulina for 16 years and is now finally being able to be reconciled to her husband and to meet her daughter, who Leontes had also cast out 16 years ago, thinking she was illegitimate.
Faith.
It's a hard word for us, nowadays, with its religious (and by religious I mean more political/church, not spiritual) connotations, and in a world that since 9/11 has seemed to be almost entirely out of control, at risk of ending at ANY MOMENT, so CLUTCH everything you love and HOLD ON; it's easy to see why our digitally-&-immediately-gratified-culture wouldn't put much stock in "faith," a word that has as antiquated a taste as "honour." I think a lot of us are afraid to be destroyed. We're afraid to be hurt. We're afraid. And having faith in someone else, especially those who you're vulnerable to, is an impossible task to achieve without getting hurt. Because people are people, and they fail.
I think it's a mistake when productions don't show us an actually flirty Hermione at the beginning, which feels like it totally belongs in the text. Hermione is not simply a victimized martyr, innocent as a wafting lily, who gets to come back at the end and forgive everyone. In fact, it's telling that in the statue scene, she focuses her energy on her child first when she "comes to life." I think she's a whole person, and whole people flirt, even if they aren't going to do anything about it. Maybe Hermione wanted to bone Polixenes, you know, maybe there was temptation there.
I think it's dangerous to put all the onus on Leontes & his perceptive skills, which really makes him seem to freak out FOR NO REASON, because it implies that if Hermione DID do any flirting, his reaction would be acceptable. And the only reason that his jealous rage is unacceptable is that she OBVIOUSLY didn't remotely approach doing anything wrong. If she did, it'd be fair game for him to ruin everyone's lives. His jealous rage is not acceptable, regardless of the circumstances. He seeks revenge, too, much like Hamlet & Richard III, but much more like Othello, he does it for reasons that don't add up.
There is no ocular proof, there is no surety. We do live a life of Viewpointsy vaguery and ambiguity. It makes for hard lessons in class, especially with kids who are just now understanding that people fail sometimes, and that's actually part of being human. But I don't think we are dumb, as a species, men or women. We perceive what we perceive.
In the case with Othello & Leontes, though, what they were perceiving was not the actions of a whore, but that of a woman being a living person, not a statue, not an anesthetized holy goddess floating above in her halo, but a woman living and carrying on her own conversations with men. Othello & Leontes freak out, they blame the women, not for actually cheating, but really for it just being a possibility, a potential hurt, a potential failure. They are not secure enough with themselves to know that what's transpiring is harmless. They not only do not have faith in their spouses, but, more to the point, they do not have faith in themselves.
I think you have to know you're worth being in a relationship with for that relationship to last. I'm just starting down that road myself, for the first time honestly, and I don't think I could've gotten to thinking like this without royally fucking up a lot about thinking about what it takes to love someone.
But at the end of the day, the only person living and breathing and making decisions and deciding to be with one person, one whole unique fallible person, is you, and you have to trust you're worth sticking with, just as you have to trust the person who's sticking with you to do the sticking.
Faith involves failure. In catch, there are always dropped balls. We misjudge the distances we need to send balls, we overshoot, we throw to people who aren't ready, we have weird sudden spasms and send our balls rocketing askew, out of anyone's reach. We fuck up.
But everyone breathing together, listening to each other, and not giving up when the balls occasionally land? There's a kind of holy focus there, and the more we all relax, the more catches are successful, the longer the dance of catch and release lasts, and that's where real creation can happen.
So basically I should just play catch with Othello & Leontes for a little while, and save Desdemona & Hermione a lot of trouble. If only I'd been around.
No comments:
Post a Comment