How to Rehearse Ichi-Go Ichi-E – PART 1

In yesterday’s blog, I suggested something heretical. That the individual lines of the script are not important to the actor. They are important in communicating the story of the play, film or show to the audience, but for the actor to truthfully embody them, they need to be left alone for as long as possible. I understand that if you can’t come to my studio in Scotland and see it being done, this might seem like heresy for its own sake. But it is precisely the approach that I recently used to direct a piece that was performed under the banner of the National Theatre of Scotland at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow. Do you think I would use this approach with my professional reputation on the line, if I didn’t believe in it? No way. So I won’t risk yours either!

But I do believe that rehearsal is the death of liveness in performance. It is the starting point from which all the productions that my ensemble perform come.

So how do we rehearse and without causing the death of liveness, destroying the immediacy or killing the spontaneity.

READ ALOUD/ALLOWED

We start off with a couple of read throughs. Two actually. I don’t want the actors inculcating line readings even at this stage. I don’t mind if they want to read it through personally, as long as they try to avoid sub-vocalising during the readings. We use these cast read-throughs to just make sure we’re all on the same page.

TABLE WORK

A short period of time is spent discussing the essentials of the script and story. We need to be very sure that we’re all on the same page at this stage. So, we ask some questions. What’s this play about? What’s this scene about? Who wants what from whom and what do they do to get it? What conflicts do they encounter and how does the journey change them? Then a vital period of translating our understanding of the fictional world into real world actions. We use simple scene analysis questions, these can be found elsewhere on this blog and through my book Truth in Action.

During this time, we learn to create real world tasks for the actors to carry out during the scene. This is something that can be done over and over again without killing immediacy. Each time they do these tasks, they try different ways of going about it, they respond in a moment to moment way with their scene partners, they improvise their words, but they don’t try to paraphrase the scene, they simply try to achieve their task from the other person.

ON THE FEET

Now we move onto exercises to get the actors acknowledging each other. We would start with Meisner’s Repetition Exercise. Then we would do Repetition with a Task, which begins the process of habituating the actor to acknowledge their scene partners whilst carrying out a real world task. Then we move onto As-Iffing the scene.

I’ll explain that process and more tomorrow…