Challenges and Rewards: Using Laban/Bartenieff Fundamentals

in Movement Coaching William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

by

Stefan Sittig

CHAPTER II - THE 1930's

When Dr. Campbell explained to me that he planned to set this production in the crime underworld of the 1930's, my creative juices started to flow.  I knew that to ask these students to recreate the physicality of a gangster living in the 30's would be a lot easier than having them recreate an Elizabethan movement style.  After all, the 1930's were a very colorful period in modern world history and a period that is still freshly visible in the mind of most actors today due to the fact that many images of the period remain recorded on film and in several photographic works.

When it came to doing research, the films and photographs of the period became my biggest source of information.  I took my cues much more from visual sources than from written ones.  I figured that anything I could find that was visually stimulating to the actors would work much better than a written source.  Although some examples of photographic work were important, I found myself using, for myself as well as for the actors, mostly film footage for a specific view of what the period was like.

I spent hours analyzing two different kinds of film footage; the documentary and the Hollywood movie.  While most of the images in the documentaries portrayed men and women in daily routines like dancing, waiting in line, and hurrying through the crowded city street trying to catch a bus, the images that called my attention the most were the ones concerning the Great Depression.  These images of men and women waiting in line for bread, living under tin roofs in Hoovervilles, and scrounging on the streets looking for food, were so strong that I knew I had to show them to the cast. 

These images of people made poor by the Great Depression fit in perfectly with what the director had already envisioned for the chorus of the play, referred to as the "plebeians" in the play text, or as the character of Casca calls them, "the tag-rag people."   Inspired by these references, the director wanted the chorus to represent the poverty that resulted with the economic catastrophe of the stock market crash and the overall collapsing of the U.S. economy.

So, early in the rehearsal process, I actually screened one of the documentaries for the entire class, titled America in the Thirties: Depression and Optimism (1990).  This short documentary contained an abundance of images of poor workers during the depression and proved very valuable, specifically for many of the chorus members.  As it turned out, the aplomb with which each of these actors took on their individual plebeian persona ended up being one of the most impressive parts of the production.

The other form of film footage I used was the Hollywood movie. The most crucial of these movies was Mervyn LeRoy's Little Caesar (1930), staring Edward G. Robinson and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.  Not only did this film accurately depict the movement style of men in the 1930's, it also dealt with the underworld and several gangster and mobster characters that inhabited it.  This film footage gave me great insight into the specific kind of movement a gangster of the 1930's would use.     

Other films like Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday (1939), and Alfred Hitchcock's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935) were also crucial in defining the period's movement style because these had several scenes that involved men taking off and putting on their hats.  I knew this would be a crucial issue in my movement coaching because, in an early production meeting, the costume designer had mentioned that many of the men would be wearing hats. 

I also turned to photographic material, and found a great abundance of it.  The most beneficial of these sources for me was a selection titled This Fabulous Century: 1930-1940.  This particular selection contained over 14 different images that I found useful for this production. Although none of these images was completely reproduced on stage, they were used mainly to give the cast, as well as myself, a taste for the period and its diverse characters.

I have always been a firm believer in the old adage that "a picture is worth a thousand words."  The information I gathered from period photographs and film footage, both the documentaries and the Hollywood movies, was of the utmost importance in influencing me in my work with the chorus of this particular production of Julius Caesar.