Challenges and Rewards: Using Laban/Bartenieff Fundamentals

in Movement Coaching William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

by

Stefan Sittig

CHAPTER IV - INDIVIDUAL MOVEMENT COACHING

The Task at Hand

After completing the period research, the second and much lengthier section of my task as movement coach began to emerge.  From the beginning, I had decided to work with Jason Linkins, Jake Berger and Paige Larson in what would be very specific training.  I would help each of them overcome their specific physical habits as well as introduce them to Laban Movement Analysis terminology and other exercises that would help them open up and begin to move in different ways. After carefully reading several texts by different movement coaches, including Laban's, and culling my mind for any exercises I had learned from my years of movement coach training with Colleen Kelly at the University of Virginia, Denise Gabriel at Ohio University and Melanie Richards at Virginia Commonwealth University I came up with a series of exercises and improvisations that I believed would help the three actors I chose in their specific needs for Julius Caesar.   Each actor required different exercises, and in this section I will describe the work I did with each one individually.

Jason Linkins as Marcus Brutus: Transforming The Comic Character Actor

The actor cast as Marcus Brutus in Virginia Commonwealth University's production of Julius Caesar was Jason Linkins, a third year Master of Fine Arts candidate.  The performance of this role would also be in partial fulfillment of his Master in Fine Arts degree from Virginia Commonwealth University.  Having known Mr. Linkins for 6 years, and having seen him perform as an actor several times, I was aware of his positive and negative qualities as an actor.  When I heard he was cast as Brutus, I jumped at the occasion of working with him for I knew it would be a huge challenge.

Up to this point in his training, Mr. Linkins has always been cast in comic character roles.  I knew this was because of his natural body tendency towards indirect movements.  As a person, Jason is much more comfortable when he can be indirect with his body.  His lack of dance training, as well as his lack of muscle mass and tone have all contributed to his preference for indirect movement in stage roles.  This indirectness often casts him in the eye of directors as a buffoon, a clown, or a comic, if not bizarre, sort of character.  As Newlove writes in her book on the Laban technique, we must learn to "lessen the danger of being type-cast according to inbuilt personal movement patterns." (5)

As a movement coach, I knew that this indirect quality would not work well for Brutus; in my discussions with Dr. Campbell my assessments were confirmed.  Dr. Campbell wanted Brutus to move in a very direct manner, with straight, specific movements.  Whatever happened, the audience was not supposed to laugh at the actor playing Brutus, nor were they to think they were looking at a comic character actor.  My work was cut out for me.

The first thing I did was watch Mr. Linkins in rehearsal.  As I suspected, Mr. Linkins' movements were still very indirect and unclear.  He often made little adjustments as he moved, as if he were not sure of the physical choice he had just made, or was in the process of making,as an actor.  He often was off-balance and looked as if he were about to fall over or trip on himself.  (It was easy to see why he was getting type cast as the "buffoon".)  He also carried a tremendous amount of tension in his shoulders, neck, and upper back area; and because of this tense energy, he was unable to use angles when he moved.  Instead, he would always move his body in a circular motion when turning corners or turning around.  Dr. Campbell put it best when he whispered to me in a beginning rehearsal, "Can you get Jason to stop rolling his body."

I set up weekly meetings with Jason outside of the formal rehearsal period so I could begin to help him discover what his habits were and how to begin to break them.  This would not be an easy task, nor could it be fully accomplished in just four weeks of rehearsal.  But I never told Mr. Linkins that.  I wanted to push him physically to the furthest point possible and see how much we could accomplish together.

The first of our meetings was spent discussing what our challenge was on this project.  As always, once I made Jason aware of the work necessary, he dove in and accepted the challenge wholeheartedly.  After much discussion, I proposed two specific solutions.  First, we needed to work on getting him used to using direct movement versus indirect movement.  Second, I asked him to focus on economy of movement.  That is, I asked him to select his movements very carefully and only use them when he felt they were absolutely necessary to compliment his words.

Then we worked on an adapted exercise borrowed from Colleen Kelly at the University of Virginia, called "the chair exercise."  I asked Mr. Linkins to walk to a chair and sit down as he normally would.  Mr. Linkins did as told, and used four different movements just to sit down.  Of course, his natural tendency being to use indirect movement, he made several small "adjustments" before he actually sat down in the chair.  I made him aware of this and then asked him to try the same exercise, but this time he could only use one movement to sit down.  He looked frightened at this prospect and sure enough, he was not able to perform what I asked on the first try.  He made several attempts, and about the fifth time, he was able to narrow it down to two movements instead of four.  It still was not the one movement I wanted, but it was closer.

We then talked about how difficult it was for him to use direct movements instead of indirect, and how he wanted to make sure he did not seem uncomfortable physically on stage when attempting to create direct movement.  I told him that unless he practiced, he would appear very uncomfortable.  I think this motivated him to practice on his own a great deal.  Before we left that first meeting, I assigned Mr. Linkins some homework.  I asked him to pick several activities in his daily life(ie: getting dressed, taking a shower, brushing his teeth, combing his hair.)and try to eliminate the indirect qualities in his movements during these activities.  He was on a mission now.  Our project was beginning to take shape.

Our second meeting, a week later, we talked more specifically about the tension in his spine and how that affected his movements, most specifically his walk.  I pointed out that he seemed very tense in his upper back, shoulders, and neck.  He agreed with me and said he believed it to be a result of his fear of letting his body go limp.  He has an inherent fear of losing tone in his upper body, and appearing overweight, so to compensate he tenses his upper spine, shoulders and neck. 

Without getting into personal issues, I decided to recommend a specific exercise in Kristin Linklater's Freeing Shakespeare's Voice that I call "Zzoo-wooe-shaw" and that I learned how to apply to movement work when training with Betsy Tucker during my undergraduate work at the University of Virginia.  This exercise is basically a scale of sounds and each sound is connected by Linklater to a specific area of the body.  As the actor goes up and down the scale of sounds, he is to associate each sound with that specific area.  Ms. Tucker often used this exercise to help actors become more comfortable physically when performing Shakespeare.  Here is a reproduction of the exercise scale:

crown

RREE-EE 

KI forehead KI

PE-EY  eyes  PE-EY

DEh  cheekbones DEh

BA   mid-cheeks       BA

FUh            lips               FUh

  MA-AA         heart             MA-AA

  GOh                chest center                 GOh

SHAW-AW              solar plexus       SHAW-AW

WO-OE                               belly                                  WO-OE

  ZZOO-OO                        legs & pelvis                ZZOO-OO

To begin with you should allow a new breath impulse for each sound.  As you become familiar with this sequence you can put together sound groups as though in sentences. (6)

This exercise scale proved very useful in our quest for freeing up his body.  As Linklater points out later in her work: "The sounds are intrinsically connected to energies and moods as nuanced and diverse as the spectrum of the rainbow and the gamut of human nature.  This scale provides an aerobics of the inner self..." (7) I like Linklater's definition of this exercise as an "aerobics of the inner self."  I find that is precisely what it is, for it helps the actor get his inner self in shape by accessing certain muscles in connection with his voice.

In my third individual meeting with Mr. Linkins we talked specifically about Brutus's oration in the beginning of act three of Julius Caesar.  Mr. Linkins was having problems with his oration, because Dr. Campbell wanted him to be very specific in his physical gestures during the speech.  Having observed Mr. Linkins attempt the oration several times during rehearsal, what I noticed was that he lacked specificity of movement while he was speaking to the crowd.  Again, his tendency towards indirect movements and hesitancy led him to choose very weak gestures.  His gestures were often unclear, repetitive, and indirect.  I gave Mr. Linkins a two part solution to this problem. 

First, I recommended that he watch several film recordings of famous, successful public speakers.  Because this production was set in the 1930's, I recommended that Jason watch Leni Riefensthal's 1935 film entitled Triumph of the Will which contains several filmed sequences of speeches by Hitler, Goebbels and other members of the Nazi party.  This film has many examples of men using very direct gestures during their speeches to compliment their vocal work.

Second, I gave him another exercise to work on.  Next time he performed the oration in rehearsal, I asked him to only use six gestures for the whole speech.  I warned him that he could not exceed six, for I would be counting in the audience.   This exercise worked wonderfully!  The next time he performed the oration, his gestures were clear, specific, and well measured.

  By giving Mr. Linkins a limit to the amount of gestures he could use and how many times he could use them, I forced him to focus on being specific and direct.  Of course, this was only an exercise, once he physically understood what he needed to accomplish, I gave him free reign and choice of his gestures.  But whenever I saw him slip back into indirectness and overuse of gestures, I pointed it out to him.  Eventually, he could tell himself when he had been direct or indirect.

In our forth meeting we worked specifically on Mr. Linkins' walk and the mannerism that Dr. Campbell had described as the "rolling of the body."  I had Mr. Linkins walk around the room and reproduce certain moments of blocking that Dr. Campbell had given him for Julius Caesar.  We went over several crucial scenes,the first confrontation between Brutus and Cassius in act one, the scene in Brutus' garden where he realizes he must kill Caesar, and the assassination scene. 

In the first scene we worked on, the first encounter between Brutus and Cassius in the play, Mr. Linkins had difficulty with the task Dr. Campbell had set up for him in the scene.  Dr. Campbell wanted to emphasize the dominance of Cassius over Brutus and his ability to persuade Brutus into killing Caesar.  During Cassius' long section in act one, scene two, that starts with "Man, he doth bestride the narrow world/ Like a Collossus..." (8) Brutus was to react to Cassius's suggestions and persuasions.  Dr. Campbell had set up the scene so that Brutus would literally walk along the painted grey line that made a square all along the perimeter of the stage, trying to avoid Cassius, as Cassius followed him around the stage delivering his long speech. 

Mr. Linkin's biggest difficulty with this scene was what to do with his hands.  He often found that his hands got in the way when he was supposed to stroll along this line on the stage.  I suggested that he place his hands in his pockets, leisurely, since this first scene was not really as intense as he would later be in the play.  Jason loved the idea and it ended up being used in the final version of the production.  By having Jason place his hands in his pockets (a choice I would ordinarily not make for an actor) he was able to loosen up the rigidity of his upper body, he looked less tense and he was able to appear complacent, which is what the director wanted. 

When it was Brutus's turn to describe to Cassius what he wanted to do, which started with the line: "That you do love me I am nothing jealous./  What you would work me to I have some aim," (9) I recommended that Mr. Linkins take his hands out of his pockets.  He could begin to use his gestures to back up what he was saying, as long as they were specific and direct gestures.   This way, his problem with what to do with his hands when he was just strolling and listening was solved.  It was perhaps, not the best solution, for I would have rather worked on getting him more comfortable with his own hands to be able to just let them rest at his side; but for the short amount of rehearsal time, I had to chose the expedient approach.  In this particular case I think it was the best possible choice.

The second scene with which Mr. Linkins had difficulty was act two, scene one.  In a short period of time, Mr. Linkins, as Brutus, had to show the audience that he had decided to go ahead with Cassius's plan and murder Caesar.  Mr. Linkins' problem in this scene lay primarily in his inability to show vulnerability by opening up and making the center part of his body available.  Because of the tension in his upper back, shoulders, and neck, he was using mostly his head and facial gestures to communicate his emotions, while his torso area stayed immobile.

In order to relieve some of this tension and to try to get him to access his vulnerable center, I used an exercise that I learned in my work with Melanie Richards, a professor  at Virginia Commonwealth University's dance department, that would later prove very useful not just with Mr. Linkins, but with the other actors as well.  I asked Mr. Linkins to perform several isolation exercises with me.  First we would bend from the neck, then from the upper torso area, then from the waist.  At first, he was unsure about what the difference was between bending from the torso and from the waist.  I explained to him that the torso area ended at the rib cage, and that the waist area ended at the pants waist.  So when bending from the torso, the body must bend in the space right below the rib cage.  When bending from the waist, the body bends from where pants wrap around the waist.

The fact that Mr. Linkins was not aware that he could move each of these parts of his body individually, was most of his problem.  Once he realized that he had a whole torso area to work with as well as the waist, he was on his way to opening up.  We practiced this exercise a couple of more times, and then I asked him to incorporate it into his personal physical warm-up before each rehearsal and later before each show.  Whether he did this or not is not known to me, but he did seem to loosen up after that exercise.

The last scene with which Mr. Linkins was having difficulty was the assassination scene in act three, scene one.  The biggest problem in the scene was the crucial moment after he stabbed Caesar.  Mr. Linkins was having difficulty controlling his movements, after he stabbed Caesar.  This was not related to the stage combat or the direction, but rather, Mr. Linkins' equating emotional intensity with physical imbalance.  He felt that this was the most emotional moment for Brutus on stage, but he did not know how to properly show that physically.  After many different suggestions, I finally asked him to simply treat his descent downstage after stabbing Caesar as a moment of stage combat choreography. 

I actually choreographed his walk downstage after he stabbed Caesar.  I told him to walk backwards for three steps starting on his right foot, and then turn over his right shoulder to go down the stage step to the lower level, and then kneel down and point the dagger at Caesar as he delivered his final line. 

Once I gave Mr. Linkins specific movement on stage, he seemed more confident.  Then it was just a matter of checking up on him regularly to see that he was still executing the choreography perfectly.  I told him he could add any sort of vocals or facial expression, but that his body needed to follow the choreography exactly.  This might have made another actor's movements look stagy, but in Jason's case, it was exactly what he needed to give him physical confidence in the scene.

Aside from our weekly meetings, I gave Mr. Linkins notes after every rehearsal and I kept reminding him of the work we had done previously as the rehearsal process progressed.  When working as a movement coach, these daily check-ups are essential to keep reminding the actors of their physical habits and when they tend to creep back in.  I followed Mr. Linkins throughout the whole process, from the read through to the final performance, and found that our work together was tremendously productive and instructive on both sides.

Jake Berger as Caius Cassius: Freeing the Upper Body and Producing Gestures 

The second actor I worked with individually was Jake Berger, who was cast as Caius Cassius.  Working with Mr. Berger was a completely different story from my work with Mr. Linkins.  While Mr. Linkins had difficulty controlling his movements, Mr. Berger seemed to control his movements too much.  Dr. Campbell wanted Caius Cassius to be a manipulator, a convincer.  He was to be a man that could sway Brutus to commit the horrible act of assassination.  Mr. Berger's stiffness, his lack of flexibility was a problem.

As in my work with Mr. Linkins, the first thing I did was to identify specifically what Mr. Berger's physical problems were as an actor, and what habits would get in the way of his portraying Cassius as Dr. Campbell wanted him to.  In my observations I noticed several things.  First, Mr. Berger's upper body was almost always completely immobile.  From his neck to his waist, Mr. Berger seemed almost dead.  This was his major problem, and one that I hounded him with all the way through the process right through closing night of the show.

Secondly, Mr. Berger used almost no gestures on stage.  For some reason, unknown to me at this point in the process, Mr. Berger never used his hands or arms to gesture, even though the script was full of gesture possibilities.  I struggled to determine what was causing him to be so restrained with his movements, and I wondered if he even knew he was being so uncommunicative with his limbs.

Thirdly, Mr. Berger had a difficult time grounding himself and moving in a quick, precise fashion that was necessary for the character.  His natural tendency seemed to be to walk at a leisurely, almost plodding pace; but the character cried out for a quick moving, agile actor.  The need to develop this quickness and agility in Mr. Berger was clearly a main focus point as well.

So, one by one, I tried to reshape these three habits that were interfering with Mr. Berger's physical expression, in the hope that by the end of our four weeks, some progressed would be achieved.  I knew that the changes would have to be so drastic that in all probability we would not be able to achieve all of them.

In order to address Mr. Berger's first issue, the stiff upper body, I had to recruit the help of my mentor and creative project advisor, Melanie Richards.  Melanie came to rehearsal to observe my work on September 22 and I asked her about Mr. Berger's physical expression.  She observed his problem and immediately gave me exactly what I needed by merely saying: "S curve." 

I knew, of course, what Melanie meant when she said "S curve."  She was talking about Mr. Berger's spine, and how it needed to move in an "S" like shape to help him activate it.  Mr. Berger's spine was completely stiff and immobile, and because of that no life was being given out by the center portion of his body.  As James Penrod states in his work, Movement For the Performing Artist, "[S]tage movements are too often initiated externally rather than motivated from within, so that they never take on a realistic vitality and are often incomplete, stiff, and erratic, rather than broad, free, and convincing." (10)  If an actor moves without starting this movement from the center of his body, kinesthetically, the movement will of course have no energy or vitality whatsoever.

That rehearsal, I introduced the "S curve" concept to Mr. Berger and explained to him how it would help him move his spine.   We also had a conversation about initiating movements and gestures from the center of his body.  Mr. Berger immediately started to play around with the "S curve" notion and, with my guidance, he explored moving his body in this new way.   It truly was very foreign to him, and at first he looked quite awkward, as he purposely undulated his upper body in search of that kinesthetic connection.  I explained to him that it was not that he actually had to forcefully move his spine, but that he had to activate it with energy.  That is, he had to give it a vitality of its own.

I think that initially, my description of the "S curve" technique was not clear enough, so I decided to go back to my main working source, Laban's techniques.   Looking through Laban's writing I struggled to find an exercise that would help Mr. Berger with this problem.  Soon I found a perfect exercise in the introduction of the text of Mastery of Movement where Laban explains:

One of the most characteristic primitive dance-mime productions consists of imitations of animal movements.  The benevolent or malevolent-virtuous or vicious spirits governing human fate are represented as animals, venerated or abhorred by members of primitive tribes.  It is useful for the actor-dancer to consider and to compare the typical movement rhythms of  various living beings, animals as well as men, in order to gain insight into the selection of effort qualities, or the kind of inner impulses, appropriate to the various characters, situations and circumstances represented...(11)

Following Laban's lead I decided to work on animal imagery improvisation with Mr. Berger. 

I started the work by asking Mr. Berger to think of an animal that he thought best represented the way he saw Cassius moving.  At first, he seemed thrown aback by this question, which surprised me, since I always thought most actors were accustomed to animal improvisations.  It took Mr. Berger a while and he eventually came up with a snake.  I then asked him to try to imitate physically what he felt a snake moved like, its speed, how it moved, and what muscles it used to move.

After slowly undulating on the floor for about two minutes, Mr. Berger realized that a snake was not the right animal.  Although it had the right "S curve" quality we were looking for, it did not have the speed and agility Dr. Campbell also wanted for Cassius. (Snakes can often act quickly, especially when they attack, but Mr. Berger and I both agreed that for the most part people tend to think more of them as slow creatures, who slither rather than pounce.)  I did point out to Mr. Berger that although the snake was not exactly what we needed, the undulant quality was a good thing to hold on to for his portrayal of Cassius.

After the rejection of the snake idea, Mr. Berger seemed at a loss for new ideas.  He was not able to come up with another animal that embodied all the qualities Dr. Campbell looked for in Cassius, conniving, manipulative, quick, and agile.  After some mulling, I suggested to Mr. Berger that he try the cheetah.  His eyes lit up, he seemed to really like this imagery.  The cheetah seemed to be the right image, because it embodied all of Cassius qualities and it also had speed and agility.  I also pointed out to him that a cheetah's spine was always in motion and that its coordination and eyesight were superb.  After all, the cheetah is considered the fastest of all land mammals and one of the deadliest predators.

Once we evoked the cheetah image, improvisation started to move a lot more smoothly.  Mr. Berger was able to explore the different movement possibilities on stage now that he had the cheetah to work with.  This helped him begin to physically express Shakespeare's wonderful text. He seemed freer and more ready to use his whole body, especially the center portion of his torso.

Although it seemed to be successful at first, the animal imagery did not work perfectly.  Mr. Berger did not seem to respond to it as much as I wanted him to, and he seemed to lose sight of it as rehearsals progressed, as the burden of line and blocking memorization became heavier.  Some actors respond well to imagery, and others do not.  Mr. Berger seemed to get a small spark from the animal work, but it was only a small one, and soon he was back to old habits and movement patterns.  I had to do something.

I tried redirecting my approach to try to help Mr. Berger in another way.  He still carried a lot of tension in his upper body and he needed to loosen up to be able to achieve a greater level of physical expression. Instead of throwing a lot of terms at him or speaking to him abstractly, I tried to literally manipulate his spine as he walked on stage.  I asked him to try to feel if there was any movement in his spine as I went up and down it with my fingers.  I asked him to turn, walk forward, walk backward, bend over, all as I had my fingers crawling up and down his spine.  He realized he was not moving his spine much at all, that is, other than what was minimally required to perform the basic movements I asked him to perform.  Once I asked him to try to energize my fingers with the energy from his spine by moving it he increased his mobility tremendously.

I think this impromptu exercise helped Mr.Berger make the complete connection between mind and body.  When he realized that he was not putting any energy into his spine when he moved, he went to work.  I gave him a specific task: he had to energize my fingers.  This helped him to physicalize what before was just in his brain.  He understood he had to "energize" his spine, but he did not know how to do it.  All it took was my actually touching his spine with my fingers.

From that day on, Mr, Berger was able to understand the basic concept of giving the spine life.  As he slowly progressed, I gave him other tasks.   One day I told him to recite all his lines as he walked up and down a balance beam or a narrow board of wood slung across two chairs.  He asked me why this would help.  "Balance!" I replied.  When the body is in the act of keeping itself in balance, erect, the spine can not help but energize.  All tightrope walkers, acrobats and good dancers know this.  By working on balance you work on the kinesthetic sense of your body.  "The kinesthetic sense is important in determining and controlling your body positions and your movement.  It helps you stand erect, walk, talk and perform other motor skills." (12)

After working on Mr. Berger's spine mobility, his other problem with gesturing, became easier to solve.  Once he had learned to activate the spine, he was freer to produce movements with his limbs, especially his arms.  Nevertheless, I still found that he would spend long periods on stage not using his arms at all.  They would lay at his side as if they were glued to his hips, no matter how emotional or descriptive the dialogue was.  To compensate, Jake was leaning forward and using his head and neck to gesture and punctuate sounds.

I tried pointing out these specific moments to him, and this often helped temporarily, but soon he would fall back into his habit.  For a couple of weeks after I introduced the concept of gesturing to Mr. Berger, I saw him struggling with the concept.  Gesturing was new to him physically.   Midway through the rehearsal process, in late September, Mr.Berger started to show progress in some selective sections, especially towards the end of the play.  As the play progressed, Mr Berger loosened up more.  His body, perhaps because of fatigue, was less self-protective.  He opened up to gestures that sprung naturally from the center.

Noticing this, I started to point out to Jake how stiff he was in the beginning of the play, especially in Cassius' first scenes with Brutus in act one.   Mr. Berger agreed with me but he seemed to want specific guidance when it came to gestures and actions in this first part.  So I turned to the play text and found a tremendous amount of opportunity in it for movement.

In Cassius' attempt to persuade Brutus in act one, scene two, Shakespeare has given the actor playing Cassius an amazingly descriptive language that can inspire a myriad of fantastic gestures if worked on by the imaginative actor.  Instead of just making general comments about his lack of movements, I thought I could excite Mr. Berger into using more varied gestures and movements if I used direct examples from the play text.

Some of the most apparent examples of movement clues in Shakespeare's text were contained in Cassius' lines when he begins his persuasion of Brutus.   As Cassius describes his experiences with Caesar and tries to label him a coward, the language Shakespeare uses would motivate any actor to move in a myriad of different ways.

He had a fever when he was in Spain,

And when the fit was on him, I did mark

How he did shake.  'Tis true, this god did shake.

His coward lips did from their colour fly;

And that same eye whose bend doth awe the world

Did lose his lustre.  I did hear them groan,

Ay, and that tongue of his that bade the Romans

Mark him and write his speeches in their books,

'Alas!' it cried, 'Give me some drink, Titinius',

As a sick girl.  Ye gods, it doth amaze me

A man of such a feeble temper should

So get the start of the majestic world,

And bear the palm alone! (13)

This language is so descriptive and full of movement possibilities, that it was not difficult to pick specific gesture examples for Mr. Berger.  For example, when Cassius mentions Caesar's fever and how "this god did shake" I tried to entice Mr. Berger into actually shaking his body, hands, and face to get the feeling of that phrase.  Not that I expected him to actually perform this gesture once on stage, but I wanted him to experience what Shakespeare was describing in his body, not just in his head.

Then I pointed out the section where Cassius actually imitates Caesar's plea for more water.  I suggested he try finding a gesture that Jim Choate, (who played Caesar in this production) had used for his characterization of Caesar so that the audience could readily identify it.  Mr. Berger seemed to like this idea at first, and experimented with a couple of different gestures.  But as rehearsals progressed, his gestures for this section became more of his own creation.  This showed me that he was starting to take courage and make some of his own gesture choices on stage.

When I noticed that Mr. Berger was starting to gesture more frequently I made sure I gave him positive feedback and let him know that he was doing good work.  This created an increased confidence in his physical work and he improved progressively.   As we got closer to opening night, he experimented more and more.  By the time we got to the week of technical rehearsals, he had already created several gestures on his own that worked very well to physically support his choices for Cassius.  I had succeeded in sparking his interest and getting him to realize the importance of gestures for a Shakespearean actor. 

Paige Larson as Portia: Creating Specific Choices

The actor playing Portia, Brutus' wife, came to this production with several bad physical habits.  In her past work on stage I had seen evidence of her inability to use her hands effectively and her tendency to lead with the neck.  She also showed a tremendous amount of tension in her upper body, specifically in her shoulders and neck.  Many of her physical problems were not unlike the problems I had faced working with Mr. Linkins and Mr. Berger.

The difference was that Portia, although she is the most important female character in Julius Caesar, is only on stage for two relatively short scenes.  I knew that my work with Ms. Larson, because of rehearsal time constraints, would have to focus more on the specific physical work she would need to perform for those two crucial scenes and less on her overall physical work as an actor.  So I set on my mission to help Ms. Larson discover what she wanted to achieve physically in her two scenes.

The first scene Portia is involved in deals with her trying to persuade Brutus to open up to her and reveal his innermost thoughts.  This scene provided Ms. Larson with two physical challenges.  First, she had to appear fatigued due to her illness, and second, she had to kneel as indicated in the script.   Ms. Larson and I worked together to overcome these two challenges.

According to the script, Portia is a sick woman.  As Dr. Campbell and I discussed the specifics of the scene we at first thought perhaps the illness was psychological, but as we rehearsed we decided to opt for an actual physical illness.  After some thought, Dr. Campbell decided Portia would have to appear fatigued.  So I began working with Ms. Larson on her walk, carriage of body, and the use of her hands, all of which would help her surpass the two challenges of this first scene.

As we worked, Ms. Larson developed a slow walk, that showed fatigue and sickness by the fact that it was very deliberate and very sustained, but I still had trouble getting her to control her arm movements.  We talked a little bit about what specific gestures she could use, but eventually, she found her own solution.  She decided to keep her hands close to her chest, grasping her robe closed.  This worked in two ways.  First, it fit with the costume designer's choice of putting her in a robe; and second, it would show that the character felt cold and clammy, often a physical manifestation of illness.  I applauded Ms. Larson's idea and recommended that she use it in both scenes to maintain physical consistency throughout the play.

The other major physical challenge to Ms. Larson's skills, the kneeling, was more difficult to solve.  Before her physical training, Ms. Larson was just kneeling when indicated in the script.  Her movement seemed disconnected and artificial.  She knew it was not genuine, and yet did not know how to make it so.  I had to help her.

In order to make her kneeling fit into the scene, I advised Ms. Larson to realize that the most important thing about any movement on stage is not the movement itself, but the initiation of that movement.  As Anne Dennis writes in The Articulate Body: "The action-a parting, an embrace, a killing, etc.-gains its dramatic value through the moment that precedes it..."(14)   If an actor begins a movement without first giving the brain time to deliver the message to the body, then the movement is disconnected. When this happens, the actor looks like an automaton performing blocking.  I stressed to Ms. Larson the importance of finding a reason to kneel, before she actually did.

In Portia's second scene, Ms. Larson needed to show her character's emotional disintegration.  Shakespeare's script challenges the actor playing Portia tremendously, by forcing her to go back and forth between talking to herself and talking to her servant.  The actor must convince the audience that she is fluctuating back and forth between moments of complete lucidity and moments of mental chaos.

Ms. Larson experimented with different methods of approaching this scene, but none of them seemed to work.  One crucial approach, that Dr. Campbell thought of, was the comic one.  He mentioned to me that if Ms. Larson were able to understand the comic possibilities of the scene with the dumb/smart servant and its almost formulaic comedy aspect she would be able to clarify her performance.  As rehearsals progressed, this did not seem to work and Dr. Campbell started to get anxious and asked me if I thought we should cut the scene altogether.  I asked him to let me work with Ms. Larson, and told him that maybe we could achieve progress with the scene if I focused on her physical expression.

Ms. Larson intellectually understood what was needed to play the scene, but she did not know how to translate that into physical expression.  I did not want to paste on any superficial movement, but rather, I wanted Ms. Larson to discover what movement would work best for what her mind envisioned.  I wanted to "develop within the actor a capability to discover and use on stage, the movement that comes from within, movement that is organic to the character, not simply layered or pasted on." (15)

In order to make sure Ms. Larson solved this problem with her own movement creation, I asked her to do an exercise.  I asked her to attempt to play the scene for me, without any dialogue, just using her body.  At first she seemed exasperated at the thought of not being able to utter a word, but she quickly decided to give it a try.  The transformation was amazing.  With just a few adjustments from me, Ms. Larson was able to communicate the scene with much more physical expression.

  Her solution was simple, but quite clever.  She decided to use the small flight of stairs located far upstage to help her physically delineate her intermittent moments of lucidity and chaos.  When she was delivering a line that required her to indulge in stream of conscious, "talking to herself" behavior, she walked down the stairs with her back to the audience.  When she was delivering a line directly to her servant, and it demonstrated her lucidity, she delivered it as she went up the stairs towards downstage and towards the actor playing the servant.

This going up and down of the stairs, not only helped clarify Portia's intentions for the actor and the audience, but it also created a frenetic, pacing rhythm that the director liked and was looking for in the scene all along. By showing Ms. Larson how to trust and use her own physical instincts I was able to guide her to a much clearer physical performance of the character of Portia.

(5) Ibid., 22.

(6) Kristin Linklater,  Freeing Shakespeare's Voice  (New York: Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 1992), 25.

(7) Ibid., 25.

(8) William Shakespeare,  The Complete Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 603.

(9) Ibid.

(10) James Penrod, Movement For the Performing Artist (Palo Alto: National Press Books, 1974)  3.

(11) Laban, Mastery of Movement, 10.

(12) Penrod, Movement For the Performing Artist, 3.

(13) Shakespeare, The Complete Works, 602-603.

(14) Anne Dennis, The Articulate Body (New York, NY: Drama Book Publishers, 1995) 18.

(15) Jean Sabatine, Movement Training For the Stage and Screen(New York, NY: Backstage Books, 1995)158.