“Working with states of being”
3.3. Operation and procedures of ’Working with states of being’
As it has become clear in the sections above, there are no differences between the terminologies of Corporeal Dramaturgy and Working with States of Being (WSB). Why, then, are there two titles and two approaches? I wanted to give a new name for my approach because my interpretations of the operational terms and the use of them may be somewhat different from those of the other members of the research group. All members have developed their pedagogical thought and practice to their own directions from the basis of shared basic principles.
Also, I am aiming at formulating an embodied pedagogy of acting especially for the needs of the youth theatres and youth theatre education which is another reason for a new name. Then, how do these two approaches differ? Training Corporeal Dramaturgy assumes a basic technique. An actor beginning to train following the ideas of the approach needs to have some other technique as the basis of her acting. In the training in the youth theatres and in youth theatre education no basic technique can be assumed. Further differences between these two approaches are in the use of the concepts; in pedagogical procedures;
and in the aims of training that differ substantially. In youth theatre education
personal development is the main thing. The students do learn acting skills but more profoundly, they learn about themselves as social and individual beings.
This can, respectively, help them a lot in their development as performers. In the contexts of actor training in higher education and professional development of actors Corporeal Dramaturgy offers choices to perceive the actor’s creative work.
Instead of presenting the whole arsenal of concepts presented above the training in WSB is based on two simple things; on the idea that the actor works primarily with states of being and transitions between them; and on the frames as a means to create states of being. In WSB states of being are defined as unnamed but meaningful body-mind states that always have a bodily focus; a concrete location in or a sense or function of the body. A sensation in the body works as an initiative, the reflection of the initiative radiates influencing the body, and at the moment of confronting an outer element, material, textual or fictitious, forms a specific body/mind state. During this process the actor gives this body-mind state some kind of meaning, or rather, the meaning of which grad-ually emerges. In this way, the all-encompassing involvement of the body-mind forms the state of being through a process that becomes conscious. Similarly to Corporeal Dramaturgy, in WSB a state of being constitutes a small world of its own. It is a place to dwell, to linger. The actor can move in or out of a state of being. A state of being may include words, feelings, gestures, props, sounds and lights, for example, but primarily a state of being is a sensation, a feel in the performer’s body.
Emphasising states of being and transitions between them in the training in youth theatre education seems to be advantageous in several ways. The ideas that interpretation of a state of being remains free and a state of being profoundly individual help the actor deal with the anxiety of trying to accomplish a task she has been given; the anxiety of assessment. Also, the fact that the actor and the director do not have to agree on the substance performed increases the actor’s artistic freedom. ‘Artistic freedom’ has not been one of the most common phrases within youth theatre education. Rather, I find the students inclined to think that the actor’s part is to do what the teacher/director tells her to do. The question of agency is clearly something that future developments in the field must consider.
Contemporary methods of theatre-making such as devising do share the respon-sibility of artistic choices regarding the dramaturgy of the performance but not regarding the actor’s bodily work, and the dramaturgical choices the actor makes in the creation of an individual performance score. Moreover, having states of being in focus in training displaces certain conventional paradigms of acting: the
use of personal emotions, derangement of personality by suggestive methods, stereotypical characterization, and the representational approach in its entirety.
The use of frames has become central to training within WSB through prac-tice: they have indeed proven their applicability. They provide a simple, easily accessible way to non-representational training for young people. In WSB the frames are trained separately and often kept separate in performances, too, be-cause the simultaneous use of the frames in the manner of Corporeal Dramaturgy would be too demanding for unexperienced performers. However, the basic in-struction that one is free to make any choices is always present. For the training in WSB, I have re-named the frames presented above. The three frames are named in WSB the Network frame, the Somatic frame, and the Carrying/ being carried frame. There is a detailed description of the use of frames in WSB in Exploring bodily reactions (A III: 22-23).
The other concepts of Corporeal Dramaturgy are also used in WSB but there they are more additional than they are in Corporeal Dramaturgy. The use of concepts is meant to organise the flow of artistic creation but not to restrain it.
With these concepts, the student actor is meant to learn to organise her own artistic work. Although WSB emphasizes individual work and aims at enhancing an auto-didactic approach to training the function of the group is crucial. Other actors and the things they do work as attunement/activation for an individual trainee. At the beginning of a session, the actual space of the studio constitutes a space for collective experiences which are analogous to the experiences in an individual body. Thus, an individual body becomes the stage for “the feeling of what happens”, to borrow Damasio’s phrase, and in itself a transitional space. I want to underline here that Corporeal Dramaturgy and WSB are not separate constructions but form a continuum where the aims of training are basically the only things that differ. This difference is reflected in how complex and demanding the techniques learned are, and how complexly they are used.