Day Five in Rio de Janeiro

Rio de Janeiro, Day 5:

Spotty notes from today:
Enrique begins with stretches, lunges, a tiny bit of yoga. All the warm ups I've been a part of, from Lecoq to Pig Iron to New Paradise, are always about warming up the center: the pelvis in space, a reminder of where it can go, and how breath connects to it. Different practitioners want different states from the pelvis, different “ready positions,” but there's no way around warming up that incontrovertible physical center. Enrique leads this simply and clearly.

“Start to walk,” says Enrique, “but as a fish.” He speaks about seeing without focusing on any particular thing - I'm reminded of David Brick's walking dances, his interest in global awareness and sensation. It's a good metaphor for getting at this quality of attention.

 
The walks become exercises in spatial composition for the actors.

Then Enrique proposes an assignment: “Five flashes.” Dito and I are flabbergasted that Compania has evolved an exercise so very similar to one of our touchstones for playmaking: We call it “Five frames” - reducing a story to five pictures as a way of clarifying and simplifying what we've created.

But Enrique has a wildly different purpose in mind. He asks us to think about the experimental films of Eisenstein (which I've heard of, but never seen, I need to admit). His five flashes are going to be etudes in non-narrative storytelling. Rather than use this vocabulary to clarify something, he asks us to juxtapose disassociated images which, next to each other, can make a new, and surprising, meaning. “The inspiration,” he says, “is the Chinese ideogram: Put together 'sun' and 'tree' to make 'sun going down' or 'sunset.'” He asks for “non-continuous editing” - “not young to old.”

“It is a free theme,” he says, “but make sure there is something incomplete about each piece.”

Now this is the exact opposite of how we'd run an exercise like this. Our injunction would be to make sure there is a beginning, middle, end - to find a completeness as creators.

And the actors break up to feverishly make their small scenes. The funny thing is how narrative they turn out, despite our efforts to make them intuitive and non-continuous.

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At the end of the day, so many questions. “Is this what you actually do in rehearsal?” “No, it's more of a training; it depends what we're researching, that determines what we do in rehearsal.”

I am particularly interested in when they evaluate what they've generated. Right away? Or after a few weeks? The “three brains” exercises I was doing, I'm pretty quick about putting the feedback loop in place: not that, not that, that is a bit closer. With today's work, we begin with a very open spirit, and at the end of the day each individual speaks about one image from the day that he or she remembered.

A difficult question, and again one that is so individual to an artist, to a company- what's the proper time to start separating right from wrong in generative work? Okada, the Japanese director I observed in July, he is even quicker to bring down the boom than I usually am: he halts his actors after one sentence, one gesture, asking them to do it again, differently, with a microscopic attention to detail that I also admire. Today's energy with Enrique was extremely open and exploratory, with very little judgment. For Pig Iron, this shifts too: part of collaborating with Joe Chaikin or David Brick means trying on different rhythms of generating material, letting the performers sit longer in improvisations, move through several chapters of creating scenes. Finding their own way out of failure.

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After the day we head out to a nearby Portuguese restaurant. Suddenly we find our days with the Compania have come to an end. We're surprised at how intense the connection felt. We all vow to find a way to continue the conversation, to come down to Rio or up to the States to work on something together, something more substantial, maybe for a couple of weeks…..

Good news - Lia Rodrigues, who has been so difficult to contact, has gotten in touch. She'll pick us up at our guesthouse at 830am to take us to the favela where she works.