Hofan journal

As the workshop draws to a close, I am taking this time to reflect upon what I have learnt this month. It's been an intense month. The first two weeks were pure fun, movement, contact, space… very good for me in terms of基本功, a return to the fundamentals.

Then, in the third week, we entered the world of text. It was a introspective week – we spent a lot of time spent "dropping in" with our own monologues, plastique (authentic movement), contact guide (where someone tries to free you vocally and break your habits…
It was a challenging week in many ways, as working with text is still a relatively new thing for me. I like the journey from body to voice to text – this makes sense to me – and I think it gave me a much clearer idea of how to stay authentic to the moment in both body and voice.

One question that I have been mulling over quite a bit is about the balance of in : out
There seems to be a number of steps to this process.

First you create the world in sensory detail. I can still remember Paola (my teacher in Lecoq) holding my hand and walking through my imaginary childhood bedroom. You have pots of paint? Feel its weight. What is the lid made of? Feel the coolness of the metal. Open the pot – smell the paint…

And then, if you breathe in these sensations, certain feelings arise.
For example, in my monologue my opening lines have a huge sense of space for me.

田野佈滿死牛牛掤塞滿死牛
Everywhere cattle are dead in the fields dead in the stalls

This sense of space aches in me.

This feeling, therefore is a by-product. Now it is very important to stay with this feeling, and just let it be what it is. Neither to push it (when the actor expresses more than he or she feels, the emotion will feel forced, because you are "telling" the audience what you feel), nor to hold on to it past what it is.

In some ways, it is not unlike the chi (氣感) in tai chi. At first it is very exciting to feel the chi, this new dimension of yourself. You feel like you are doing something right. (好有"feel"). But chi and emotions are by-products, they can give you feedback, but are not things you should seek for or hold on to.

Now the question, the crucial question that I am currently trying to figure out is: having created this inner world, how do I become transparent, so that this world can be accessible to the audience?

This is something I need to work on, I know. A few months ago I was doing some authentic movement with Adrian and Tuen. It was a really rich exploration for me, but I suspect this world was largely opaque to the two witnesses. I was closing them off.

I suspect in life too, I hold a certain reserve.