Movement Directors in Contemporary Theatre

Conversations on Craft

Ayse Tashkiran

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350054486
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

'When directors understand the value of a movement director they remove any sense of hierarchy within the room and place movement directors firmly by their side for they are and should be their co-pilot, navigating and creating the world of the play.'
- Joan Iyiola
Movement directors work with the physical, living bodies at the heart of theatre productions, creating movement languages with actors and directors. Through a series of in-depth interviews with leading theatre practitioners, Ayse Tashkiran charts the growth of the movement director in contemporary theatre. The voices of Jane Gibson, Sue Lefton, Kate Flatt, Toby Sedgwick, Siân Williams, Struan Leslie, Ellen Kane, Peter Darling, Steven Hoggett, Ann Yee, Imogen Knight and Shelley Maxwell explore processes of creativity, collaboration and innovation for the moving body in performance. The conversations open up:
Growth of movement direction through the 20th century
New insights into embodied theatre practice
Diverse movement approaches and creative preparation
Physical trainings and influences
Working methods with directors and actors in the rehearsal room
Movement for actors in opera, film, television and musical theatre
Relationships between movement direction and theatre choreography
Potential future developments in the field

1 Early practitioners and practices

Each conversation in this book describes a practitioner’s unique personal history of movement trainings and references the teachers and practitioners who inspired them. The interviews illuminate a myriad of influences on these contemporary practitioners, and taken together, they start to map the development of the discipline.

Looking backwards into the twentieth century is a useful way of understanding what constitutes the contemporary in the field of movement direction in the UK. This chapter provides an insight into the work of the earliest movement directors and theatre choreographers, and whilst it does not present an exhaustive history, it discusses a representative range of early practitioners working within the British theatre scene. I begin by discussing the careers of Litz Pisk, Claude Chagrin, Geraldine Stephenson and Jean Newlove. These pioneers were the first to name the practice and developed working processes that are still recognizable today. Some of these early practitioners also directly taught or influenced a generation of movement directors that feature in these interviews.

Whilst the term director of movement emerged in the post-war period, instances of actor-centred movement practice, avant-la-lettre, are discernible much earlier in the twentieth century in British theatre. Frequently, this kind of work was attributed to a ‘choreographer’ (sometimes signalled with a reference to ‘dances by’ in the programme or credits). These terms can be misleading, since they sometimes fail to represent the real contribution of nascent movement directors. I will examine one short phase of Ninette de Valois’ work on theatre productions to reveal that she was creating movement material beyond the dances that she was originally engaged to set – a creative contribution that is now more akin to movement direction than choreography. Then I will look at some of the dancers and actors associated with the British Natural Movement and Greek Revival dance who developed their own hybrid techniques, inspired by new, freer forms of dance emerging in Europe at the start of the twentieth century. They too contributed to the emergence of ‘movement’ practices before they were so named. In this chapter I will discuss the careers of choreographer Margaret Morris, and movement and mime teachers Ruby Ginner and Irene Mawer, all of whom are representative of the practitioners working in this period.

Litz Pisk (1909–97) was a notable actor movement teacher working in Britain from the interwar period onwards.¹ Originally from Austria, her early training combined drawing, scenography and costume design with Ausdruckstanz, or new expressive dance, in 1920s Vienna. Her formative training was a dynamic combination of acrobatics/gymnastics, Laban, ballet, historical and folk dance. Like many Jewish artists, Pisk left Vienna ahead of the Anschluss in 1933, settling permanently in England in 1937. She went on to teach movement to generations of actors at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA; 1936–42), the Old Vic Theatre School (1947–51) and Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (RCSSD; 1962–70, as Head of Movement from 1964).

Hand in hand with her teaching, Pisk worked on theatre productions, practising as a movement director with greater frequency from the 1950s onwards. She directed movement across theatre, film and, to some extent, television. Her collaboration with theatre director Michael Elliot was an enduring one, based on complementary working methods that sought to harness the actor’s emotional and imaginative capacities. Elliot recalls that as collaborators, they could ‘always discuss the emotional intention in detail first, where we speak the same language, before finding our different ways to express it’ (Elliot in Pisk 2018: xxxiii). Pisk also worked repeatedly with actor Vanessa Redgrave, first on a seminal production of As You Like It at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in 1961, and then on the 1967 film Isadora, directed by Karel Reisz. For the latter, she contributed choreography and movement direction, creating the dance and movement language for the role of the modern dancer Isadora Duncan. Redgrave recalls,

In 1967, we spent weeks together preparing the dances for the film Isadora. When Litz drew up her skirt between her legs and began to move, with or without her drum, I saw in her, alive, the amazing spectrum of history, philosophy and rhythms from the ancient Greeks to the Renaissance and to our times. She inherited and transmitted the katharsis: the coming together and the mutual release that men and women all seek and can find.

Grace et al. 1997: 14

Pisk’s movement practice was, at times, choreographic but almost always ritualistic. Her way of working was frequently described as organic by those who knew her because she started with the innate qualities in each individual actor. Her movement progressions commenced with inner impulses that manifested in external motion. Her capacity to draw out the dramatic potential of movement and her actor-centred approach continues to inspire practitioners today. Jane Gibson (Chapter 3) and Sue Lefton (Chapter 4) trained with Pisk in the 1960s in London and are directly influenced by her teaching, which they embodied as trainee actors. Lefton also went on to assist Pisk on several productions. In particular, Pisk’s idea of a ‘climate of a time’ was intended to help actors access social dances through their imagination. She would draw on references to architecture, art, clothing and music of a historical period to activate the actor’s senses as well as their imagination. Pisk focused on the actor’s capacity for transformation, explaining that

The actor does not move for movement’s sake and he does not beautify movement for beauty’s sake. If he is called upon to dance, he will do so as a certain character in a specific time, place and situation. The actor’s body maybe small or big, short or tall and he transforms his body into any body.

Pisk 2018: xxxv–xxxvi

In 1975, Pisk published The Actor and His Body, a seminal book that starts to chart the terrain of movement direction, and which still influences movement practitioners and actors to this day – especially her identification of an actor’s need to move. Pisk’s legacy to movement direction lies in identifying and realizing the dramatic dynamics within movement in a way that was tailor-made for the actor’s inner life and that supported the dramaturgical imperatives of the theatre production.

Post-war movement directors/theatre choreographers were often engaged to fulfil moments of specialized movement. They were hired as specialists to teach specific movement techniques if movement was seen to be beyond the skill of the actors or the director. Their specialism – for example, animal movement, mime or dance – was needed in and of itself and frequently acted as an entry point to a more expansive input. Movement director Claude Chagrin and theatre choreographer Geraldine Stephenson were credited with ‘mime’ or ‘dances by’ early in their careers. From the 1950s onwards, the demand for their specialist skills grew. This led them to make greater movement contributions, resulting in a gradual renaming of their work to ‘movement by’ and ‘choreography by’ in credits.

Claude Chagrin (born 1935) was a French movement director and performer whose physical training was in mime with Marcel Marceau² and physical theatre with Jacques Lecoq.³ In Britain, she taught mime in a variety of settings, including the City Literary Institute (City Lit.) and Morley College. Throughout the 1960s, she taught actors alongside movement directing on professional productions – with one practice feeding the other. Some suggest that Chagrin was chosen by Laurence Olivier to join the National Theatre. She was, in fact, appointed by William Gaskill to become the in-house movement specialist, but it is unclear in what capacity she worked, beyond contributing to individual productions. We do know that she worked on at least seventeen productions at the National Theatre from 1961 to 1974. In 1964, Chagrin movement directed Royal Hunt of the Sun, a new play by Peter Shaffer at the newly formed National Theatre, directed by John Dexter. She was instrumental in creating a stylized physical language that included ensemble movement work and rituals. Her movement vocabulary developed out of her physical theatre training and into a creative dramaturgy that prioritized seeing and feeling over understanding and listening. Critics responded to the dynamics of her work and sometimes acknowledged her work directly in their reviews. When reviewing A Bond Honoured (also directed by John Dexter), critic B. A. Young wrote, ‘Stage pictures of great beauty are created, with bold, arrogant movements that take the eye’ and explicitly acknowledged Chagrin’s contribution, writing that ‘Claude Chagrin has arranged the movement’ (1966: 24).⁴ Milton Shulman noted that ‘by the use of swirling balletic movements, by the suggestion of violence throughout the skilful manipulation of mime play and by the adroit placing of Sicilian folk songs, this short play has been turned into a stunning parable with a magnificent theatrical impact’ (1966: 9). Critics were noticing the physical potency of the movement and were sensitive to the collaboration between movement director, composer, director and, importantly, actor. A third review of A Bond Honoured notes that the movement was characterized by ‘flamenco fluency’ and ‘the plasticity of flamenco dancers, using semi-abstract mime for the moments of violence – blows which fell without connecting, red scarves for head-wounds’. He observes that ‘above all, there’s Robert Stephens carrying further the sculptural technique he mastered for The Royal Hunt of the Sun: part-dancer, part-athlete, fixing each posture in bronze’ (Bryden 1966: 24). In 1973, Claude Chagrin worked with John Dexter again on the seminal production of Peter Shaffer’s play Equus. She contributed what we might recognize as the mainstays of a Lecoq-trained movement director – mime, animal movement and chorus work. The central relationship between horse and human necessitated a physically creative approach to express violence, sexual awakening and psychological disintegration. Dexter, in his biography, makes little mention of Chagrin’s sizeable contribution, but one has to infer a successful working relationship where physicality was playing a significant part of the whole production language.⁵ Chagrin’s daughter, Sophie Chagrin Cohen, recollects that Claude’s ‘movement came from her training with Lecoq and Marceau, and then it was a process of translating her unique vision into a display of ambiance, movement and impeccable timing’ (unpublished conversation with Chagrin family, September 2014). Chagrin’s work in the UK came to a temporary halt with her relocation to Israel in 1976; she returned to England in 1988/9. While there is no direct inheritance from Chagrin to Sedgwick, there is certainly an indirect one through the shared vocabulary of the Lecoq training (see Sedgwick, Chapter 6). Her legacy is inscribed into the artistic vibrancy of early National Theatre works and the reimagining of corporeal mime for a wider physical theatre vocabulary.

Geraldine Stephenson (1925–2017) was a dance and Laban-trained movement director and choreographer who created mass-movement pieces, and social and historical dances for the actor.⁶ She studied physiotherapy and physical education at Bedford College of Physical Education and went on to study at Laban’s Art of Movement Studio in Manchester with Rudolph Laban⁷ and Lisa Ullman from 1946. Stephenson’s formative experience with Ullman and Laban included teaching movement to actors and non-professional performers as well as creating her own solo works for dance recitals. She went on to assist Laban, teaching actors at Esme Church’s Northern Theatre School in Bradford.⁸

Stephenson talked of the influence of Laban and Ullman, and how their movement training focused on ‘the liberating of one’s movement’ by putting ‘emphasis on centrally generated body movement – so different from ballet’ and ‘full-body use of the floor, bare feet, wide-ranging spatial directions, and the totally new experience of improvisation, partner and group work’ (Goodrich 2003: 29). She had a range of skills at her disposal – skills that would be reformulated in her work with actors.

Stephenson worked on St Mary’s Abbey’s medieval York Mystery Plays as part of the Festival of Britain, where she was asked to create three movement sequences including Lucifer’s fall from heaven. Her credit in 1951 was ‘Stylised Movement and Mime’. And with the same project three years later, in 1954, this credit changed to ‘Director of Movement’.⁹ Stephenson’s detailed description of her work on the York Mystery Plays in 1951 shows she was clearly applying choreographic skill to a huge range of movers, both amateurs and professional performers. She integrated movement sequences with speech and text for the choruses in this piece. She paid tribute to the ‘mathematical solutions’ that Laban imparted; she employed a structural strategy in which smaller subgroups within the larger chorus of 250 performers were led by two of her own students. Actor Edward Petherbridge trained with Stephenson and performed in this production. He recollects that Stephenson was

a disciple of, and chief assistant to, Rudolf Laban at the time and her classes were both rigorous and freeing – no dancing, rather abstract in their exploration of, it seemed, every fundamental quality of movement. We students played demons, bad and good souls, at the last judgment under her direction at the York Mystery Plays of 1954.

Petherbridge 2018

Stephenson identified this project as a creative turning point. Working on the Mystery Plays, she discovered her capacity to create movement material for non-specialist movers and found how to generate a movement style that was integral to the narrative demands of the drama. Talking about her approach to movement for actors, she said, ‘I think you get the best out of people if you don’t impose on them. … I like to know who I am working with – what my material is’ (McGaw 2001: 24). This very individual, bespoke approach is a characteristic of all movement direction today, and one that you will hear repeated amongst the voices that follow (see Flatt, Chapter 5; Maxwell, Chapter 14; Igbokwe, Chapter 15).

Stephenson’s long career included choreographing pageants as well as theatre works at the National Theatre, at the Royal Shakespeare Company and in television from the 1960s to the 2000s – often credited as ‘choreographer’ or for overseeing ‘movement’ on her many television productions. Stephenson developed what would become a lifelong commitment to

working with actors and helping them find the movement for their character or teaching them to dance – the process of getting the movement out of them and through them. … I believe that this is what all dance should have: a sense of drama and a sense of intention. You have to know what people are dancing about. Laban with his effort work as much as with his spatial exercises, is responsible for my interest in the content of movement, and for my being able to work with all these different types of people – the York Plays, pageants, actors – professional or amateur, and of course with dancers.¹⁰

McGaw 2001: 24

Here, she places emphasis on the actor rather than the director or the production. Two threads emerge from the work of Stephenson: first, dance’s dramaturgical potential to communicate drama and second, the centrality of actor-tailored processes. It is notable that several of the interviewees w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Early practitioners and practices
• 2 Themes
• 3 Jane Gibson
• 4 Sue Lefton
• 5 Kate Flatt
• 6 Toby Sedgwick
• 7 Siân Williams
• 8 Struan Leslie
• 9 Ellen Kane
• 10 Peter Darling
• 11 Steven Hoggett
• 12 Ann Yee
• 13 Imogen Knight
• 14 Shelley Maxwell
• 15 Future voices
• 16 Beyond the room: Contexts and Structures
• Glossary
• References
• Further reading
• About the author
• Copyright