Integrative Performance

Practice and Theory for the Interdisciplinary Performer

Experience Bryon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136511509
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Artes escénicas

Integrative Performance serves a crucial need of 21st-century performers by providing a transdisciplinary approach to training. Its radical new take on performance practice is designed for a climate that increasingly requires fully rounded artists. The book critiques and interrogates key current practices and offers a proven alternative to the idea that rigorous and effective training must separate the disciplines into discrete categories of acting, singing, and dance.

Experience Bryon's Integrative Performance Practice is a way of working that will profoundly shift how performers engage with their training, conditioning and performance disciplines. It synthesizes the various elements of performance work in order to empower the performer as they practice across disciplines within any genre, style or aesthetic.

Theory and practice are balanced throughout, using:

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• Regular box-outs, introducing the work's theoretical underpinnings through quotes, case studies and critical interjections.

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• A full program of exercises ranging from training of specific muscle groups, through working with text, to more subtle structures for integrative awareness and presence.

This book is the result of over twenty years of practice and research working with interdisciplinary artists across the world to produce a training that fully prepares performers for the demands of contemporary performance and all its somatic, emotive and vocal possibilities.

PART I

Performers – Performing – Performance

Chapter 1

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Who is an integrative performer?

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH THIS CHAPTER, hopefully you will agree that the answer is: you. You are an integrative performer!

As you progress through the book, you will begin to understand that integrative performance is largely a matter of what you integrate and what you understand you are performing.

By the time you finish this book, you will have gained a new perspective on what it means to practise, along with a set of tools that will help you integrate the performance disciplines in any combination you wish.

In the twenty years that this work has been in development, Integrative Performance Practitioners have learned a crucial lesson. The lesson is that in order to work in a way that integrates performance disciplines effectively, we must come from an integrated self: body, breath, and mind all working from an integrated instrument toward an integrated outcome. As we move forward, you will learn that this integrated self does not mean a “cleansed” self, “clear” of histories and “defects”, but in some cases the exact opposite. We will also learn that this integrative instrument does not adhere to any type, shape, tone, or look, but rather to a “way” of doing that balances the dynamic web of all that our expressive possibilities allow, within an exacting practice, creating excellence across the performing disciplines.

This book does not offer a “technique”, but rather a practice, and perhaps a new way of thinking about practice. As you progress you will be able to incorporate this work into your own “tool kit”, creating a personal practice and expanded awareness of yourself as an interdisciplinary performing artist. You may consider yourself as any combination of singer, dancer, and/or actor. You may also be a practitioner working with performing artists, exploring philosophies and new ways of making work through direction or choreography. You may be critiquing, devising, or writing for interdisciplinary work, or perhaps you are helping to advance performance through developing technologies, philosophies, and techniques. This particular work offers an Integrative Performance Practice, through which many combinations of performance discipline (s) can be activated.

New vocabularies and skill sets are presented in the spirit of putting YOU at the heart of YOUR life’s work, YOUR practice as an integrated mind/body with a history and given talents. Some of your talents may be more developed than others. How you identify as a practitioner may also differ. For instance, you might say, “I am an actor first, singer second, and dancer third”. It is recommended that you come to this work with what you have at this time and from this, in each action, we will move forward.

For the purposes of finding a starting point, knowing there can never be only one in the experience of the performer and their practice, we will begin at a biological beginning, through the lens of developmental psychology, starting with early childhood.

As mentioned in the introduction, if you ask most young children to sing, they invariably also dance and act; if you ask them to dance, they also sing and act; if you ask them to recite a poem or play a character, they sound and move with their entire breathing body and voice. As very young children, we rarely compartmentalized artistic expression into categories of movement, voice, or gesture. We hadn’t started to edit ourselves as agents of expression or categorize our choices of expressive activity into disciplinary signs and signifiers. We didn’t identify ourselves as belonging to a discipline that would inhibit, through delineation, aspects of our physical, vocal, and emotive patterning. Rather, we were little people doing something (that might fall into disciplinary categories). More simply put, we didn’t come from the idea that we were either dancers, singers, or actors, and further, we didn’t decide that the way to express an idea was through set gestures expressed through select skill sets. (We will discuss later how this has implications for self in terms of categories of race and gender, but for now let’s stay with performance disciplines.)

Of course, as little children we couldn’t do a perfect pirouette or sing a Bellini cadenza, and a Shakespearian monologue might have eluded our abilities for a few years yet. The point for now is that we may start with less sophistication and skill, but we do start as integrative performers… But wait, were we really less sophisticated practitioners? After all, we learned greater amounts, and faster; we adapted better, and were open and present. We were centred in our bodies, our breath was free, we had incredible vocal resonance in any physical position, we were emotionally available and unapologetically spontaneously creative. These are things that are asked of the best dancers, singers, and actors. Aren’t these also some of the very aspects that define great performers and, further, separate them from the mere technicians?

Could it be that in learning a specialism we also start to categorize, and in doing so we sometimes block out not only creative but also physical, emotive, and vocal technical possibilities? How can we retain an integrative philosophy and skill sets while attaining excellence? This book is all about that question, and offers a practice and philosophy toward this goal.

In Part I we will look at some of the current thinking that sits at the very core of how we consider practice, discipline, and performance. We will look at key concepts that have been adopted and adapted from science, philosophy, anthropology, and literary theory by the diverse field of critical theory of performance. We will explore certain ways these ideas have influenced a disintegration of our practice (s) and even marginalized performers in our own realm of performing. In this chapter we will look at how we identify as self when in practice. In a few pages we will return to the latest knowledge about how our brains worked as children to better understand how we might be able to harness some of the immediacy, integration, and lack of inhibition of childhood in balance with the level of excellence required in our specialism(s). But first, let’s look at our craft(s) of performance and establish a working vocabulary from which we will explore further.

THE ALCHEMY OF THE PERFORMER

Whether we are singers, dancers, actors, or any combination of these, we can agree that we are all artists in the vocation of performance. In essence, we are people called performers, who do something called performing, towards an outcome called performance.

A	B	C
performer	performing	performance
Who is doing.	Way of doing.	What is done.

NOTE: From here on when we use the terms performer, performing, or performance within the context of this working distinction, the words will be italicized, and may also have the corresponding letter in brackets next to them if a particular distinction in their relationship is being emphasized.

Performance (C) may be a work of choreography, a play, or a score. It can also be an exercise, executed in the classroom or practice studio, such as barre work, scales, or sensory work. A performance can even be a doing or a verb, when that doing becomes the object. (We have all made the act of singing, dancing, and acting a thing to tackle. This often happens in practice or in a lesson.) Performance is an outcome of you, the artist, doing something in a certain way. We will learn that when you try to do an outcome directly you leave the way of Performing and change that desired outcome. In short, we work under the understanding that we are performers (self), performing (way of doing) performance (what’s done).

From here on we will work with this distinction made between performer (A), performing (B), and performance (C). Within Part I, Chapter One will examine (A), Chapter Two will examine (C), and in Chapter Three we will define a distinct, active field of performing (B), from which the practice in Parts II, III, and IV of this book will unfold.

How the performer (A) is perceived by our culture, science, and philosophy affects the ways we work in and across our disciplines. The ways in which performance (C) is considered and is given prime value in analysis and the making of work also has very serious ramifications for our craft. We will look at these two categories in detail, offering a reconfiguration of the ways we consider ourselves in performance that puts the performer, our craft (s) and most importantly the act of performing front row and centre.

What will be brought to light is that performing (B) as a discrete category is exciting but also problematic, in that it does not fit easily into fundamental Western concepts such as reason, objectivity, reductive measurement, and paradigms of cause and effect. However, it is the stuff of performing (B), our way of doing, where our alchemy happens, and where our real work, our discipline of doing, resides. It is only in the field of performing (B) that our singing, dancing, and acting selves can integrate. Bracketing performing as its own distinct field provides a conceptual framework that highlights the kernel of our work, separating it from the “what I do” or the “who am I doing it”, forefronting and giving prominence to a “way of doing”. This way of doing will be made distinct from the “aesthetic values” of performance and will shift us out of the limitations of performer (A) doing performance (C) into a new concept, the active aesthetic, operating in a field of performing (B). An active aesthetic is distinguished from the term aesthetic, as commonly applied to performance and the performer, in that it is concerned with the steps before the product or outcome is usually evaluated. It is the way of doing. As we move through the book we will learn how, by engaging with the active aesthetic, you can witness or evaluate the way of doing in process, the qualities within the activation of generating a process. Through an embedded process of witnessing in the act of doing, active aesthetic differs from the general application of aesthetic in performance in that it is self-critical.

By the end of Part I you will have been taken through select philosophies, key scientific concepts and a few mind tasks to help reveal some dis-integrative influences embedded within aspects of our discipline(s). The ideas presented are designed to help us collapse the distinctions between (A), (B), and (C) as you begin to see how performer (A) and performance (C) can be viewed as emergent properties of performing (B) and that in this central field we can begin to conceive of a practice whereby the disciplines of acting, voice, and dance integrate.

For those of us not used to reading theory, some of the writing in Part I (Chapters 1, 2, and 3) can be complex and challenging. It can be like entering a foreign land that shifts not only your thinking if you allow it, but also your way of thinking. Do, however, feel free, as stated in the introduction, to skim and skip to the writing on practice starting in Part II to help facilitate your own personal understanding of the relationship between the practice and theory. To aid this, throughout the book corresponding sections will be signposted for practical exploration.

For now, let’s return to the idea that we are people called performers (A), who do something in a certain way called performing (B), towards an outcome called performance (C).

In the distinction between (A), (B), and (C), the performer (A) is who we are, the self that we bring to the task. It includes the condition and intricacies of yourself as an instrument and as a physical, emotional, and spiritual being. It includes how you live in and of the world. It includes your attitudes and beliefs. We will leave the English language for a second to somewhat ironically use one German word to define another. We will learn in this chapter that much influential thinking around what it means to experience as self in the act of doing is found in the works of German philosophers, within the field of Phenomenology.

The German word Haltung, for which there is no equivalent in English, is most appropriate here. Haltung translates as attitude, but also includes posture, position, stance, manner, keeping, and composure. Haltung might come from cultural indoctrination or teachings; it might influence your level of commitment and affect what you consider discipline in service to your craft. It will include behavioural, emotional, and physical patternings, family history… It’s the gestalt that you bring to the table as you work.

Gestalt

Gestalt, as a concept, suggests that something is greater than the sum of its parts and, further, that the whole cannot be predicted from the parts. It suggests that in order to understand something (an event or aspect of a person, for instance), you must...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of exercises
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Performers—Performing—Performance
• Part II Working in the Field of Performing
• Part III Integrative Performance Practice
• Part IV Integrative Performance Analysis
• Bibliography
• Index