TOOL TIME: THE PALACE
Over the course of the six process weeks (or eight rehearsals), a cast and creative team of a production will explore a number of tools. One of the tools that has proved fruitful to a number of the SOTP main stage productions is The Palace.
What is it? How does it work?
This tool is chiefly imagination-based but is enriched deeply when actors have a space where they can work physically without impediment. For us, a big open gymnasium works wonders. Additionally helpful to this exercise is if the actor can explore it in the Imaginary Body of their character. [We will explore Imaginary Body in another post to come - stay tuned!] Over the course of the exercise, actors are asked to work individually in soft focus. [Soft focus is when you allow your field of vision to work peripherally to become aware of what is around you without hyper focusing on anything in particular. By working in Soft Focus, actors can be safely engaging around each other without any obligation to be a performance-level scene partner or accountable to each other’s imagination-based explorations.]
A director invites the actors to imagine they’re walking in some kind of open space when they notice a path that leads to a palace. [This first step allows the exercise to begin gently, and all the better if the actor can connect actual walking to whatever the imagination conjures.] The director then facilitates the actors’ imaginations to: come into contact with a palace of their own making, enter the palace [whatever form that may take], and then enter a series of rooms within the palace. Upon entering a room, the director will give the room a name a la, “the room of ____________.” The names of these rooms correspond specifically to themes that relate to the play. By utilizing themes from the play as the prompts for these rooms, each actor [and therefore each character] has an opportunity to explore and freely associate how the theme impacts them or lives through them within the narrative of the play. In a play that contains strongly polarized characters, the way these rooms affect characters or the way they take shape may wildly differ from character to character. Characters may choose to explore the room in a naturalistic or realistic way, or they may be inspired to explore more abstractly.
While the range and variation across a cast of characters can be really illuminating, it is also fascinating to observe the ways dissimilar characters may find common motifs with one another despite their polarized qualities. In exploring the thematic rooms of Amerikin, we found both extremes.
We’ll share experiences from other actors over the next handful of weeks and do some comparisons on how this exercise elicited different or similar ideas for each character.
The rooms/themes we played with for Amerikin were:
Room of Isolation
Room of Family
Room of Justice
Room of Bigotry/Hatred
Room of Belonging
In a Spyback, Mia Jones, prop designer for Amerikin, made some incisive observations about a few of the characters. Mia noted how one of the characters appeared to be so untethered or ungrounded in this play, and she offered if there was some kind of artifact from the character’s former life or from a former group of friends that would provide solace or comfort. To another actor, Mia noted that there appeared to be a propensity to be snacking or some kind of oral fixation. In both cases, the actors immediately acknowledged how much those notions resonated with what they were experiencing for various reasons. Spybacks like these immediately re-invigorate the cycle of inspiration from script to actor to designer and back again. To have designers in the room during process weeks is such an asset to our development of a production and continues to significantly shape the work we will ultimately have onstage.
