PHYSICAL THEATRE
WITH THE SOCIAL FIELD AS THE TARGET
Yiannis Fragoulis, EER Artistic Director; Senior Youth Worker, Training Course
Erasmus+ KA151 Social Community Theater 01-09 Jul -2023
Perhaps there is no better place to learn physical theatre than this village in Poland,
Rabka-Zdroj. Of course, you can't call it a village, in terms of structures, public lands, people's behaviour... A small former hotel was our ark. There we put the elements that were necessary to start and we arrived at a complete and complete monument built in the public space, where the rehearsals and performances took place, and in our own space, in our soul. The moment of saying goodbye was difficult.
How can you leave and leave your Acropolis? And yet you have to keep it to give light to everything you do afterwards.
The sound, the images, the emotions have to settle down before you can put them in
order and do what is difficult: the evaluation. This one sounds like a memorial. But
you quickly realize that it is a resurrection event, since something new can be born
out of it all. This is what our actions are now stained by what we have experienced.
Education started from very simple elements. How the body is set up, how you
breathe. They seem simple, but you understand when you decide to act that there is
complexity in that simplicity. The simple structure of the movement of one part of our
body, when done by others and there has to be coordination, has a simple
complexity. We need to understand this in order to pass it on to our students.
Necessary condition.
To get to the point where we can operate, even a little bit, in physical theatre we
have to learn the first simple movements and their evolution. The slightest movement
is a point in the process. You are taught it in theory, but you understand it when you
do it in practice, in rehearsal, in performance. It all starts with that simple movement,
like the spelling of a child who, then, writes words. The sui generis does not exist,
what we can accept is the structuring, through the theory of structuralism. All this we
learned and experienced in Rabka-Zdroj.
The lessons led us on a path that takes us to the wonderful landscape where the
soul and body are experienced as what they really are: two sides of the same coin,
inseparable parts of a universe whose creators are ourselves. I've experienced it
before, but it was one of the few times when teamwork played such a large and
fundamental role.
We got to the point where we had the ability to make the first complete movements
of physical theatre. To understand that this does not require, in the first moments,
the incredible physical states of a human being. Then these are necessary. If we
look at the works of Dimitris Papaioannou, Stella Spyratou and Theo Terzopoulos, in
Greece, we understand that the road is long. This workshop has done nothing more
than to show us this road and give us the first tools to walk it.
Breathing was useful to be able to complete a movement. The next step is to breathe
in and out to make the sound. The first elements, the phoneme, to be made, word,
words, whole phrases colored by the brush of our soul, because each character has
its own tone, its own color, according to the psyche of the character that will have to
follow to poetize this man in the text, the only difference being that it will be his own
man for each actor person.
From this laboratory lines begin lines, the works of those who create that, inevitably,
will have points of convergence and divergence. This is how the universal text is
created, which is creation with theatre as a canvas. The point where physical theatre
is not far from performance. Or, to put it another way, representation and performance converge and give rise to the sublime totality that is the voice of the
human soul.
For what we got we thank those who worked to complete the workshop.
Particular moments were the actions done by other groups on the margins of the workshop, the editing of the text, the film projection, our Performance... Moments that showed that this workshop triggered the creation of parallel expressions.
Everyone, even the smallest role, was necessary. If you took away, took away something the whole structure would collapse. Now the priority is to continue working in the direction we have chosen. The lab will have achieved its purpose. Its poking will be an act of resurrection, of creation.