I joined an improvers acting summer school at the City Lit, Covent Garden, at the end of July. I’d previously attended an introduction to screen acting weekend and I’ve completed several terms of online learning to develop singing skills. It’s well worth popping over to the City Lit website to look at their online learning offers if you can’t attend in person.
We were an intergenerational, international group with eight learners from Thailand, America, France, Germany and the UK. The aim of the course is to lift text from the page with a short performance at the end of the week’s input. (We attended classes from 10am–4.30pm, Monday–Friday.) I worked with another female student to present an extract from Road by Jim Cartwright. Set in Lancashire during Thatcher’s 1980s government, the play gives insight into the desperation felt by many at the time. My character was an alcoholic mother trying to extract money from her daughter for a trip to the pub. Although it was a grim role, there were moments of humour in the script.
To prepare us for our roles, our tutor introduced us to Rudolf Laban (1879–1958) who studied the art of movement. He produced a theory of movement which refers to eight different forms of movement (or efforts) and the elements within them.
The eight efforts are punch, slash, dab, flick, press, wring, glide and float. The four elements are direction, speed, weight and flow.
| EFFORT | DIRECTION | SPEED | WEIGHT | FLOW |
| PUNCH | direct | quick | heavy | bound |
| SLASH | indirect | quick | heavy | free |
| DAB | direct | quick | light | bound |
| FLICK | indirect | quick | light | free |
| PRESS | direct | sustained | heavy | bound |
| WRING | indirect | sustained | heavy | bound |
| GLIDE | direct | sustained | light | free |
| FLOAT | indirect | sustained | light | free |
These are used in performance arts to help embody character, how they move within the scene and the way in which lines are delivered. It seems to me that much of this is transferable to creating characters in a story. Can you imagine a character expressing desire through body language including actions (or efforts) which glide, float or wring? Would those actions sustain the direction, speed, weight and flow Laban describes? Can you write dialogue that draws upon Laban’s efforts?
Have a play around with these ideas and see if this approach gives new insight into the characters you create.
I can completely see how learning how to act a character would inform writing. I find it interesting that you focus on movement to embody character, which is not an obvious route.
This has made me think and reflect.
Interesting post, with some cross-over to Raissa’s guest blog here, which can be found at https://pensaroundtheworld.com/weewis/the-author-as-an-actor/
Did you find the physical demands of taking on a character in a play helped to think how to achieve the same in a written character, Gail?
Embodying character through acting does gives insights but the introduction Laban’s theory of movement made me think about how I could give more focus to a character’s body language and their delivery of dialogue in writing stories.