Ejemplificando con AndroMDA.

Eugene Gendlin offers a description of a common experience:

The poet reads the written lines over and over, listens and senses what these lines need (want, demand, imply, ….). Now the poet’s hand rotates in the air. The gesture says that. Many good lines offer themselves; they try to say, but do not say – that. The blank is more precise. Although some are good lines, the poet rejects them.

That …. seems to lack words, but no. It knows the language, since it understands – and rejects – these lines that came. So it is not pre-verbal. Rather it knows what must be said, and knows that these lines don’t precisely say that. (cited in Johnson, 1997, p.151, italics original)

We do not have to be writing poetry (although Gendlin says he knows that at some point we have all tried) to have felt this ‘tip of the tongue’ syndrome; the felt sense of

frustration and inertia and the converse sense of relief and release when the right words come.

One usable value for Shakespeare, as the continuing popularity of his quotations suggests, is in providing the ‘right’ words; the right quality of language to express what we want to express. An enjoyment in speaking aloud the text is a common factor in people’s experience of Shakespeare, whether children, adults, or professional actors. A common rehearsal room exercise has actors paraphrase Shakespeare texts to find their own expression, and often find that Shakespeare’s words are better. The MA actors

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described them as more efficient or more expressive but with a general sense that they ‘just feel right’. This ‘rightness’ is associated with the physicality of language Berry observes, that somehow the sounds and rhythms work through our bodies,

simultaneously conjuring and completing emotions in language that feels like music. The MA actors had followed a Meisner based process which taught them to ‘live truthfully under imaginary circumstances’ (Meisner, 1987, p.87), and in applying this to Shakespeare, they had been encouraged to gain a thorough and personal, rather than generalised understanding of the text; for, as Berry (2009, p.18) describes, understanding an overall sense ‘inevitably leads to a generalised and prethought’ rather than live, felt response. The actors all commented on how this gave them ‘freedom’ in performance, a word that was used frequently during the interviews. Lucy D’s comment could be considered typical in explaining, ‘If I ever do Shakespeare again, that’s how much work I have to do on it to feel comfortable with it. That’s brilliant – like it doesn’t daunt me at all - but once you’ve done that you can be really free with it.’ There was a common feeling that it is the responsibility of the actor to understand why they are saying every word in order to communicate meaning to an audience. Phoebe explained it in this way:

The extent we broke down every single word and explored all the possibilities - it meant you as an actor could make your own choices, like really educated choices – because if you get a script and you learn it and, you know, if it’s Shakespeare you kind of understand what you’re saying but if you don’t understand every single word, I don’t think you can be free in knowing exactly why you’re saying it. For these actors, a ‘kind of understanding’ of the text was not enough because that limited the meanings available to them. Joe offered a metaphor: ‘At university it was like digging for a sandpit whereas here it’s like digging for an oil well – it’s just so much richer!’ Tom explained it as: ‘So many choices and options to choose from and – not necessarily options but question marks to explore in rehearsal and yeah, that really helped me find my version, or my choice of Shakespeare.’ Kitty said: ‘All this pre-work gives you that freedom to make the choices and make it your own rather than being like oh I’m being Juliet. I’m being me, but I’m playing Juliet.’ Lina captured the difference generally expressed between working with Shakespeare and modern writers:

It’s kind of written erm very poetic - and yes you can work out the meaning but there’s so many different versions of the meaning - whereas in modern language you know what the words mean and to say, with Shakespeare it gives you a much wider choice of what you as a person want to say, what the words mean for you.

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There was a strong sense of ownership in all the comments deriving from the personal connections made: ‘my version’, ‘my choice’, ‘make it your own’, ‘you can’, ‘you have to’, ‘what the words mean for you’. The actors claimed that Shakespeare gave them a particular sense of freedom to inhabit the characters with the meaning of their own lives and imaginations. Berry describes how Shakespeare’s writing particularly, provides variety and dynamics of rhythm and sound that ‘quickens the reflexes of the speaker and gives the actor a great freedom of response’ (2009, p.37).

Through their deep relationship with the text, the MA actors were finding a paradoxical value in Shakespeare’s writing that the complexity of the metaphorical layers can support an actor in capturing and communicating simple, personal emotional meaning to an audience. The actors explained this as a physical response to how ‘right’ the words feel, not because there is a ‘right way’ to say the text but because there isn’t. Instead the words create an emotional structure for personal experience to fill. In a process of reverse engineering to the normal relationship of thought and language, Shakespeare supplies the words and instead of searching for the right words to express meaning, an actor must search for the right meaning to express the words. This actors’ process of exploring the possibilities of the words to express meaning can provide insight into how those words work. Experiencing this process as part of theatre-based practice can support young people in metacognitively reflecting on Shakespeare’s craft; considering why and how the words and phrases he writes achieve their effects. Experiencing those effects as embodied communication rather than the more detached process of reading can support young people in developing their own immediate and interactive communication skills as they speak and listen to others.

Johnson examines Gendlin’s proposals that the viscerality of inner meaning is too intricate to be understood by forms and patterns and our attempts to translate internal sense or meaning into the symbolic features of language we can articulate is a highly limited understanding of how meaning works. Gendlin’s blank requires precision; when we are reaching for the right words, finding approximately right words is often not the problem; there are plenty of possibilities, but we feel that these words will not do. Johnson explains:

When you are considering how to continue a line of poetry, or a line of thought in a philosophical argument, or an episode within a narrative, or an argument with a friend, the felt sense of the qualitative whole is what determines how well

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various candidates for the next thought, word, or symbol will carry forward the thought (2007, p.82).

He argues that meaning is always embodied and resides in ‘situational relation as that relation develops and changes’ (2007, p.83). It is this movement through possibilities that Shakespeare’s writing captures, supporting an actor to reach for the precise articulation of what each word means to carry them into the next moment, where each moment is shaped by a physical relationship with other actors and their environment. Without an experience of Shakespeare in performance these momentary possibilities of meaning are less easy to capture. Theatre-based practice shares these experiences with young people, guiding, stimulating and challenging them to find meanings in Shakespeare’s texts that are culturally relevant and useful for them.

Berry (2009, p.138) argues that an actor should find and clarify the thought and

arguments in a text, claiming it is those initial thoughts which give rise to the feelings, and not the other way round. She quotes from a letter written to her by Brook: ‘Only when the thought pattern gradually becomes clear can a new level of fresh, ever-changing impulses inform the words. The thought brings with it the feeling that in turn makes the word patterns’ (cited in Berry, 2009, p.23). In life, feeling comes first, and from feeling thought and word patterns are co-created. The process of reverse engineering

Shakespeare offers means investigating possible thoughts in the word patterns so that language and feeling are co-created in a moment of expression.

Gendlin’s concern is greater attention to how we think through our embodied minds. With Shakespeare’s text an actor is not reaching for a word to fill the blank since the words are already in his/her head; instead the actor is reaching for the emotional blank in order to convey why only that word will fit. The actor moves moment to moment through the text channelling the intricacy of possible responses the viscerality of the moment suggests into the words they have been given; their embodiment of a role shapes and is shaped by what and how they speak. Embodying a text through theatre-based practice allows exploration of the possibilities of sense behind the meaning of the text. In real life we are constantly reaching for the right words, the right metaphors, allusions and rhythms to express what we want to express. Speaking Shakespeare gives us the right words, words crafted to catch the attention of our right-hemispheres, and allow us to embody other possibilities outside the knowledge our left-hemispheres have carefully

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stored. Shakespeare’s exceptionalism is the potential in his writing to make us feel our own exceptionalism as we inhabit his language.