Etapa Exploratoria.

Reference to the Appendices: there are filmed examples of Callum and Amelia’s physical storyboards, an example of Amelia sight-reading and Callum’s explanation for his storyboard in DVD Three, Appendix Eight, Volume Two.

At the start of the autumn term in 2011, Callum came to me to express anxiety about his inability to remember a text. He explained that he had to learn a speech from the Euripides play Medea, for the study of Greek tragedy in his movement class.

As he often has difficulty in memorising words, several years ago he had devised his own memory system which he commonly utilises as a survival strategy. This strategy involves his creation of a sequence of physical movements, with each action tallying in some way with the words of the text. His worry had arisen because he found it hard to speak the speech without always applying his devised movements.

In a filmed recorded interview (5th _{December 2011) Callum explained that he}

used this physical action device as a strategy to hold the words in his head. He finds learning text incredibly hard. In particular the retention of the order, without jumbling it up, missing large chunks out, or forgetting the words altogether. Following his first reading through of a text, he tries to learn it. He said: ‘I always get tripped up by certain words …so normally that’s when I start putting the physical actions to it, trying to give it some sort of position - so I can root back to it’. He likens his physicalisation sequence, or, as he labelled it - ‘the visual thing’, - to a dance. ‘I can remember the way my hands moved or I know where I placed them on my body – like a timeline kind of thing with my hands’.

In an audio recorded interview on the 15th _{October 2011, Callum states that} when doing a monologue, ‘… there are no cues, it’s all yourself’. So, to counter this lack of directions, he will: ‘…physically walk through it… to try to understand at this point I raise my hand and at this point I bend down to pick this up, because it gives me cues… if I’ve got a physical cue I can work out that during this line I walk there,… and on that line, because I pick that thing up , is what cues me to say this ……so it’s like giving me a physical map almost…it becomes almost like a scrap book where I’m taking photos of myself’.

It is noteworthy that Callum describes the act of remembering as ‘taking photos of himself ‘ - looking at pictures of himself doing the movements, fixed into a record- keeping model, - the ‘scrap-book’.

By working through the movement sequence, the visuospatial - motor- sensory associations trigger his stored mental images of the words of the text. ‘I try to give everything a movement so I can link the two together – the words help the movement and the movement helps the words, so if I forget one I’ve got the other one to back it up’ (Callum 2011: 1). I asked Callum if his movement process was similar to Berry’s way of physically inhabiting the text: ‘ Yes - it is like the Berry stuff – there’s a word ‘fiend’ and I just pretend that I’ve got a big nose and pull a big nose away from my face and I realised I was doing the whole emotion with my face as well, so … it’s very sort of illustrative and it’s not exactly emotionally true, but through doing the movements a sort of emotion will come through, but it is literally word by word’.

I enquired if he used this physical action method when learning his Shakespeare monologue, which he had performed as part of class practice during the Shakespeare unit. (He played the character of Bottom from Midsummer Night’s Dream). Callum replied that for him Bottom’s monologue had a narrative that he could follow, and therefore he could remember the text, but the Jason monologue in Medea was more challenging to him as he could not see how each line was connected to the other. He explained:

So I put basic, almost sign language, kind of mimes to it. If the next word was walking, I might literally put the fingers on my palm and literally walk my fingers along so that a muscle memory emerged. Each of the physical movements that I did merged into the next one. If the word was bird I could merge my hands into a bird shape so I could remember the order and the words and the structure of the piece in particular. Rather than it being an emotional thing, it’s much more a visual, literal meaning of the word bird, rather than thinking about the bird that soars and is free. I literally think ‘what does a bird look like?’ and then I do my hands placed together flapping up and down.

I pointed out that, although he mentions muscle memory as an initiator for the words, as he was speaking to me, his demonstrative gestures created the shape, movement, and animated picture of a bird. I note that he couples the word ‘visual’ with ‘literal meaning’ in his explanation. I asked him if the visual aspect was important for him, as well as the physical. He replies: ‘Oh yes – very much so – I’m looking at my hands as clues – everything is prompting itself.’

However, having learned the Medea text in this manner, the problem that Callum faced was that he could not remember the piece, if not attaching his own sequence of physical actions to it. The movement class performance situation demanded a different set of actions from those Callum had created.

Intrying to find a way around his reliance on his physical actions, Callum tells

me that he is now experimenting with imagining a small person in his head, like a mirror image of himself, doing the movements. I ask him if that might be distracting, but he replies that it acts as a safety mechanism in his head so he can think through his sequence of movements to prompt him on the words. He explains: ‘I’m not actually seeing a man in front of me, but I’m imagining that someone’s doing those movements, so I don’t have to – in my mind’s eye’. Callum has often used this physical action technique when learning texts in the past. As the work proceeds, he tells me that he eventually drops some of the movements, ‘but sometimes they seep through into the acting and remain – especially if they are emotionally derived’.

Similarly to Callum, Amelia relayed in a recorded interview on 15th _October 2011 that she had devised physical movements to enable her memorisation of the Medea text. Amelia’s approach seemed akin to Callum’s, although both denied having any knowledge of each other’s process.

In a recorded interview (2011) Amelia expands:

I think my strongest modality is definitely physical, like choreography. If you showed me twenty movements and I went over them with you once, I could remember them straight away, my body has got an amazing memory…like that Medea speech we had to learn for movement… I did a movement sequence for it so that

I could remember.

To explain what she meant, Amelia demonstrated an illustrative movement of drawing a bow and arrow, depicting a strong image in space as she spoke the phrase, ‘bright arrow of the sun…’ (Euripides Medea).

In a filmed interview on the 5th _{December 2011, Amelia stated that she relied}

on her muscle memory if she had to learn a big speech. She reports that she finds it a struggle to learn lines quickly. Callum had labelled his process as ‘a kind of dance’, and Amelia also used dance vocabulary, ‘because of the nature of the text and it being full of imagery, it was easy to build a choreography which meant the lines would come with the choreography…it sped my learning process up’.

She might use the physical actions on simply a couple of lines or choreograph a whole monologue if she cannot remember the lines. She reports:

The lines come with the choreography which really makes the learning process much quicker…with Shakespeare when the language can be such a barrier when you are initially given a piece and you have to work so hard to get to the truth and real meanings, I need to learn it first, so then I can put my script down and start to act and feel those feelings. I can’t do that straight away, I need to break down that language barrier and I take all the beautiful imagery – similes and nice words that he gives you and I remember those…I can’t learn it straight away, it just won’t go in like a contemporary piece of text because the language is so different.

Although she uses the physicalised actions as a memory aid, Amelia also recognizes that the process of devising the actions assists her in finding underlying meanings in the text. Agreeing with Callum, Amelia likens the work to Berry’s exercises of physically connecting to the text, describing her own method as:

…almost illustrative … I find big strong bold shapes moving from one to another helps my memory more than if I did small emotional-like movements. …I want to use the images…It is images – if you give me any novel or text I make pictures, but for me making those pictures physically is a good learning tool.

I asked her if she had used this physical action method when working on her monologue for the class practice in the Shakespeare unit; Lady Percy from Henry IV. In a correlation with Callum’s answer when asked about his Shakespeare monologue process, she replied that she had not needed to because:

…the Lady Percy piece had a good beginning, middle and end… I found it easier to map out…It was more easy [easier] than this Chorus speech, it’s so frantic…Medea has just killed her children and the Chorus are telling the audience what she’s done …. It’s so all over the place – it is not one story, I can’t map it out.

I wondered if therefore, she might not need to use this physical method with Shakespeare’s writing, but she underlines that it is all about the content and dramatic narrative action. ‘Say if it was Puck or Ariel when describing the ship or finding the flower. It is a story, but it’s not got the dramatic bits of the story - it’s more describing – or Titania with her long speeches – I would use it for those, yes’.

As Callum had already discovered, the embedding of the physical movements attached to the words can prove problematic to future developmental work on the text. Amelia explains that through performing the movements in tandem with the speaking of the text, an entrenched rhythm emerges. This rhythm is repeated every time she works through it. ‘I sometimes have a rhythm of how

I say those words and sometimes this can be a problem – breaking out of that rhythm’.

I asked to see their use of their actions with the Medea text in order to film it. I wanted to see an example of their strategies in accessing a text, without any influential interventions from me. Although not Shakespeare, the Medea speeches are classical language, encompassing large dramatic content. I was interested in the fact that they were using, (and appeared dependant on), a personally devised method of creating physical spatial shapes (e.g. some form of mental models of images) as a way of not only remembering the text, but of taking an ownership of the text.

5.3.2 Example of Callum’s movement storyboard: Jason from Medea by