MÉTODOS

In this latter part of Text in Action (Ch. 10) Berry (2001:219) makes very useful suggestions for using more imaginative exercises to “discover how the text can actively take us into those different spaces in the character’s mind, and how each thought has a slightly different texture and dynamic”. This section of exercises also resonated very clearly with our work on the Sorrows and Rejoicings text. She sets out four parts to this group under the heading: Imagination/Memory (Berry 2001:220):

i. Inner versus outer landscape ii. Spaces in the mind

iii. Drawing iv. Imaging

I touched on these exercises and adapted them for our purposes to discover how inner actions and thoughts can lead to a more concrete sense of place and space and outer actions by the characters. The scenes in Sorrows and Rejoicings move constantly between the past and the present, outdoors and indoors, youth and age, memory, dream and wish- fulfilment to the harsher realities of the present South African society from the millenium

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onwards. For a young cast it was helpful to use a variety of exercises to explore this range of ages and experiences in the older characters and to imagine the changes in the political landscape in differing, more personal ways, other than just researching the historical facts. This exploration of thoughts moving into actions on the text and into improvisation situations, made it clearer to them what life might have been like in the Apartheid years of the 1970s and 1980s until the first democratic election in the 1990s. Finding this context of space and place then also went inward and helped the actors find reasons to understand their characters’ deeply held views towards each other and their circumstances. We took these exercises beyond the text’s actual dialogue but these improvisations were always closely linked to themes and ideas in the play. As Berry (2001:220) says “For language is not just about making sense, it is about where it takes you”.

Application: Inner and outer landscapes (Berry 2001:220–223)

In this section I think it more interesting to rather discuss other improvisation situations and aspects of text than those on the Tristia poem, which have already been explored at some length. I adapted this exercise to become a larger improvisation, using lines from the Sorrows text but also allowing the actors to include their own responses from their characters. This was necessary as not all the characters speak in each scene of the play as there are more monologues than dialogue exchanges. To include the whole cast during these first four rehearsals flexibility was therefore desirable.

Berry (2001:220,221) suggests marking out two areas in the rehearsal room, creating separate spaces. In one of the spaces the character speaks when in the present. He/she moves to the other area when “the thoughts take you to another part of the mind, perhaps to a past experience, a philosophical viewpoint, an intuition, etc.” Moving on the shifts in thoughts creates an awareness of what the characters are thinking and feeling and how this contributes to their resulting actions. Berry says “By physicalizing these changes of thought, and hearing their different textures in this way, you…uncover things that you may not have noticed before” (Berry 2001:221).

We needed to establish a physical and emotional landscape for the characters to inhabit. The actors had to create memories and sensations of their past landscapes, dwellings and how this could re-inforce their understanding of the present they found themselves in. We began with the first of the four parts of the improvisation, visualising the Karoo home that characters Dawid and Marta grew up in. The actors marked out a large rectangle on the floor and used some chairs and a table to broadly demarcate some ‘rooms’ in the space. Each of the actors took a turn then to first speak a line or two of text from the early scenes of the play while in the opposite area, like Allison’s “My word! Nothing has changed. This is exactly as I remember it” and Marta ‘s “Every time I dusted and and swept in here I put everything back

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in its place…Nothing has changed” (Fugard 2002:5,6) and Dawid ‘s lines “I also can’t believe it. But it’s true. Dawid Olivier is finally back home” (Fugard 2002:14). Rebecca took one of her lines from later in the play when she finally chooses to speak “I’ve heard you―many times―when you thought you was alone in here. You tell me there are ghosts in here…” (Fugard 2002:41). These lines or thoughts were spoken to stimulate their thinking as individual characters about how they feel in the present moment in the play. Then they were asked to take turns in stepping into the rectangle representing the Karoo house and to walk their way through rooms that formed part of their childhood and teenage memories. They could then voice their thoughts about what they remember in this space. When something did not match up to their memory or they were unsure they first had to move away from the rectangle to the other space and then query their memory. I also fed them suggestions and questions from time to time to stimulate more responses, for instance to Rebecca: “Where and when in the house was your first playtime? What did you play with? Were you happy then? What do you remember?”

This was a quiet, thoughtful improvisation in many ways as the characters both created and found memories and had to clearly visualise potential images of the house, its rooms, its yard and atmosphere. Each one of them had a different inner view of what the house meant to them. We did not have time to work through large parts of the text and their imagined responses, so included a little of both. They had to verbalise some of what they ‘saw’ or remembered in the past in those rooms, even if it differed from character to character. They ended up staying some time in the rectangular space as they became absorbed in finding their characters’ memories. After a few lines spoken alone they could all be in the rectangle together, moving through the rooms and voicing their observations and feelings aloud. This did help to save time as we still had other spaces from the past to explore. Already, moving on the voicing of these memories made these images far more concrete and lively for the actors―than it might have been sitting around a table and simply discussing what they think the characters see. This way of working through text, improvisation and contributions from the actors at an early stage set up the conditions for an imaginative approach I feel, using voice and body to imagine space more quickly and precisely. This also influenced their understanding of blocking the scenes; not to be tied down to rigid ideas of time and place but to allow for more fluidity yet being clear on what the reality was for each character within a scene. This fed directly into my eventual visualising of the stage space.

In the second part of the improvisation we moved to the aspect of drawing, 4.3.12. This part is linked to the above discussion. Now I asked the actors to focus on the living room which is the locus of the action in most of the play. The rectangle was enlarged and the table and chairs were arranged in the middle. They walked around the table several times, swopping direction now and again, and thought about what they did at this table so many years ago;

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reading, writing, eating, playing, polishing, telling stories, being reprimanded etc. They then sat down and I provided paper and crayons and asked them to draw together, and to discuss what they remembered specifically about the room and its contents. They were also encouraged to argue with each other if they did not agree on the placing of objects and to move about in the space and imagine putting things back in order, before returning to the table and continuing with their drawing. The actors tended to go into character very soon and this led to a lively interaction in English and Afrikaans about who did what and what there was and even included the memory of Ouma and Oupa and Marta’s mother who was the housekeeper then. We did not return to speaking dialogue or sections from the text while drawing, as I felt the improvised thoughts were revealing in themselves. There was much talk about Dawid’s grandparents and how they liked the house to be and how each character felt in relation to them as the older generation. The communal drawing ended up being more detailed than what I imagined as being essential for the stage space but gave us a clear sense of the presence of the past and perhaps, what had been lost by these characters by the present time the play takes place. Memory, it was discovered is a complex thing and can be perceived differently by individuals; it all depends on your point of view. This exercise led to more questions about life in South Africa in a small Karoo town in the 1970s and early 1980s.

The third section of the improvisation went much faster and the actors responded and seemed to find images and words without undue effort. I asked the four actors to stand in the corners of the rectangular space, looking outwards. They had to take their attention out of the room and imagine the landscape and view outside the house. Each actor could be in character and comment on what they saw from their point of view. I encouraged them at first with verbal suggestions and they had to respond using words or very short phrases and to do so quickly. A whole wordscape of Karoo images was spoken, from the ordinary e.g. dust, white walls, aloes to more evocative animal and ‘township sounds’. This came in useful during later rehearsals when building elements of the soundscape for a particular scene. The sound brought some of the longer monologues more to life by supporting the images mentioned. Together the cast also developed a sense of place and belonging―or not belonging, to the Karoo house and the environment.

A further addition to the improvisation was the shift from the big Karoo home to character Marta’s family home in the coloured township. The rectangular space was made smaller and fewer chairs were put around the table. The actors walked the space to find the feeling of much less space, confinement. The room changed from living room/lounge to the kitchen. Marta and Rebecca were in character, except that Rebecca was 9 years old and the other two became a visiting aunt and friend. Questions were raised around the table about the Olivier family and jokes were made about people in the town. It became a very lively and jolly

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improvisation. Interestingly, Marta became the centre of everyone’s attention and aspects of Rebecca’s rebellious nature emerged when she did not want to go bed early and argued with her mother about staying up and watching television. Marta had to pacify her in front of the visitors and also show her authority. This pointed to the early family dynamics between the two and also resulted in some ‘jostling’ and pulling between mother and daughter that sounded very authentic. The physicality released between them resulted in more vocal spontaneity and ease than noted before in the readings. Both actresses playing Marta and Rebecca are more English speaking and this exercise helped them discover the Afrikaans side, as well as a more down to earth side to their characters. This helped them stay in touch with their countryside roots and was a useful reminder when working on scenes from the play when both women are older. Again, another layer discovered through using Berry’s exercise and adapting it.

The exercise continued the following evening as it took long to work through the above aspects. I am only going to discuss the basics as a similar outcome was achieved in awareness of outer space and inner thoughts and reactions. The space was divided into two again and now the setting was their Hillbrow flat in Johannesburg and the focus was on characters Dawid and Allison in their first year or two of marriage. Some lines were chosen from the scenes where each of them comments on the effects of the Apartheid laws and the police harassing them. Allison mentions her first look at Dawid “the very first time I saw him. The Wits’ campus in 1976―on the steps of the great hall. A huge student rally in support of the Soweto uprising.” (Fugard 2002:7). She also tells Marta “Those last years in Johannesburg weren’t easy you know, and we knew they were going to get worse. That banning order was only the beginning.” (Fugard 2002:23) and “I realised just how much fear we had lived with in South Africa…fear of the informer, fear of that knock on your door in the middle of the night” (Fugard 2002:26). Dawid explains to Marta the effect of the harassment on his writing:

Ja. I’d reached a point where I was actually asking myself that question. ‘Why bother? You know they’ll just wake you up again in the middle of the night, search the place, find the manuscript and take it away like all the other stuff they’ve looted from your life.’ (Fugard 2002:24)

They then moved through the rooms of the small flat commenting on what they saw, creating their personal milieu from this phase of their life together. The other two actresses then became policemen or security officers that questioned them in the middle of the night etc. There was a real sense of their private space being invaded and the actors imagined this quite vividly in their speaking and reactions. This was an important exploration for the actors playing Dawid and Allison; to experience this imaginatively, and helped them understand the reality of people who spoke out against Apartheid in those years and the risks they took. This

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understanding was incorporated emotionally and physically in terms of acting memory by the characters and in later sections of the play led to more mature interpretation by the actors.