Fire Face
Fire Face Rehearsal Processby Aiden Condron, Director – June ‘03
Having worked as a full time ensemble for two years in the area of
research and
development Nervousystem initiated a seven
week period of formal rehearsal beginning in mid January of this year
for it’s debut production of FIRE FACE a version of four of
W.B. Yeats’s Cuchullain plays to be performed for the first two
weeks in March at The Space at The International Bar in Dublin.
I had always been drawn to Yeats’s plays and felt that he was hugely underrated as a dramatist and man of the theatre. While the plays are not without their weaknesses they are brimming with ambition and contain a beautiful strangeness. Most importantly for me however was the fact that Yeats’s theatre is truly experimental. He wrestled with the medium and drew on all kinds of unusual influences including many great innovators of the European Avant Garde and theatre practices from the Far East to develop a stylized form incorporating mask, music, dance and drama allowing him to intensify his stage poetry.
This material offered tremendous challenges to our ensemble most notably in the area of masked performance (all of thirteen masks were designed and made by the company) but it also provided an opportunity for us to elaborate on many principals underlying Eastern Theatre practices, particularly Japanese No Gaku, Kabuki and Butoh, which we had been exploring as part of our research. I have always been very drawn toward stimulating internal impulses via strict external forms or katas in order to create more authentic inner realities or truths within the actor.The first half of each rehearsal day began with intensive physical and vocal training using various yoga techniques, plastics and exercises stimulating physical and vocal imagination. This was followed by compositional work in the afternoons comprising of exercises in Neutral Mask drawing largely on the work of Jacques Le Coque, practiced alongside the exploration of several principals developed by No Gaku theatre master Zeami, particularly the concepts of “Jo-Ha-Kyu” and “Iguise” movement.
Later in the process we made significant progress by incorporating the above with work on Psychological Gesture, a technique developed by the Russian actor/director Michael Chekov. Through Chekov’s ideas on the creation of character through the practice of expansive sculptural bodily forms to provoke inner psychic landscapes and feelings in the actor we managed to unlock a vocal and physical vocabulary of great resonance and truth. It was this vocabulary that became the building blocks of the acting score that was blended with the mise en scene and finally brought to performance.
While FIRE FACE proved to be a significant success for the company, receiving extremely good houses, positive critical responses and very good press it is only the beginning of its life. It is only now, for example, after much trial and error that we feel confident enough to refine our work with mask. The process of creating fire face allowed us merely to scratch the surface of what is only the beginning a very new and limitless endeavor. It has unlocked for the ensemble and myself enormous potentials for re-imagining Yeat’s text and the possibility of building new montages.
