Movement Directing and Shakespeare

I walked through a town celebrating Shakespeare’s birthday last week. Everywhere young people, young men, children holding fresh spring flowers… I was stopped in my tracks at this sight. It was so unexpected, festive and pagan - two essentials for community rituals. I have been movement directing an intimate portrayal, an imagining of the family life of the Shakespeares. My movement life on this project has been full of births, love, illness, dying, domestic tasks, caring, tending, nursing, delivering babies, living as a twin, dancing, undressing, dressing, flying, falconry, bee keeping, being a Londoner, dying. This family’s physical lives have become very vivid and very real. It’s like their movement moves through you - it moves through me. Words like visceral and sensual will be used about this production by those who see it. And it has been both of those as a movement director - it has also been a labour, a joyful celebration of graft…which sounds a lot like ‘craft’.

It gave me a moment to reflect on the way that each of the plays (ten) that I have movement directed by Shakespeare has offered a unique set of creative challenges; and also a wondrous deep plunge into a playwright whose words are flow, metaphor, poetry, experience. A type of music of lived experience. There is a lot of noise around this writer and the first step is to still those voices so your/my body can listen and feel the proposition. His language expresses the body unlike any other playwright I know. Beyond the words are the actions suggested; these wide open terrains of dancing, rituals, battles, storms, magic, vanishings, substitutions, incantations, deaths, masques - an invite for the potential of theatre and potential of bodies in movement to lead us into events where bodies speak to bodies. Spoken language fails to wholly capture lived experience. As a movement director my attention of course goes to the written language, but equally to these other potent spaces - I always do a humoral reading to get me there.

And I also dwell, like a movement anthropologist or a collector of movement memories/images - on a 21st Century snapshot of full adolescent physical awkwardness and lovingly gathered spring flowers - standing in line to honour Will. Body, community and ritual at the heart of it.

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Photo above: Hamnet 2023 with Madeleine Mantock and Tom Varey Photo by Manuel Harlan @RSC

King John (2012), Romeo and Juliet (2018), Merry Wives of Windsor (2012), Othello (2017), As You Like It (2013), Richard III (2012), As You Like It (2019), Much Ado About Nothing (2014), Measure for Measure (2011), Macbeth (2007).

Please see each production page for full production and photo credits

As You Like It 2013

King John 2012

Othello 2017

Romeo and Juliet 2018

Richard III 2012

Measure for Measure 2011

As You Like It 2019

As You Like It 2013

Much Ado About Nothing 2014

Macbeth 2007

Merry Wives of Windsor 2012

Movement Directing and Endorphins

‘caring activities are associated with important neurochemical rewards. The feelings of calm and contentment that accompany nurture have benefits for giver and receiver alike and there are obvious evolutionary reasons why this should be so’ The Well Gardened Mind by Sue Stuart-Smith page 35

You can’t movement direct Romeo and Juliet without really immersing yourself in love; in what it feels like in our bodies, what is the fall of falling in love - the wide-armed dropping abandonment of falling forward into the unknown, or the breath fuelled dizziness of careering forward, or your sight blurring to gently wash away others and only see/hear/remember your beloved. Our physiological states as humans in love are turbo charged with a flood of hormones. Oxytocin fuels bonding and 20 different kinds of endorphins, flood our beings with feelings of euphoria, dampening stress and pain, we synchronise our breath, on a cellular level our heart cells yearn towards mutuality, and achieve it, our brains repattern, our temperature changes - I mean humans are really built to love and care and consummate… but that is the beauty of bodies in Shakespeare is that he shows us love in action and then allows us to fill in the space of a night of love and discovery…The bodily - ness of love we all know that and we also all know the heart and gut wrenching ness of it’s absence….and you can’t movement direct Romeo and Juliet without immersing yourself in violence….the cycles of invasion and hurt and damage meted out between clans, from leaders to their people, from parents to children, from husbands to wives, from young person to young person.

The action and understanding of hormones, that is so effortlessly present in the language and metaphors of the language of the play offer a route to the body as a site of passionate experience. So the movement director does a hop, step, jump. From the language (especially if you can do a humoral reading) hop to the actuality of the body in all its corporeality and physiological changes, step into translating that into action or doing or verbs, and jump into feeding that into ‘concrete doable things’ (my own mantra) for actors in rooms as they move, accumulating vocabularies and experiences that feed the vitality of their performance work.

I set out to write about an idea that left me dazzled. I have to go sideways to go forwards. I love my little garden, and was wondering why ….so I attended a lock down lecture on gardening where the speaker suggested that any act of caring - for a garden, a child, pets, chums, neighbours, parents, oneself, seedlings had hormonal rewards - specifically beta endorphins. And movement directors have intuited for a very long time that warming up and bonding as a company was a pretext to soak us all in oxytocin from day one of rehearsal. A slow thought - that complicity -that is so so important in creating a healthy, playful and free rehearsal environment- might actually be endorphin-fuelled care for each other in our vivid but temporary theatre communities.

So next time a movement director says ….’let me run a little warm up session to get us going’….say ‘yes’ in the full knowledge that s/he/they has done her/his/their homework on the biological and movement basis of her/his/their offer. And they might have read a fair amount of neuroscientific theory that helps to build a bridge towards feeling and behaviour and imagination. And that her/his/their little warm up might be a light disguise and actually be the seed of the driving dynamics of love and violence for example, but also essential to the caring ensemble in which performers can relish being a body with other bodies relishing being bodies.

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The Well Gardened Mind by Sue Stuart-Smith in a Lecture hosted by Brockwell Part Community Greenhouses

https://www.brockwellgreenhouses.org.uk

Photo from a movement session during rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet with brilliant actors moving and laughing, fantastic MD and AD and ASM supporting the room and photo credit to a wonderful photographer with a brilliant eye for process ( see theatre page for full credits)

Movement Directing and uncertainty

I have been - like many theatre workers - mourning all the projects that were en route on the day that theatres were closed. I was in a rehearsal room - one that had been incredibly rich, creative and driven. The last afternoon was fraught - with all of us finding it hard to keep going as the accumulating energy from Europe was buffeting this company. We hailed from all over….lockdown in Italy, Spain, Germany had artistic and domestic implications for collaborators. It was a Monday and travelling home, I was fortunate enough to be with a director who I hadn’t seen in a while so we were together when an hour later we checked facebook for the news of cancelled shows. My As You Like It Company were due to play that evening on their regional tour. So on March 16th 2020, I scampered out of a rehearsal room with all my stuff in that room ready for the next rehearsal. Weirdly I often think of my beautiful research books sitting quietly gathering dust, bits of clothing, a water bottle, pencils, post its - sitting next to my little perch that I shared with a wonderful assistant movement director - and I still find it really hard not to well up at the thought of that little imagined still life of redundant and abandoned rehearsal room life. There is a story for every theatre worker on that day.

The ensuing weeks was a series of plans toppling, crumbling and landing in dust - the nuance between cancelled and postponed became critical. My agent called to say Chichester have cancelled The Village Bike, ( stomach lurch and mourning for the potential of a new creative relationship with Nicole Charles). I want to call her and then I desist because I feel sad and shy. The week of R&D with Dante or Die to return to a project that I have found completely revelatory…and here I mourn for the ex prisoners whose stories were at the centre of that week, I mourn for the student assistant movement director who was so excited to observe and learn….and then there was the opening night of Europeana….we were a whisker away from the premiere of an extraordinary piece of work tracking a full century of ‘progress’ full of movement and song and humanity. That work will happen one day, but when and how are embedded in hope and in the kinship of that company and the resilience of Maria Aberg.

I saw that company many times subsequently and with a group of actors we continued to meet on Zoom for a movement session all through the months that followed.

That hour saved me.

Maybe that is overstating it - it is the hour that let me feel like a movement director. All of us moving ‘together’ in readiness for a future date. It was as together as we could be and we did always emerge centred and connected even though I was desperate to hear their breath and to be in the presence of their full bodies…I missed seeing their legs and hearing their breath the most…. Embracing all the making ‘do’ and ‘it will do until we can be together again’….is heartbreaking and funny at the same time. Embracing and loving imperfection is what I love about movement with actors….and we are really really good at imagining …’ as you place your fore head to the floor imagine me adding a tiny weight on your sacrum and the back of your head, with that weight your spine would lengthen and open”….or ‘glance to your right shoulder and locate one of the ensemble - know who is standing next to you on each side’…we are masters of feeling and imagining and every lock down session has been fuelled by both. I was lucky I knew everyone’s tendencies really well as we had moved together for hours since January, so it was incumbent on me not to fritter away our embodied memories and experiences. It was however a process of constantly filling in the gaps like being present in three times zones simultaneously - a live movement session with live memory and an enth of connection built through the screen - I learnt though that I had to always bring the best energy that I had and I had to care for them and their actuality, and that we had to reach our finger tips and breath to the its most expansive and generous capacity.

I now sit on the cusp of going back into new creative relationships whilst holding on tightly to those that have weathered the uncertainty