During the rehearsal process consideration of St. Marks train station would be a difficult aspect of the sites history to incorporate into performance. Firstly, using hand signals in the performance incorporated the train station into our piece as this method of signalling is now obsolete though would have been used in the early stages of the stations history. The second means of communicating the train stations existence is through the performer’s physicality. This concept led to influence being drawn from Vsevolod Meyerhold’s work on biomechanics. A representation of a physical objects impact on culture and society is difficult to present. As Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright describe Meyerhold’s work as:
A style of acting in which theatre rhetoric was replaced with a ‘light and unforced’ delivery- ‘the exterior calm that conceals volcanic emotions’- and by mime and improvisation; character and relationships were established not by words alone but by ‘gestures, poses, glances and silences’, with speech and movement not necessarily coinciding.(2001, P.347)
Our performance relied heavily on the physical presentation of the performers, with several schools of thought and aspects of history needing to be portrayed, a minimal amount of speech had to be employed. As giving verbal explanation to one aspect of the research would require the same level of expression devoted to other aspects of the sites history or the overall meaning may have been lost. If speech is used evenly to communicate all the historical research discovered about the site the performance would result in being to reliant on that speech, resulting in a performance closer to a lecture on the sites history than a performance, therefore a choice few lines and the dates of historical changes on the site were the only verbal communications used in performance.
This consideration furthered the importance of Meyerhold’s use of gestures and posses to establish characters and relationships. The physicality of ritual and religion proved easy enough to begin rehearsing but the representation of the train station was a harder task. A method of physically representing the train station that seemed effective was to break down the body’s movements into ‘mechanical’ sections. Reducing simple or complicated tasks to separate stages of movement presented the complexities of the human body’s construction. This was in effort of creating a parallel to the complex machinery required to construct a train or the large turntables that were located in the same space as Homebase.
Works Cited
Eyre, Richard. Wright, Nicholas. Changing Stages, A View of British Theatre in the Twentieth Century, 2001.Bloomsbury Publishing:London.