Repertoire Revisited - Filling The Voice

Theatre is a place where you can sometimes meet yourself coming the other way.

I have been re-rehearsing Genesis to prepare it for recording. This show last saw the stage a year and a half ago, and has always worked well. But now it must come to strike the ear with the same impact that it originally struck the ear and the eye together. Every creative decision I made in in the past must be made again. Every chance to fail has been revived, like a cloned velociraptor, and there is nothing to hide behind.

The pared-down body-and-voice performances that I developed in Perth in the late ‘90s and took out onto the road from the turn of the century had their origin in the yarn sessions I witnessed as a small boy among the Communists and Unionists on the south coast of WA. The men that made up these groups were all intelligent, often much more intelligent than their day-to-day society but, without exception, they had chosen to trust their emotions, and in particular rancour and aggrievement, rather than their brains and their imaginations. They drew their energy from these feelings, and this energy extruded into grand and extravagant narratives. Taken word by word they were not so special but married to the tonalities of voice and the extremities of gesture that each man could reach they became something unique. This style of story-telling is, in my view, the only genuinely original art of Settlement-era Australia. It is an authentic folk theatre and capable of extraordinary sophistication.

Genesis was the first of my shows in which I trusted myself fully to this tradition. I had been in Bamawm, in northern Victoria, and had overheard two dairy farmers in casual conversation. One of them was talking about a tiger snake that had been sleeping on the separator, and which had scared him. The farmer was built like a soccer ball with a baseball for a head. Short, slow and globular. Yet, for a moment he became the snake and the transformation was so brilliant that I could barely move. This was mime of a very high order, but quite unlike anything I had ever seen in a theatre. It was like hearing the Australian accent for the very first time after having lived here all my life. This man was a brilliant artist in a style that I wanted for myself. I found that the seeds of the style were already deep in my own flesh, having been picked up from those gatherings of working men in my childhood. It took effort and daring, but I found that I was able to marry it to the text work that I was already performing. The results were electric. Applied to the opening chapters of Genesis, a stodgy series of liturgies and half-sketched myths suddenly became filled with fire. The comedy, which lurks so close to the surface of The Bible, and yet which is so often repressed in translation, suddenly burst free. The logic of the whole became clear - despite initial appearances that there was no logic, merely an anthology of sketches strung on a timeline of convenience.

Up until this point, I had striven to present a text as faithfully as possible. Now, there was freedom to let the text become series of boundary points within which the performance could play. The language itself became rich and playful - the rhythm and tempo became integrated more deeply into the moods of the audience, and the vernacular made itself felt more emphatically. Surprisingly, the textures of Renaissance English on the one hand and the Modern Australian Vernacular on the other go together brilliantly. In jazz terms, they make a great groove. I was also otherwise able to develop movement and voice to allow improvisations of dynamic whilst retaining the formal constraints of a chosen text.

All this was a natural outgrowth of a persistent following through of our folk theatre techniques - techniques which the urban stage ignores, and usually derides if it stumbles upon them. Casual and wonderful performances are available all throughout the regions, if you know to look out for them. If I was ever to return to the production of formal plays, I would love to incorporate these techniques into performances of Aristophanes and Jonson.

It has become necessary for health reasons to adapt my work for the microphone. This is not so as to create a transcription of a performance, but to create a performance that is indigenous to recording, and yet is derived from authentic folk style. Plein-air recordings using the stereo effects of WWII period radio broadcasts will go a long way to giving the sense of a body in space. This will counteract the ‘fleshless voice‘ effect of the average talking book. The rest comes down to re-imagining the physical materials of my performance. I have to stop myself gesturing toward the microphones, for example. Not only do my hands make a baffle, but the energy is wasted which might otherwise be used to create tonic and timing effects that would be of some artistic use.

The first step has been to regain fluency in the text. I always learn texts as syllable units rather than as meanings. I rely upon muscle-memory in the same way that a musician does. A run-through at four to five times normal pace keeps the text firmly in place. I find that it is best to do this whilst doing something else as well - the dishes, for example, or tidying the car. This is nothing more than a variation on the technique that Olivier advocated for the RSC. More importantly, it keeps the imagination free to interact with the sounds in front of an audience and turn them into words. For my present purposes, it means that I can be recording engineer and performer at the same time.

Performance of any kind is firstly a matter of managing energy. This is why it is so important to learn how to breathe. So few Australian performers - regardless of their speciality - engage with this. The exceptions are those who also practice yoga or tai ch’i, and even so, few of them integrate the discipline of the one into the other. Breath is the actuality of energy - emotions and ideas are no more than canals: useless without the energy to fill them. Disciplined breathing fills the voice, and it is from this that the performance comes. This is often overlooked when reviewing folk-based styles. The styles themselves seem too simple to contain complex disciplines. Instead, it is more attractive to look for crudities of speech, gesture or pitch delivery and then assign value to them. But all folk performances are disciplined. Their studied derivatives do not make the discipline an add-on. The discipline comes first . Anyone who has listened carefully to Bob Dylan or Hank Williams will already know this.

All this past week I have been running text, picking up the places where I have relied in the past upon physicalisation, and searching for ways to channel that energy through breath back into the voice to recreate the original impact.

At every turn, I met myself coming the other way. But I was nice about it. I stopped to wave.