Feet: More Than Just a Smell in Your Socks

When performers talk about what we do we are full of vagaries and suppositions. This is as it should be. Ours is an art of guesswork, not a bureaucracy.

When a performance starts to go wrong, when it gets blurred or off-centre or impossible to find, the problems first show up in the feet. If you are a director, always look first to the way your actors use their feet. If you are a performer, look down past your knees. Feet are antennae that receive the performance from out of the earth. This is as close to science as performing ever gets.

Put less weirdly, a performance is built quite literally upon the ground. The ground is first found and first understood by the feet. No one should rehearse wearing shoes until first their performance has been internalised. The best exercise to learn and understand the importance of bare feet is to gently roll and kick a raw egg around the stage. If this exercise is extended to include the whole cast, then fresh and unexpected intimacies will arise within the ensemble both throughout the rehearsals and throughout the run.

After rehearsing bare-foot, the first rehearsals in shoes or boots can be disorienting and sometimes distressing, but the more deeply internalised the performance, the more quickly the footwear adapts to the feet, and the more truthfully it contributes to the show for which it was meant.

I was always good at understanding this, and at seeing the faults in others, but not so good at the application. Too many of my early shows were given as though the stage was mysteriously loaded with ball-bearings and only a desperate shuffle would keep me upright. I learned many fresh and creative ways to reject the criticism this aroused.

Later, I proceeded as though wading through the boards of the floor. It was a more stately way of looking ridiculous, but it looked ridiculous just the same.

I was aware that I was doing it all wrong, I just couldn’t find the way to do it right. Gradually, however, I learned to make each step count. It was as though I stepped moment by moment into the next deep moment of the performance. The work itself began to lead me into the next step. In time I was able to run all through a forty-five minute show - or through two forty-five minute halves of a show - and never outrun it, or run away from it.   

Now I am learning to stand still. I spend ages carefully positioning microphones to capture earth-echo and the multiplicities of ambience - birds and cars and crickets and the movement of trees - and I do this so that I can place my voice in the centre of it. So that it will sound fully embodied and in place.

My early recordings were made with me running all about the place - or, at least, doing so in my head, which meant that in practice I was back to a shuffle of incompetence. The results sounded truly demented. It was as though there was a bunch of me attacking a stereo rig all at once but achieving nothing except embarrassment.

Once again, I have had to imagine my feet as antennae, but now so delicately poised that if they move out of alignment they will lose the signal. This has been a massively difficult discipline to grasp.

Zeami Motokiyo argued that a true performance must always be still in one part and simultaneously frenetic in another. This was only ever partially useful to me as I developed my performance style - I have written elsewhere about the value of traditional Australian techniques in my development - but it has always remained part of my thinking. For Zeami,  the differences of stillness and energy belonged between the arms and the legs. For me, as I adapt to the microphone, they belong between the body and the voice. From time to time, I have had once again to look down.

I have learned where my feet are. I am getting some decent sounds now.