Learning M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A.

  

Before I start, I want to say that learning 70-odd minutes of monologue is no big deal. There are plenty of other people who learn solo shows, many of which are at least an hour long, and don’t write blog posts about it. There are also many people who perform truly awe-inspiring feats of memorisation. Chao Lu  holds the world record for reciting π  to more than 67 thousand places. It took him some 24 hours. I’ve personally witnessed Oliver Senton playing Phil in The Warp  for a similar span– that was a thing to see, and that’s dialogue, which is much harder than monologue to learn.  And if those aren't sufficiently grandiloquent comparisons, then there are the oral traditions. You probably know that the epic of Gilgamesh, the Greek epic poems, the entirety of Brehon law, the Norse sagas, and many another once-memorised text surpass any modern memorisation by orders of magnitude. . . 

So, no big deal.

All the same, because I’m interested in how memorisation works, both technically and psychologically, and because people keep asking me about it, 

here goes:

LEARNING M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A

In early February 2013, I know M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. I’ve read it through several times and it flows. The words come easily to me; they’re my words. LenaKitsopoulou wrote Μ.Α.Ι.Ρ.Ο.Υ.Λ.Α, but the translation is mine. I wrote every word.

I learned the first 2 pages (10 minutes) back in Aprli 2012, not long after I finished the translation, to perform at a scratch night. That was a scratch of the text itself, really. I didn’t do any work on it besides the learning. I just wanted to observe how the language worked with an English-speaking audience, if they understood it. They did, I even got a laugh or two, which was nice.

I spent about an hour a day on it for a week, and don’t remember any difficulty, though I do remember that it prompted minor rewrites. This flows better than that, you need a different turn of phrase here in order not to skip ahead to the next time you use that phrase; that sort of thing. The only bit I remember of that process is the 555 bus.

I’d agreed to meet my son and his aunt in Keswick and the 555 bus is the simplest and prettiest, if slowest way to get there. I look out the window. “This whole concept,” I mutter, “this birth-death, happy-sad, black-white business, is it going to go on much longer?” I am looking at the mossy roots of the trees outside, the little springs that sparkle among the stones, the giddily bouncing wild rabbits. They’re part of the text now.

•           *           *

In late February, 2013, I’m learning M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. I’m in Athens. I drop my son off at his cousin’s house, and take the bus to the hospital, running lines in my head.  The show is becoming my internal monologue.

My father has just had his spleen removed. It was enormous, full of lymphoma, and excised in an institution that is best known as a maternity hospital. The surgeon is a cousin and a friend – approaching us in the waiting room where the expectant families sit, he tells us Dad was delivered of a spleen weighing only a bit less than my kid did at birth. It wasn’t easy, but it went well. Later, my brother and I go into ICU to see him. He is freshly out from under anaesthesia and incoherent. For the first time I remember he looks old, and frail. Inside my head, Mairoula waxes narcissistic about her mother’s cancer diagnosis. I’m starting to hate her.

A few days later, I have a stupid argument with my brother. The tension is getting to us, the hospital, the worry. I storm off, walk up Kifissias towards the Olympic installations, past the suburban apartment blocks, forgotten village houses  tucked among them with chickens still in the yard, the empty lots full of weeds and wildflowers. “Can’t complain,” I tell the nettles and hubcaps, the already-crumbling concrete of the Calatrava walkway “can’t complain isn’t really gratitude”. Later still, my father asks me about the show. Conscious of not telling him about the character’s Daddy issues, nor her mother’s cancer, I read him the bit about being on a ferry boat, the long and increasingly absurd list of amenities she piles up, then rejects. He laughs.  In May, when we’re cutting down the text for performance, Stella suggests cutting that bit. I refuse; in the hospital, it made my father laugh.

  
                                                      *           *          *

It’s March 2013 and I’m learning M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. Thanks to Stella, I have a version of the script that looks a lot less daunting than the huge block of text I produced. She’s divided it into scenes and I can begin to see the outlines of the structure buried beneath the verbiage like the trunk of a shrub, just discernible under the leaves.

I know the first five pretty well, so I start with scene six. I put the script on the kitchen counter, just under the window. I read the first sentence aloud, repeat it while walking away. If I forget a word or hesitate or screw up, I walk back to the script, read aloud from there, walk again. When I’ve done that a couple of times without a mistake, I add a second sentence. Five sentences takes me through the door of the annexed kitchen, through the dining room, down the hall and to my front door; ten brings me back. When I’ve done ten sentences perfectly a few times, I start a new section. In the morning, walking back from dropping my kid off at school, I run as much as I know. When it starts to take longer than the 25 minutes of a leisurely stroll back, I take detours. I try not to speak out loud where people can hear me, but sometimes a sidelong glance tells me they can.

                                                      *           *          *

It’s April 2013 and I don’t know M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A, though I know about half of it reasonably well, well enough to be getting on with. . . I don’t. Not really. In rehearsal I’ve got maybe a quarter, maybe a third then it’s rant and flail about for the next bit. I get to the end of a scene and face a mental desolation in which not a whisper of a word appears. I improvise actions. More often, I don’t. Stella gives me things to do. Moving, my body stops my brain remembering. I am the worst actor in the world.

I am entirely in awe of Stella (the Stella Duffy) and still not quite able to believe we’re here, in London, working on my show. I am trying to please. I am diffident. I am also constipated.  My digestion is as sluggish as my brain. I can’t get how three people (Leo Burtin, producing, Stella and I) can rehearse in open space, but because of D & D I love open space, so there I am. We have three days together. On the last day, my bowels awaken. The need to empty them is overpowering, and it hits me right in the middle of the morning’s rehearsal. Working in open space means that it’s cool for me to interrupt the work, explain that there’s something I have to do right then, do it, and come back. Of course I don’t do anything as sensible as that. Instead, I drag my bloated body thorough various ideas that Stella brings in, contributing no thing to the process but my endurance.

We’re working the “rock bottom” bit of the show, where Mairoula longs for the despair of her adolescence, revels in the memory of. It feels like rock bottom to me, too, but I’m not revelling. Stella gets frustrated with me. I don’t blame her, but find myself unable to tell her what’s going on.  I am certain she’s going to decide she can’t work with me after all. Who could work with the near-mute and shambling creature who’s been stumbling through the last two and a half days. I can barely endure sharing a body with her. With Aliki, I mean, though the more I think about Mairoula, the less I like her, too. She’s selfish, vain, pretentious, angry, self-involved, the kind of woman who fawns over men and ignores other women. I’ve forgotten why I ever wanted to play her.

Afterwards, lighter of body but more anxious than ever, I come back and we talk. I own up to the hero worship, and the anxiety, but not to the leaden bowels. It’s not an easy conversation, though Stella handles it with a generosity and perceptiveness I will come to know as typical. She shows no signs of wanting to abandon the project. I am giddy with relief. We’ve got one week off, then another three days in Lancaster.

In that week, rather than resume my one sentence at a time regimen, I try to learn the scenes I half-know by reciting them with the script in front of me and my eyes closed, opening them to check a particular word, or see what happens next. By the time Stella comes up to Lancaster, I know half the show. I’m desperately nervous that the next rehearsal period won’t go well. The night before we start, I invite Stella and Leo to dinner. I fret about the food, because it gives me something to fret about, but in the end it’s as pleasant a meal as I’ve ever shared.

The rehearsal period is a joy, and the exercises Stella brings in show me how to fall in love with Mairoula again. We find some physicality, some hidden structure I can rest on, we find her kindness and her acute, acerbic eye on her own follies, her flights of poetic extravagance. We find, somewhere inside me, an open-hearted warmth to give her, a tenderness for the audience that I see in Stella, and that makes everything alright. We show the first half to some friends in Lancaster, and they’re engaged and friendly. One of them saw that first extract performed the previous year “I can see how much you’ve worked on it since,’ she says, it’s changed completely.”

                                                               *           *           *

It’s May 2013 and I’m learning M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. Stella has suggested a number of cuts, as we’re trying to bring the length down to under an hour. I’ve accepted most of them, rejected a couple – one because the Greeks will get it, even if no-one else does, and one because I don’t want to lose the bit my father laughed at. I’m surprised by how quickly I get used to skipping bits of text I’ve already learned; I expected that to drive me nuts. We have a final few days of rehearsal scheduled in London, then a little over a month to rehearse on my own before we open.

In London at the end of the month, I still have my script in hand for the last 10 minutes. It makes things tricky, because this is the most physically complex part of the show. We block it as well as we can. It’s almost there. I feel good.

                                                               *            *             *

It’s June 2013, and I’m learning M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. My housemate is helping me. He’s a graphic designer and a cartoonist, so his schedule is flexible and we can run lines when I’m free. He’s also Greek, and very perceptive about language. He teaches me some of the references I didn’t get in the text, elaborates, comments. He is the perfect person to do this with; patient, knowledgeable, relentless, precise. We run lines every day. I’ve got it all, except that last little bit, which I know vaguely, but not well.

In the last three weeks of June, I have a rehearsal space booked, three times a week. I can lay out the whole playing area, run the actions with the lines. I start to learn things by what I’m doing, not saying. I start to think about how I need to be saying that there so I have time to do that and then I can say that bit right after I’ve finished doing that bit. This is the part of rehearsing I love best. There is more creative ferment earlier in the process, but it’s always shadowed by the fear that it will never come together. At this stage, you have confidence, a shape, a sense of how it will play, but there’s still room for tinkering. I have all the beautiful stuff. The dress, and the rug and the wonderful sofa. Nerissa comes to watch a run. It's the first time anyone's seen it without me holding a script at some point or another. She's concerned about the sweat stains showing. She's right, as usual.

On the days I don’t have the space booked, I take long walks. It’s a beautiful time of year. I gather elder blossoms from the trees by the canal, I wander down into the marshy ground between the canal and the allotments, declaiming a very Greek text to the vivid English leaves. My boots are muddy. I am a study in exhilaration.

                                                          *            *             *

The show went well. One night in Lancaster and a film to show for it, a film which will form the centrepiece of our attempt to book a tour. I spend the summer running the show every day in my head. Back home in Greece, I run it swimming in the sea, the show’s length perfect for my morning workout – breast stroke out, freestyle back. Soon, I start to stumble, and by the end of the holiday I’ve given up. I’ll learn it again when we have dates. 

Tour booking, it turns out, is more complex than we knew. Months pass, and then more, and then hope appears. Her name is Claire and she’s booking the tour right now. Send her an email.

It’s February 2014, and I’m performing M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A again in less than two months. I'm scared, so I wrote to Stella and got the loveliest response. This morning, I went down to the cellar, opened one of the two suitcases where I keep the show, and took out the script; it’s the first time I’ve seen it since July,

It’s February 2014, and I’m learning M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A.

Improvisation Workshops: Week 1

I’d planned some ice-breaking exercises and group complicity building ones, and I had to adjust slightly as we were only four, that first time. All the same, we were fairly representative of the mix of participants I expect to be getting. We had H, who’s never done any improvising or performing before, G who studied theatre in university and does a lot of improvising as a musician, and M and myself who have studied theatre and take workshops every chance we get, but are not expert improvisers.
After a very basic physical warmup, we stayed standing in a circle (well, square) and tried a couple of exercises that I’ve done in so many workshops that I’ve got no idea whose practice they come from originally.



Throwing an invisible ball : Group

In this exercise, players stand in a circle. One player mimes holding an invisible ball, and, by eye-contact alone, signals to which other player she is intending to throw it. Once the other player is ready to receive, the ball is thrown and caught. The player who has received the imaginary ball makes eye contact with a new person and the process repeats until everyone has thrown and received the imaginary ball.

Comments

This is a great game for starting to work on complicity, and I’ve seen it played, by a large group, for over 10 minutes. Because there were so few of us, and because I was keen to stress the fun, rather than the discipline of the game, we moved on very quickly to a variation. Too quickly, I now think.

Throwing an invisible ball, variation

As before, only this time the ball changes after being caught. Thrown and caught as a baseball, it might be thrown again as a basketball, a ping pong ball, a hockey puck, whatever. It’s not about being explicit in miming the new ball, it’s about the conviction with which you imagine the new ball.

Comments

We had fun with this, but, in retrospect, we were being pretty slapdash and slapstick about it. I want to try both these exercises in a more focused way, concentrating on the imagining of it and on keeping the communication minimal. I suspect, as well as working more directly on the skills we need to develop, that this would be more fun.



Packing my suitcase: Group

This is a verbal game, it’s about imagination and memory. The first player begins by saying “I’m packing my suitcase, and I’m taking” or words to that effect, then naming an object that starts with the letter “A”.

EX: I’m packing my suitcase, and I’m taking an ant farm.

The second player repeats the first player’s sentence, adding something that begins with the letter “B”.

EX: I’m packing my suitcase and I’m taking an ant farm and some bluebells.

The game continues around the circle, the list of things packed getting ever longer until the letter “Z” is reached.

Comments

The idea, as with all improvisation games of this type is to not leave players enough time to come up with something clever or original, but to have them say the first thing that comes into their minds. We didn’t always manage to keeep it at this speed, but one indication that we got it sometimes was the “Foo-foo machine” packed by H. We all loved the Foo-foo machine and I’m plotting ways to use it again.

Packing my suitcase, variation

Because I tend to work too much from the head, I didn’t want this to just be a talking game, but one in which the whole body was involved. So, I added an illustrative gesture to each alphabetical object.

Comments

The gestures were a lot of fun, but they got pretty sloppy pretty fast. We were much better at remembering words than gestures.



One word, one step: Pairs

This is an exercise I remember from my undergraduate study at UCLAN. The partners alternate in making a story together by speaking one word each. At the same time, they walk through the space, taking one step for each word spoken. They are not to walk without speaking or speak without walking.

Comments

I guess it’s about building complicity again, and about restricting the opportunities for being clever. You can’t think too far ahead, and you can’t duck the responsibility of coming up with something. Because the something is so small, a single word, the responsibility is small enough for even the newest improviser.
Because I only had thee participants, I was in one of the two pairs, so don’t have much in the way of observation to add. U think the exercise helped in the evening’s overall goal of short-circuiting the “I look/sound so silly” reflex that inhibits new performers.



Giving/receiving a gift: Pairs

This is a Keith Johnstone exercise, from Impro for Storytellers. One partner mimes giving a gift, the other receives it, with pleasure, naming the gift as the take it. For me, one of the crucial things about such exercises is that participants should be encouraged to imagine the gift as vividly as they can, but not to go out of their way to establish it with mime. The giver provides a gesture which is the impetus for the receiver to name the gift; they create it together.
EX: A approaches B, arm loosely up in the air, fingers bunched. Perhaps she is imagining a balloon on a string, or holding a giant by his thumbnail. He extends the arm towards B, who, following an imaginary line up from A’s hand exclaims, delightedly: “A llama, thank you!”

Comments

Johnstone has several variations of this exercise and we moved among them pretty chaotically, again, in part because I had to form half a pair. I want to go back to it, concentrating on the different ways the gift can be established and negotiated. Even with the half attention I was able to spare the others, it seemed to me that our energy was all over the place instead of focused within a given pair, so I decided to apply the granddaddy of pairwork complicity exercises.



The mirror game: Pairs

If you’ve ever taken an acting class, you’ve probably played the mirror game. I don’t know who used it first and I don’t remember ever not knowing it. A and B face each other, palms outspread and held to either side of their face and slightly forward, as if rested on a mirror. There should be a few inches of space between the palms. A begins to move, slowly, B to copy her as close in time as she can, to achieve the illusion of a mirror. Once a pair is working well, they can trade who leads and who follows back and forth in silent communication, their movements can become more extravagant.
The mirror game, variation
A pair with good complicity can move quite far apart and remain each other’s mirrors. I’ve even seen people mirror each other standing side to side, with only the barest of peripheral vision to work from.

Comments

Peripheral vision is the key to this game, along with a kind of openness. It’s about picking up all the hundreds of tiny cues that your partner’s body is constantly giving off about its intensions and responding to them without consciously processing. Similar things must happen in a fight, or a sparring bout.
We did this for only a short period of time, and I didn’t really enforce the discipline of it. Next time well do it for longer, and in absolute silence. I want to get to the place where neither in the pair is certain who’s leading, where the cooperation of it and the competition of it are seamless, and equally playful.



Many storytellers, one acter-out

This is another exercise I remember from my first year at UCLAN and don’t know the provenance of. The group collaborate to tell a story, and one member has to act it out as they go along.


Comments

I wanted to finish with an exercise where everybody was working together, and we had fun with this. A larger group might have had a broader imagination to draw on, certainly we got a bit bored by the time the last person performed.
This is an exercise I should have reviewed before trying it. It’s only in writing it up that I’ve seen what it was about. The joy of it lies in the group trying to wrongfoot the soloist, and in the soloist’s ingenuity in depicting the impossible. I’ll stress that next time, and derail the attempts of the participants to have the story “make sense”.