Monday 15 July 2013

Culture PL. Online Magazine promoting Polish Culture Abroad





Hello All,


I have been contacted by Culture PL regarding my blog which refers to the work of Tadeusz Kantor and his influences on my own practice. Please see the link before to find out more about their work.


Culture.pl, the online magazine promoting Polish culture abroad, run by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and funded by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Poland.


(http://www.culture.pl/web/english/resources-visual-arts-full-page/-/eo_event_asset_publisher/eAN5/content/tadeusz-kantor).

Sunday 14 July 2013

CInderella PDF Ebook available for purchase from today

Dear friends
As you will be aware if you are a regular visit to this blog - I don't often update this now as I am focused on writing my latest blog, started in January - A Life in Theatre- Towards the Simple and The Sacred http://carolepluckrosealifeintheatre2013.blogspot.co.uk/

I wanted to update here today to let you know that if you read regularly and would benefit from a copy of the whole blog with the whole story of putting a new musical/pantomie together - in one ebook PDF - its now published. All you need to do is to send a paypal payment  of £8 ($12) marked - "Cinderella Blog book" to carole@arctheatre.com and I will send you the PDF by return. 

Thank you! And all good wishes.




Sunday 9 June 2013

Curiosity and my other blog!

Good morning!
I am posting on here - which I haven't done for some time out of a deepening curiosity about two questions. One - what draws people to still check in with this blog as I rarely update it now? Secondly why is Poland still the biggest readership? I am in competition with myself too as this Cinderella blog usually does more daily pageviews than my current blog - which niggles my current blog! (get over it I say!)

http://carolepluckrosealifeintheatre2013.blogspot.co.uk/

I have to admit that I am having much the same reaction to this competition as I do to past pieces of made theatre. Namely when I am in the throws of making a new work - I believe its the best I have ever done, indeed I am passionately in love with it. Until I am not. And then I disregard it and bugger off to the next focus of my artistic and creative attention! Sorry - that sounds so harsh and callous - and I guess it is really. Don't get me wrong I look back on this blog and the whole experience of making Cinderella with huge love and affection and a good degree of nostalgia. But its done for me - and it was great, excellent even, but supremely flawed and human too as ever. Like me I guess. So why is that each time I start afresh with a new production I still have the innocent belief that this will be the magic one - the perfect one? - mmm
guess that's the mystery and the beauty of it all. Maybe I won't even attempt to answer that one.

But hey - if you are one of the many page viewers, especially those of you from my soul land Poland - why don't you pop next door and visit me at my current blog - you would be most welcome. I'll even put the kettle on!




Friday 12 April 2013

Loss and Gain


Hello All,

I had an intensely creative and demanding day yesterday downloading the material I gathered in Poland for a series of new projects, along with those we have already been working on. 

The day started in the most extraordinary way though. Arriving at the office at our Malthouse Studios I picked up a message from a colleague to ask me if we are a registered charity as she had a cheque for a substantial amount of money coming our way. 
I have always wondered what that Lottery winner call would be like, and for a moment I had it. Not, I must add that the amount we are talking about is going to fund Arc in perpetuity! I wish. But its arrival on a day of creative planning and idea development was uncanny. It gave me that feeling of wonder that often accompanies unexpected moments of synchronicity or apparent magic. We most often disregard the power of these moments which demonstrate so clearly that however much we believe we are in control, its a far reaching illusion. It reminds me of that famous Tibetan proverb 'Life happens when you are busy planning other things'. I have always liked that, and indeed that's exactly what happened yesterday.

The sweetness of this money, which I will talk about more when its official, is that it comes at a time when we have suffered two losses with projects. This happens when you run a business all the time of course, but some cause greater pain than others. As some of you will know we had a fantastic time making and producing the 2012 pantomime Cinderella for the Broadway Theatre, making a profit for the first time and getting wonderful reviews and audience response. The project captured our souls and hearts and all those who worked on it brought themselves fully to it, for which I will always be grateful. Many of them will work together and with us again in the future I have no doubt.

For me the special ingredient in that project was love. And it exuded from every pore, the team, the audience and it warmed the theatre. Sadly we heard last week that did not win the business for the 2013 pantomime at the Broadway. Our initial reaction was one of utter shock and disbelief and then disappointment, anger and pain. Of course we understand that the powers that be have their reasons, and that there are always many perspectives and competing factors on decisions such as this, some of which we can imagine. Of course painful as it is we do wish them well as we care deeply about the future of the theatre but for the time being we need to move on. 

Interestingly the grief of the loss of this project also passed quite quickly. As I have so often experienced in moments of letting go, a revelation lies underneath that propels you even further ahead into new territories that were previously unimagined. You thought you were going in one direction, and you had set your boat with commitment on that course, to suddenly find that something happens that demands a change. The magic is that that very change can quickly transform from loss to gain, as the arrival of the unexpected money does for us right now. This money allows one of our project ideas to be realised without the need to fundraise for it. How magical is that? I feel like a big thank you to the universe is in order here! Thank you universe.

As I met with another colleague from Children's Services at the council in the small rather messy gap area at our studios, we could hear the efforts of a young singer, Olivia filling the space as she rehearsed a song with Phil who is now Arc's Director of Music. The sheer joy, hard work, mistakes and tries again permeated the walls as my colleague from Education and I talked about the essential nature of the arts for all children. It was electric and living example of the power of music to raise the spirit and and touch the soul. 

This ignorant government in their wisdom, and Michael Gove specifically appears to have no appreciation or understanding of the glue that the arts bring to society, that they are a fundamental part of humanity. His new curriculum virtually exiles them from children's participation and learning. He does this at his peril. 

I believe that we must join together and take this on, or our children will potentially be impoverished and lose the joys and pains of a life understood through art, music, drama and poetry. Of course that is the fear, but underneath it also lies its opposite. Art is defiant, beautiful, soaring, soulful, smelly and ugly too at times, and it will weave its way with stealth into every life one way or another.The dangers of course in this type of political regime is that it also weaves its way in as a subtle means of control of people, as in soviet times. More on this later probably.

An exhausting but fruitful day, including listening to a wonderful song and half a song that Phil and Olly have written together that makes your heart leap! All will be well.

I am going to take a blog holiday now for a few days to digest and reflect on the huge creative inputs of the past week. Might take myself off to Abbotswick.

Until then.

Have a good one.

Sunday 31 March 2013

April 8th - My Actors workshop with Teatru Arka in Wroclaw!

Teatru Arka: The Temple. Dybuk - Jewish Legends

Dzien dobry!



Good morning to you all!

Turning now to the title of today's blog. Some of you may remember way back in January I became exercised by the fact that this Cinderella Blog was  getting a high level of visits even though the project was finished. 

But more than that at least 70% are coming from Poland. I am still curious about this. I have spoken to a few Polish people about it including a lovely woman called Marta who does a mean holistic massage at the Zen Health Spa in Notting Hill. She told me without much hesitation that she believed Polish people would be reading it because of hope. Hope to come to the UK maybe to improve their lives economically, hope because we have the funding and resources (!) to make theatre in the UK and its virtually impossible to get funding now in Poland, a country well known for its experimental theatre and some of the greatest 20th century directors.

Marta's may be a helpful hypothesis, plus Pradeep's suggestion that it might be used as a case study by students. 

In any event it prompted me some weeks ago to further my conversation with my friend Maciej (was a fellow actor with me in Triple Action Theatre) in Wroclaw. After our great catch up SKYPE conversation I decided to book a trip to Poland, to see if I can get a feel for things there and get a sense of what's happening artistically and socially for myself.

Teatru Arka: Edyta Stein
I am so excited about the news I got yesterday from Maciej that I have been invited to lead a workshop at Teatru Arka  (love the synchronicity of this - a company with the same name as ours!). Indeed Maciej was off to see their new show last night at teatrarka.pl

I have yet to get more details of Arka's work. I hope to speak to Anna, their Artistic Director this week before I head over to Poland in early April. 

I will be leading a workshop called The Soulful Actor on April 8th which will be a practical and physical exploration of the beginning of creating character through archetypes. I will invite actors to enter the imaginal space to work both on their own imaginative skills development and their emotional and spatial connection with each other in an ensemble. 

This is an entirely new workshop project in which I hope to develop a laboratory approach to exploration of the actor's work outside the pressures of putting a show together. I know I have a lot to learn and I am very excited to use this opportunity to experiment with actors in Poland,  a country and theatre which very much influenced my professional career as a young actor in the eighties. 

If you are interested in attending this workshop in Wroclaw on April 8th 10am - 2pm please email me asap carole@arctheatre.com

I also plan to run The Soulful Actor as a four-day laboratory programme for professional and emerging actors in the August Bank Holiday week at our studios at Arc, and will post more information about this when I get back from Poland. 

Have a good Easter Sunday.



nb: new header photo ©Theresa Snooks for Arc Theatre







Tuesday 12 March 2013

Kristin Linklater's list of Voice Dos and Donts


(From today's blog: A Life in Theatre: Towards the Simple and the Sacred

http://carolepluckrosealifeintheatre2013.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/kristin-linklaters-list-of-vocal-dos.html) 

Good Morning!  

Oooh its very cold this morning, and I can't find my scarf. Not good to set off the day walking in the bitter cold without having something warm around your neck! My mum would nag - and she will!  And to boot, the day I had planned has been cancelled! I was due to spend some time visiting an unusual hospital in Kent for the NHS project we are currently developing. Its a shame, especially as it means that I now have to confront a complicated grant application today that I have been putting off! 

Cicely Berry
Since starting this blog at the beginning of January I have written a lot about theatre practitioners whose work has influenced me, from Brook, Grotowski, Steve Rumbelow to my early drama teachers Joyce Ashton and Jenny Evans. 

When it comes to voice training I am a great fan of Cicely Berry's work as voice coach with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her books are excellent practical work books for the actor, which I have used consistently over my years as an actor and director. If you don't already know them her books include: 

Voice and the Actor (1973)
Your Voice and How to Use It
The Actor and his Text
Text in Action

Word Play: A Textual Handbook for Directors and Actors

My personal voice inspiration though since I was a student is Kristin Linklater. Kristin is a is a Scottish vocal coach, dialect coach, acting teacher, actor, theatre director and author. I have never met her but I feel as if I have! 
She is currently Head of Acting in the Theatre Arts Division of Columbia University. Her book Freeing the Natural Voice is my bible for voice. Its among those 10 or so seminal and  precious books that have been my companions throughout my career, and to which I turn for a chat, refreshment and inspiration.So I thought I would share Kristin's list of vocal Dos and Don'ts this morning which are fundamental for actors and directors. Enjoy!

'Know your voice—it's strong, it's sensitive, it's resilient, and it's you, so be good to it' 


Dos for the Healthy Voice

  • Do get lots of sleep. Rest relieves the vocal cords, for obvious reasons.
  • Do try to persuade your director not to set your play in a sandpit. Sand can seriously mess with your voice.
  • Do a 20-to-60-minute voice and body warm-up as close as possible to the start of every rehearsal and performance. A long, slow warm-up in the morning and a short, quick one in the evening work well.
  • Do fall in love with your breathing. It's you. It's your emotions. It's your voice. It's not a machine.
  • Do open your body down to your pelvis, into your belly, and round to your back for many deep-down enjoyable sighs.
  • Do pant loosely, often, and happily, like a puppy. This is to awaken your breath.
  • Do yawn a lot. The idea here is to open your throat—and smile as you yawn.
  • Do stretch the middle of your tongue out of your mouth, placing the tip of the tongue down behind your bottom teeth.
  • Do laugh out loud, and do cry if you feel like it. If you feel like it a lot, set the alarm and give yourself a deadline to stop and do something else.
  • Do sing in the shower. Singing is good, helpful. Join a choral group for weekly singing.
  • Do practice tongue twisters.
  • Do lie on the floor and whisper all of your text to yourself before each rehearsal and performance. The point is to relax and let thoughts be freely in touch with your breath.
  • Do drink plenty of water. One of the many reasons is that water reduces the viscosity of mucus, making it thinner and less likely to adhere to the vocal folds and interfere with movement. If you are using a decongestant medication, be sure to drink lots of water, as decongestants will dry out your tissues.
  • Do consider mucus helpful. Regard phlegm as a friend. You don't want to strip the folds entirely of mucus, because it does lubricate. Eat fruit, because mild acid helps clear phlegm. Also, fruit adds a bit of natural sugar energy.
Don'ts for the Healthy Voice

  • Don't smoke. Smoking is bad for your vocal cords and your lungs. It also tranquilizes your emotions, so it's bad for the art of theater.
  • Don't drink alcohol of any kind. Alcohol acts as a diuretic and can dehydrate you. It also interferes with your liver's ability to filter germs. If you do drink any alcohol, follow up with lots of water.
  • Don't drink caffeinated drinks. A caffeinated drink will act as a diuretic. If you do drink them, follow up with water.
  • Don't stay up late. When you do, it often means shouting over the noise in a bar.
  • Don't spend your afternoon yelling at a football match or the like. This is a temptation, especially during championship seasons.
  • Don't do imitation Broadway belting at a karaoke bar.
  • Don't eat chocolate or cheese. These foodstuffs are particularly harmful to the vocal cords.
  • Don't drink milk before a show. See previous "don't" for the effect on the vocal cords.

Do's and Don'ts for the Afflicted Voice

  • Do, if you strain your voice, hydrate, hydrate, hydrate.
  • Do get lots of sleep. Rest is an obvious tonic.
  • Do hum gently in whatever clear bit of your voice you can find. Lip trill like a baby up and down your range.
  • Do relax. Get a massage.
  • Do, if you have to perform, rely more than usual on clear articulation. The sore throat that comes with a cold will not necessarily affect your vocal folds. You may sound a bit funny, but there's no need to lose your voice
  • Do, if you develop laryngitis, go to the doctor. Laryngitis is an inflammation of the larynx that causes swelling in the vocal folds and is induced by stress or a virus. If absolutely necessary, find a very good throat doctor. 
  • Do, if you are experiencing postnasal drip, use a neti pot. Warm salt water is good for the throat, but honey may not be, as it can congest further. Slippery elm is soothing to the throat. Osha root—also called "singer's root"—is ideal for viral infections of the sinuses, throat, and upper and lower respiratory systems. It helps bring out respiratory secretions and relaxes smooth muscle, making it beneficial for coughs and asthmatic breathing difficulties.
  • Don't use decongestants! Nasal irrigation with salty water is a great alternative to decongestants, but do it earlier in the day. Don't try it just before a performance. That's because salt water can, if there is reflux inflammation already present, further irritate your vocal folds and larynx.
Memo: Do remember that all work and no play make Jack and Jill a dull boy and girl.

Over and out for today  - have a good one and keep well wrapped up! 

Sunday 3 March 2013

Tracking Down Maciej Suszynski in Wroclaw Poland: Shared from A LIfe In Theatre Blog 52.

Maciej Suszynski

Good morning.

Its over 25 years since I last saw Maciej in New Hampshire in the US. A few months ago he found me on Facebook and we had a flurry of messages as you do when you first reconnect with an old friend. But then what do you do?  Do you go on and meet up again? Well for me, only if there is a new project or purpose, or I guess maybe a bit of genuine curiosity! Its fun to get a snapshot of where life has taken them, and indeed to see their images, photos and preoccupations. 

Anyway - after sharing my blog with Maciej (in which I have talked a few times about my time in Poland) we got to talk on Skype last Sunday. I suppose at its basic level it was two old friends/colleagues reconnecting, which is great for us, but would be deeply boring for anyone else of course. But niceties out of the way our attention turned to talking of how we record our own theatre history. 

We worked with Triple Action Theatre, which was a controversial physical theatre company in the '70s and '80s led by the maverick director Stephen Rumbelow. Maciej and I were on the tail end of the company's life. I dipped out in 1983 and returned to London from Chicago, where the company carried on for another year or so. 

Our conversation turned to how we might make a record of the heady days of theatre making in the early eighties, and the huge Polish influences and exchanges. Much of this is lost. We promised ourselves that we would start to record the detail for a theatre archive. As I mentioned the other day Peter Hulton wrote a Theatre Paper about the company in his fourth series. But little of the work that took place in Poland is recorded anywhere, and its an interesting story for students of theatre, not least because of the stark challenges and dangers of making art in a military state. It was a highly fertile time in Poland's art history.

I mentioned earlier in January that I have been exercised by the fact that my previous blog about our Cinderella at the Broadway is still getting over 500 pageviews a day, mostly from Poland! I couldn't really understand why a local pantomime in East London would be of interest to Poles. I asked Maciej what he thought - and he was as curious as me. I thought maybe it was to do with the importance of the core fairy tale - but I don't think that's a very convincing reason. It certainly doesn't satisfy me.


Pradeep Jeyaratnam
But I think I may have got the answer I needed  from my dear friend Pradeep, who cooked me a lovely dinner a few days ago. He and his partner Caroline and I were discussing a number of things including Pradeep's recent show House on The Edge by the dance company State of Flux. He was sharing the enjoyment he had in a new experience of working with older dancers, and the challenges of bringing dance and theatre together.

A bit later I posed the Polish question. Without a moment's hesitation Prad told me that the answer was obvious wasn't it ? Not to me I reiterated.

He said the simple answer was nothing to do with the story of Cinderella, but quite simply that the blog tells the story of the the making of a new show from beginning to end, and all the quirky and strange challenges on the way, including the full process and the detail from the rehearsal room. He assured me that the consistent flow of hits on the blog is most likely to be from theatre students. And theatre studies is a very popular course in Poland. I suspect he's possibly right - and I hope so too. It was a very 'warts and all' account of the creative and practical process of making a piece and the collaboration between the creative team. And of course the 'characters' become familiar develop through the story. 

I plan to check in with Maciej to test Pradeep's theory - as he may have a few and is familiar with the specific theatre courses in Poland. So thanks to Maciej, Prad and Caroline for their wise counsel.

So Maciej and I are about to embark on a similar exercise for those early years of making work in Eastern Europe. I think our memories might be a little challenged, but between us we may be able to excavate enough to capture much of it to share with those same students in Poland and the US who are the other large cohort of the Cinderella blog followers.


I feel like I may have a bit of a better understanding now.


Have a lovely Sunday 

Thursday 28 February 2013

The Webs We Weave and Working In the Matrix


Good morning.

So for the last few days I have been in gathering mode, building possibilities for new projects - in a cerebral space really. (well not too cerebral actually!)

But today I am in rehearsal with Mullered by Clifford Oliver and I am really excited. Going into the rehearsal/imaginal space is warm and familiar, but also stark and sharp. It embodies the imagination, and as such can offer up many goodies, but it also the empty space. Its a playground and a factory.

Today though I am not starting from scratch as I have made this piece already - it just hasn't been out for a few months. Today is about revitalising and igniting the material. Finding it freshly. 

And the other great thing about today too is that I don't have to worry about budgets, persuasive outcomes or targets. Hurrah! (Don't get me wrong - I do LOVE targets!). Yesterday's blog was all about that really - in fact my friend Amari told me it was a bit boring, which made me laugh, because sometimes that searching for a connection/narrative bit of my job can be like looking for a needle in a haystack and it takes a while to spot it. Its technical.

But today its about four actors in the imaginal space and me. As you will know if you regularly pop in on my blog, I have been writing a bit about emotional access recently and the steps to releasing character. So in anticipation of today's rehearsal and the reorientation of the actors into character, I am thinking about webs and matrixes.

Webs and matrixes are beautiful and complex structures - the dictionary definitions say:

Web: 

Noun
A network of fine threads constructed by a spider from fluid secreted by its spinnerets, used to catch its prey.
Verb
Move or hang so as to form a weblike shape: "an intricate transportation network webs from coast to coast".


Matrix
Noun
An environment or material in which something develops.
A mass of fine-grained rock in which gems, crystals, or fossils are embedded.


And that pretty much sums up the job. I will spend time today with the actors revisiting and building the character's web of relationships within the matrix of the play. This is always a great process as it produces fertile networks and connections.













We all live in webs, indeed the invention of the world wide web is merely a mirror image of this probably  - its an exquisite architecture. 

If you think about your own life and the web of family, friends, work colleagues etc imagine just how many relationships you live in and with? You manage this physical and  emotional landscape on a daily basis and you are different in each of them. At any one time we might be engaged in several hundred complex emotional relationships and we have to adjust to each as we need to. Depending on who we are with, talking to, the intimacy or formality of the relationship will determine the energy we use, the tone of voice, the physical proximity. Its a dance.

Its pretty easy to manage that one on one (is it?) - but faced with a room full it can be daunting. Is it any surprise that the bride and groom fall exhausted into their marriage bed after a wedding day full of "managing" relationships.  Its no surprise that these hot house occasions are wonderful settings for life's biggest intimate dramas!

Making these rapid emotional shifts is what we do. 

Have you ever had that experience when you are in the middle of a heated  argument with a family member and the door bell rings and you have an unexpected visitor? You invite them in for coffee and both you and your family member have to perform emotional gymnastics to change the mood in the room and cover up the previous antagonistic energy! Its life isn't it?


So to the actor. In creating character I work with the web. I ask the actor to place themselves (their character) at the centre of an imaginary web. This is done physically, so the symbolic web is set in space in the studio. The actor employs visual and emotional imagination to 'people' the web with all those others he conjurs to life for his character. The web is as big as the actor wants to make it. The people closer to the centre are those very 'present' in the character's life at the moment in which the play is set. This does not mean close in an easy trusting way necessarily, or even alive at the time of the setting. Sometimes a person in the life of the character might be huge and very close, but extremely intimidating or dark and dominating.

Working with 'summoning' these relationships into the space does a number of rich things. It deepens the emotional work needed by the actor, references the narrative arc fully, but perhaps most importantly embodies the inherent emotional and rational contradictions and incongruities in the character's life. 
This is where lazy character work can let the actor down. It can be too neat, too systematic and linear. People are not like that - we are full of contradictions. 

And so in creating character the actor must learn to imagine and tolerate things that don't fit nicely together. For example if you had to play Hitler, how would you approach him? You couldn't just play evil. In fact you would have to work hard to create love from Hitler's perspective.

So it is with character as with the people that we base them on - the same person can be loved and admired by one person in their lives, and hated and reviled by another. But of course they are still themselves whichever "face" they choose to reveal at any time, or on which others project.

This work on relational webs in creating character is very useful - and a tool I use unfailingly. You can do it in lots of ways and its useful for the actors to capture it in a drawing that they can take away with them for their character portfolio at the end of the rehearsal day. 

So excitedly off to the studio- catch you tomorrow.







Tuesday 26 February 2013

What Qualities Would The Glass In Cinderella's Slippers Need To Have In Order For Her To Walk And Dance Safely?

Good morning!

I really like this so thought I would share it with you! 

Carole 



What Qualities Would The Glass In Cinderella's Slippers Need To Have In Order For Her To Walk And Dance Safely?



Antariksh Bothale, Mechanical Engineer & Amateur Linguist, http://www.linguistrix.com/

It is delightful to have my masters degree in Mechanical Engineering put to use in resolving age old engineering problems.


(Not photographed: Her feet)

One can never know the exact shape or size of the slippers that Cinderella wore, but one can hazard a guess that they must have looked something like this:


Now, let’s talk about failure. No, not about Cinderella’s failure to keep her shoes on her feet, but about mechanical failure. Whenever we design something that needs to bear force, we test for various possible modes of failure and try to ensure that our object is strong against all of them.

Now, one possible way the slippers could break is by yielding to the compressive stress arising due to Cinderella’s weight. But will that happen?

We can safely assume that Cindy didn’t weigh more than than 50 kgs. I mean, her cousins were fat and ugly, so we have to leave them some room on the top, right? Let’s assume this weight to be applied uniformly across the shoe. Note that the toe region of a heeled shoe bears almost thrice as much force as the heel region, but it won’t matter for our purposes.


Using a rough estimate of her foot size, her foot area comes out to be about

If 50 kgs of weight were to be applied uniformly across this area, the compressive stress developed in the material would be



The Yield strengthof ordinary glass for compressive stress is approximately, which is three orders of magnitude more than what Cinderella’s weight can produce, so we can safely conclude that any regular glass can sustain it. Since the stress is so low, we don’t even need to worry about the uneven loading on the shoe.

So, is she safe now? Can she safely dance at the ball without fear of tiny shards of glass cutting her skin and ruining her dress?

Not so soon, buddy!

There’s another way her shoe could break, and this is due to the compressive stress due to the bending moment applied to her heel every time she walks.

Now, I don’t want to be here all day, and I don’t want to model her shoe in ANSYS, so I will make a few simplifying assumptions. Let her heel have a diameter. and have lengthfrom the tip to the point where it joins the rest of the shoe. The heel can now be modeled as a simple cantilever beam of circular cross section.


I’m in a bit of a hurry, and I have to get back to reading The Casual Vacancy (2012 book), so I will defer to http://www.efunda.com/formulae/s… for the actual calculation of the maximum bending stress. I will assume her stepping angle to be about 30°, which means that only half of her weight () would act in the normal direction to the heel (causing the bending). Pluggingas the bending force and the rest of the figures in place, we get the maximum bending stress in the heel to be. Note that this is dangerously close to our critical stress of. Even if we make a few more allowances by making the heel thicker or the stepping angle smaller, we cannot let our little princess veer so dangerously close to disaster.


In order for her to be safe enough, we would take a safety factor of at least 2, and also assume that the bending stress can go as high as. This means that her shoes need to be made of glass that has a yield strength of at least.


Safety glass (thermal toughened glass) seems to be a good bet. It has a yield strength of about and a higher Young’s Modulus too (http://www.matbase.com/material/…), so I imagine Cinderella can use it safely without fear of it breaking just when she is shaking a leg with our awesome prince. Ideally, we would also want it mixed with something to make it less brittle, but I don’t want to make it too different from glass or the answer becomes meaningless.

But what happens when she starts running out of the castle at midnight approaches?

When Cinderella runs, I expect the impact force to be three to five times that of the regular walking force (this is somewhat supported by the paper
Ground reaction forces at different speeds of human walking and running,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubm…). The shoes should be safe for these values.

We must also take into consideration the fact that Cinderella’s dress would probably not let her take long strides. This would mean that her stepping angle would remain within safe limits, further ensuring that her shoes don’t break.

Most importantly, she would be well-advised to develop a toe-first foot strike,which would totally solve the problem. This cannot be maintained for large distances, but would certainly take Cinderella out of the danger zone.

What if the friction between her shoes and the ground/floor is so low that she slips? Well, we can assume that the flooring is either made of stone or is carpeted. The coefficient of frictionfor Glass on Stone is about 0.42, which is not very high, but is high enough for her to not slip. I couldn’t get a value for the coefficient for glass on carpet, but I imagine it to be similar.

x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x

(I am well aware that Cinderella’s shoes were most likely made of fur and that the glass in the story is mostly a result of mistranslation. I am also sure, though, that this is a rather lousy reason to not attempt an answer.)

Saturday 23 February 2013

The Actor Gets Ready: Blog February 23rd

Good morning!


I have been on a bit of a roll here over the past few days, looking at routes of emotion and how to access the actor's palette. So today I am thinking about the move to deepening character, and finding a truthful imaginative reference point that absorbs the creative mind in bringing a fictitious character to life.

I was chatting to a colleague about the relative time spent on the different aspects of creating character in a rehearsal process. How much time to spend on developing the 'back story' and how much on repeating and refining the dialogue!

Its a fine art actually, and there are no simple answers. In my process however there are some absolutes in terms of territory to be covered, and in this there are no short cuts. Once upon a time, about 15 years ago in another land I used to get 5-6 weeks of rehearsal on a show! Imagine that. Indeed I believed that it was impossible to make a good piece of drama in anything less. After all I grew up in the shadow of the stories of my great heroes, like Peter Brook who could secret himself and his actors for months on end. And then dear old Mike Leigh! Total immersion being the only answer. And of course the results were usually great. How could they not be? 

2013 is a different country indeed. Thanks to the squeeze on money, we, like many other industries have had to work faster, smarter as they say, be more productive, dare I even say cut corners? can these economic rules really apply to making art to? Surely not? 

Well like it or not, and in spite of our precious sensibilities, the answer is 'do or die'. Its uncomfortable and distasteful maybe, as we are mostly purists perhaps. But of course the converse is also true. 


I love the story of the plumber and repeat it often. You call her out because you have a blocked pipe. She arrives, taps the pipe and knows exactly where the block is and unblocks it. It all takes precisely 3 minutes. She wacks a bill for £90 in your hand and leaves. You reluctantly pay up and then stand there looking at the bill with your mouth open, she was only here for three minutes! How can that be worth £90?

In my book its actually about the recipe and the ingredients, and less about the exact apportionment of time to each area of concern. Basically these are the elements that I include in my process and believe are essential. You can take a week on each one, or an hour, but you need them all to make your character. 

The Actor Gets Ready! (Nod here to the Great Master Stanislavski whose book An Actor Prepares is a key text)

1. Familiarity with text: Do your homework before rehearsals. An absolute MUST
2. Research the territory. Go on a little 'look see' on the internet, amongst friends, anywhere, to locate a model of your character, ie; someone who you have a hunch may carry some of the characteristics.
3. Prepare your body, mind and imagination and emotional tools ready to work.
4. Let go of resistances, or at the very least make them conscious so you can work with them.

The work of the Director and Actors in Rehearsal

1. Emotional and physical mapping
2. Storytelling - the character's history
3. Physical landscapes, the character's territory (literal environment) excursions.
4. Archetypes - the collective access to character, decision making.
5. The physical dimension  - body changing.
6. Character and relationship web
7. Voice and tone, the language in the mouth and in the body.
8. Metaphor
9. Carving the energy.
10. Sharing the space and tolerating dissonance
11. Making the dynamics work
12. Defining and setting.
13. Repeat, repeat, repeat!
14. Share and criticise.
15. Present. And watch the audience for feedback.

A little cryptic I acknowledge, and each point is full of many others, exercises, conversations and questions. But I guarantee if you go through all of these in a process you will almost certainly unlock character and dynamic in response to the narrative arc of the piece you are making. You could spend ten years going through each stage  or a week if you like me are now constrained by time! There's nothing like a deadline to focus the mind.

Finally to return to my colleague's comment about rehearsal process. If you stay in the 'back story' part of it for too long, you will end up with egg on your face as the actors won't know their lines, their motivations in practice in a scene, and it will all look like a load of self indulgent twaddle! So make sure that the greatest amount of time is spent in shaping, reviewing and repeating for goodness sake!


Have a great weekend.






Sunday 17 February 2013

Importance Of Early Work With Text

Good morning

A number of blogs ago I wrote about the value of learning poetry by heart and the impact it had on me as a child. Its quite a loaded subject in educational terms. It certainly went out of fashion in the seventies, on the premise I imagine that it was too restrictive a practice and stemmed freedom and creative imagination. 

Its virtually unheard of now for a student to be encouraged to learn a poem or a piece of prose for the pleasure of the repetition, the feel and sound of the words in the mouth or the emotions revealed. Sadly its a clear case of having thrown the baby out with the bath water. So it was that I was encouraged yesterday in chatting to a friend to hear that he had been watching a drama lesson run by another colleague in which the students were working on a piece of text from The Importance of being earnest, interrogating it, fitting it on for size and at the same time learning about plosive consonants. Sounds more like it. I bang on about it all the time, but we are failing our young performers if we do not give them the technical acting skills they need alongside the ability to analyse and understand motivation and action in a text.

I remember as a child listening to my mother in times of sorrow or tenderness, lovingly recite entire poems and passages from books she studied at school.

We all know that practice makes perfect, but for some reason perfection is not one of the goals of learning in most schools. In today's classrooms, students practise a lot, but are not required to retain knowledge perfectly.

The M Word

Somewhere along the way, rote learning got a bad rap. Memorisation (there, I said the M word) became anathema to learning. How this came to be, I am uncertain, but what I am certain about is that this shift away from memorisation has undermined the effectiveness of the teaching and learning process.

The total emphasis on critical thinking has it wrong: Before students can think critically, they need to have something to think about in their brains. It is true that knowledge without comprehension is of little use, but comprehension requires knowledge and it takes time and effort to acquire.

Bloom's Taxonomy maintains that the highest order of thinking occurs at the evaluating and creating levels which infer that the thinkers must have knowledge, facts, data, or information in their brains to combine into something new, or with which to judge relative importance or value. Therefore, effective knowledge acquisition has to come first.
Students deserve to know how to learn and teachers do them a disservice when they do not teach them useful learning skills. Here are some underlying concepts that need to be accepted before we can continue:


The brain is a learning tool. This might seem obvious, but the brain is not a passive sponge. It requires active effort to retain information in short-term memory and even more effort to get it into long-term memory.
Learners need to know that the longer an idea can be kept in short-term memory, the more chance it can be pushed into long-term memory. This is where practice makes perfect makes sense.
The body is another learning tool -- another often-ignored concept. The body is connected to the brain and if you engage the body, you are engaging the brain too.
Learners feel an addictive sense of accomplishment when something has been memorised completely.

With these concepts in mind, I would like to share some of the memorisation learning methods that make it effective and enjoyable:

Learning Aloud

Just as we use our mouths to repeat a phone number over and over to retain it in short term memory, other things can be learned in the same way. One key point here to remember is that the cycle of repetition must be short and quick and no less than three times.
.
Using Rhythm and Breath

Learning text is done quickly, but since the order of learning the words is important there are some effective ways to chain them together. Learn the passage in breath groups, or what can be comfortably stated in one breath. Students using their mouths, because it is part of the body and a learning tool, repeat the breath group until it is firmly in short-term memory, then go on to the next breath group and do the same. When that is done, put both groups together and repeat them.

This is best taught to students using choral repetition. The key here is to be enthusiastic and energetic, praising the students as they practise. Printing the first letter of each word in the breath group can help students remember the words as they learn them.
Jigsaw Strategies

A creative teacher can have groups of students learn different parts of the passage and then switch parts, or stand up as they say their passage, or even move to a different part of the room with each phrase. Since the body is connected to the brain, it is effective to have students do a hand signal or body movement to symbolise the content of the breath group as they say it.

Sometimes it is helpful to start at the end and add phrases in reverse order known as reverse chaining. Its also
 effective to have the students perform the action of the words they are trying to learn as they told a story. 

Memorisation is not a bad thing. Students have to memorise the alphabet, sight words, vocabulary, times tables, and many other things and have fun doing it.

There's countless ways to help students learn how to memorise quickly, efficiently, and enjoyably. You can use music, song, dance, rhythms, patterns, competitions, and games. Once they know how to learn, or memorise, then students can acquire knowledge about anything they want to learn, which is in direction opposition to what critics say about rote memorisation.

The other great thing about learning a poem or piece of prose by heart is that inevitably there are new words to learn and understand, so vocabulary extends almost without effort. And such words are often imbued with the meanings and feelings felt by the reader as they become acquainted with the text and thus carry extra power. There is also a wonderful confidence that comes with the certainty of the learnt text. 

I am reminded of our Youth Theatre who did a great production of A Midsummer Night's Dream a few years ago under the excellent direction of Natalie Smith and Andy Rogers.  It was interesting to watch the group of 25 or so young people balk at the idea of Shakespeare and to recognise their fear of speaking this 'funny' language that they said they did not understand. And then gradually over a period of about 3 months to see their confidence rise as they learnt their scripts, and by inhabiting them physically gained a greater understanding of meaning. The final performance was very special. It was great to hear the text flow out with ease and clarity of meaning and connection. Here we had 30 young people from Barking and Dagenham who had not only learnt the text, but through the process had come to understand and love it and by the end were able to say honestly that they thought Shakespeare was writing about them! And of course he was.





Tuesday 5 February 2013

My Curiosity About Polish Readers



Good morning Poland! 

Well good morning to my many readers in Poland, and everywhere else of course.
I am writing this for you today. I am curious that this blog is still getting 100-200 hits a day - and the highest readership is in Poland!  I am keen to know why!  Why does an obscure blog about a regional pantomime in East London get attention from you guys out there? Also do you read it in english or press the translation button? My guess is you speak english!

What's intriguing is that I only update here about once a week, and usually only if it pertains to something panto related. And yet it is still being read, which of course is deeply gratifying!

The thing is that there is very little about Poland in this blog, and that's what provokes my curiosity. Now having spent a good bit of time doing theatre in Poland in the eighties, I could put it down to that maybe? I also know that the Poles are some of the best theatre makers out there. They had to be. Times of severe state bullying and oppression through the communist years and then the military take-over time meant that the imaginations of artists were given an ever bigger invitation to expand. If you can't say something directly for fear of imprisonment you are forced to find unique and new ways to express the human condition, both its universality and its personal manifestation in the drama of your own life. That's what artists do, but in a state of fear their work is even more vitally and expression of  soul, self, politics, love, war, loss, liberty, intellect and much more. This oppression and limits on the freedom of speech led to some of the most amazing work by artists across all the art forms. I will never forget being at a performance of Dead Class by Tadeuz Kantor at the Riverside Studios in London in about 1985. I was mesmorised by this then ancient man with a walking stick directing about 20 actors in their late 60s,70s and 80s on the stage. He was a performance in himself, marching around the stage as the actors performed this soul baring show about age and death. If he thought they weren't serving the play,or simply didn't like a particular moment, he would bang his walking stick on the floor or tap them on the back of the legs, stopping the action to make them do it again the way he wanted it! I'd never get away with that with my actors....... maybe I could give it a go sometime? So a bit about the man:

Born in Wielopole Skrzyńskie, Galicia (then in Austria-Hungary), Kantor graduated from the Cracow Academy in 1939. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, he founded the Independent Theatre, and served as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków as well as a director of experimental theatre inKraków from 1942 to 1944. After the war, he became known for his avant-garde work in stage design including designs for Saint Joan (1956) and Measure for Measure (1956). Specific examples of such changes to standard theatre were stages that extended out into the audience, and the use of mannequins as real-life actors.

Disenchanted with the growing institutionalisation of avant-garde, in 1955 he with a group of visual artists formed a new theatre ensemble called Cricot 2. In the 1960s, Cricot 2 gave performances in many theatres in Poland and abroad, gaining recognition for their stage happenings. His interest was mainly with the absurdists and Polish writer and playwright Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (also known as "Witkacy"). Stage productions of Witkacy's plays The Cuttlefish(1956) and The Water Hen (1969) were regarded as his best achievements during this time. A 1972 performance of The Water Hen was described as "the least-publicised, most talked-about event at the Edinburgh festival".

Dead Class (1975) was the most famous of his theatre pieces of the 1970s. In the play, Kantor himself played the role of a teacher who presided over a class of apparently dead characters who are confronted by mannequins which represented their younger selves. He had begun experimenting with the juxtaposition of mannequins and live actors in the 1950s.

His later works of the 1980s were very personal reflections. As in Dead Class, he would sometimes represent himself on stage. In the 1990s, his works became well known in the United States due to presentations at Ellen Stewart's La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club which inspired Lower East Side cultural leaders such as theNuyorican poet Giannina Braschi.[1]

Throughout his life, Kantor had an interesting and unique relationship with Jewish culture, despite being a nominalCatholic and having a father with anti-Semitic tendencies, Kantor incorporated many elements of what was known as "Jewish theatre" into his works. Kantor died in Kraków in 1990.

I have spoken often on this and my other blog about the influence of Peter Brook on my practice. Well here's another! I feel very privileged to have seen this show. It was deeply affecting and in fact very shocking. It was authentic and shot through with a real quality and sense of Polish culture and history. The ensemble of actors had worked together for many years and it showed. They had gone from being young to old, and with that all the physical and emotional toil. They were inspiring. Young actors could do worse to look up Kantor's work. If it were to be performed today it would be as fresh, intriguing and disturbing as it was 25 years ago! 

And lastly - I would really like to hear from my Polish friends out there what attracts them to this blog - and also to signpost you to my newest blog: A Life in Theatre: Towards the Simple and the Sacred: A Daily blog about life, theatre and the arts of directing and acting. http://carolepluckrosealifeintheatre2013.blogspot.co.uk/ where there are accounts of my time in Poland with Triple Action Theatre in 1981 at the time of the military takeover. That's partly why I am curious - as that's the one with the Polish references. But maybe I just don't get it - I look forward to finding out!  I will be publishing this post on there today too in the spirit of collaboration! 

Miłego dnia!