4change with Margi Brown Ash

Last day of Time Space and Body Masterclass, Brisbane Powerhouse

Margi Brown Ash — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 21:04:39 +0000

End of seven days of glorious work with Barney O’Hanlon and Laura Sheedy. These two are a great team, collaborating continually on the floor to negotiate a premium teaching environment. We have been composing small pieces of performance with text and movement, focusing around the theme of ‘distance’. Some of the exercises that we have engaged in have been simple yet so very effective, enabling 8 plus people to enter an improvisation that has integrity.

http://youtu.be/aDz29CyyPr4 Here is a link to one of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s videos. Body Mind Centering seems to have a profound effect on the actor’s body, preparing them for deep practice. It is worth exploring and i will continue to post references that i find useful.

Flloyd Kennedy is offering voice classes beginning 6th February

Margi Brown Ash — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 05:41:36 +0000

Being in Voice - Class of 2012
Monday evenings 7 - 9 pm
Starting 6th February
South Brisbane
Actors, singers, teachers, public speakers, lawyers, doctors, tinkers, tailors and all who use their voices to express themselves, and to communicate - join us for 8 sessions as we explore how to keep our voices safe and healthy, while releasing them to carry our thoughts, ideas and feelings joyfully into the wide world.

Click here to express your interest

The Voice Class offers a safe environment to explore and expand your range, and to discover the amazing possibilities for creative expression that your voice can give you. We are a small group, working together to support and encourage each other as we share our vulnerabilities and our strengths.

Your voice is the sound of you. You can sound clear and confident, with pure voice, with text, in conversation or in song. It’s all a matter of practise, and of course, a healthy technique. You may already have that - and you can have more!

I look forward to sounding some great noises with you some time soon!

With kind regards
Flloyd
email: fkennedy@being-in-voice.com
(phone: 0414 749 739)

Cost is $360 for eight 2-hour sessions. Deposit of $100 payable in advance, balance is due at the first session, however I am open to negotiation.

Gathering resources to share with you at MetroArts

Margi Brown Ash — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:16:01 +0000

It is very early, Wednesday, 25th January, 2012. It is raining, and I worry about people who were deeply affected by the Queensland floods, for this rain could trigger memories…although it is different this year, memory is not choosey.

Our work continues with Barney and Laura at Brisbane Powerhouse (Time, Space and Body Masterclass) and my interest is piqued. I am collecting some articles connected to Body-Mind Centering for us to read…articles such as "The Practical Application of Body-Mind Centering in dance…" by Martha Eddy and "Moving with Somatic Awareness" by Ninoska Gomez. I will take them to the studio at Metro Arts so we can read them there.

Day 3 of Time, Space and the Body intensive, Brisbane Powerhouse

Margi Brown Ash — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 09:52:14 +0000

It is pouring today, and we are safely tucked up in the Turbine Room, 21 of us, on the floor, warming up. It has been a full three days, with developmental movement warmups: Body Mind Centering: sAboBody-Mind Centering^®

Body-Mind Centering^® (BMC^tm) is an integrated approach to transformative experience through movement re-education and hands-on repatterning. Developed by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, it is an experiential study based on the embodiment and application of anatomical, physiological, psychophysical and developmental principles, utilizing movement, touch, voice and mind. This study leads to an understanding of how the mind is expressed through the body and the body through the mind.

The study of Body-Mind Centering is a creative process in which we learn to meet and recognize ourselves and others through the exploration of embodiment. Each person is both the student and the subject matter. Principles and techniques are taught in the context of self-discovery and openness. We learn to engage ourselves and others non-judgementally starting at the place where we are and the place where others are. In this way we seek to find the ease that underlies transformation (cut and paste from website, link above).

http://www.bodymindcentering.com/About/

There is an introduction to Body-Mind Centering on this website too, a decent article to give you an idea of what it is about.

Training for the actor:

Margi Brown Ash — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 22:43:29 +0000

This week 22 independent artists are training with Barney O’Hanlon and Laura Sheedy at Brisbane Powerhouse.

Motherboard Productions and the Brisbane Powerhouse present

TIME, SPACE and THE BODY: A Masterclass for Performing Artists

Performance makers are invited to re-energise their craft with this 7-day intensive from New York theatre specialists Barney O’Hanlon (SITI Company) and Laura Sheedy (The PIT).

Motherboard Productions is thrilled to bring theatre specialists Barney O’Hanlon and Laura Sheedy from New York City to Brisbane for an extraordinary training opportunity for theatre makers, performance artists, dancers, directors and choreographers. This 7-day physical training intensive will focus on the Viewpoints Training and Composition, enabling artists to work together spontaneously and intuitively, to create work quickly and inventively.

Resources to consider: http://www.siti.org/

http://siti.groupsite.com/blog

http://thepit-nyc.com/

5th Day of Stomping Ground’s ImpulseTraining Closure

Margi Brown Ash — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 08:12:01 +0000

Today was closure: what can I take from this week and move forward, or what questions emerge as i reflect on our week together?

Each actor presented their story using different cards (Archetype cards etc) as prompts, weaving their emerging stories of understanding, change, discoveries, confusion and transformation. Some actors found the process challenging, others seemed to blossom with the freedom of their artistic journey: rather than being told exactly what to do the actor was required, throughout the week, to stand within their own understanding of the problem at hand: "how have i interpreted the problem at hand?"

This can be a huge growth in personal agency, and/or can result in confusion, particularly with actors who have a preference for more linear ways of learning, which is, after all, the more dominant modality of acting training. I am thinking that our relational way is perhaps more fluid and circular for many actors, with more room to sit in the ‘unknown’, a very uncomfortable yet crucial place to be.

It is out of the unknown, that creativity flourishes. We journey through the unknown, and then we reflect on what has happened, with the hope that we discover the ‘diamonds’ of the art of acting. This experiential way of learning relies on the actor to be proactive and curious, rather than learning different techniques of acting through being told what to do, and how to do it. Acting is far more than techniques. And is most definitely more than feelings.

Acting requires relationship, impulse, freedom and trust. Relational acting, incorporating ImpulseTraining provides just that: an opportunity to discover ‘who i am becoming’ and in so doing, bring a richer and more vibrant artist into the room. I am hoping the each artist who worked with me now feels more able to bring not only their bodies into the rehearsal room, but also their heart and their brain.

(Image is of the beautiful spiral that Debs, from Wellington, gave me on behalf of her class…I love spirals Debs, thank you so much, I will wear it with joy…)

Some images from day 4 stomping ground

Margi Brown Ash — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:13:15 +0000

Note to my actors…19th January, 2012

Margi Brown Ash — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 22:54:11 +0000

I think you will be interested in this: This is a cut and paste from The Happiness Project (http://www.happiness-project.com/)…it is well worth a read. i have commented in brackets to connect it to our work in ImpulseTraining:

Twelve Personal Commandments

Gretchen, dreamed on by Margi and actors

Four Splendid Truths

Day 3: Zen Zen Zo Stomping Ground ImpulseTraining

Margi Brown Ash — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 22:26:21 +0000

We begin with a gift: if i had a gift, what gift would i have. each actor created a gift for her/himself and for the other. in check in performance, the actor shared their gift, talked about what they are grateful for (see The Happiness Project http://www.happiness-project.com/) and then scored themselves from 1-10, or colours.

The Gift: what does it teach you about yourself? See below:

Book Review (cut and pasted from http://southerncrossreview.org/4/schwartz.html)

The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property - by Lewis Hyde

(Vintage Books, 1983)

Reviewed by JoAnn Schwartz

In The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, Lewis Hyde uses anthropology, economics, psychology, art and fairy tales to examine the role gifts have played and continue to play in our emotional and spiritual life. By gifts, Hyde means both material objects and immaterial talents and inspirations, such as ‘a gift for music’ or ‘a gift for mathematics.’ Or, as Hyde himself so lyrically observes, "I have hoped . . . to speak of the inner gift that we accept as the object of our labor, and the outer gift that has become a vehicle of culture. I am not concerned with gifts given in spite or fear, nor those gifts we accept out of servility or obligation; my concern is the gift we long for, the gift that, when it comes, speaks commandingly to the soul and irresistibly moves us."

Above all, Hyde is interested in examining the effect our current immersion in the market economy and the myth of the free market has both on our view of gifts and on our ability to give and receive them. The market economy is deliberately impersonal, but the whole purpose of the ‘gift economy’ is to establish and strengthen the relationships between us, to connect us one to the other. "It is this element of relationship which leads [Hyde] to speak of gift exchange as ‘erotic’ commerce, opposing eros (the principle of attraction, union, involvement which binds together) to logos (reason and logic in general, the principle of differentiation in particular). A market economy is an emanation of logos."

In a market economy, one can hoard one’s goods without losing wealth. Indeed, wealth is increased by hoarding— although we generally call it ’saving’. In contrast, in a gift economy, wealth is decreased by hoarding, for it is the circulation of the gift(s) within the community that leads to increase— increase in connections, increase in relationship strength. Through this book, Hyde helps us focus on the importance of gifts, their flow and movement and the impact that the modern market place has had on the circulation of gifts.

In the first half of the book, Hyde examines the structure of traditional gift economies. For non-Western cultures he relies on anthropological studies; for Western culture he looks at our fairy tales and myths. In the second half of the book, Hyde looks at the lives and art of Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, two American poets whose reaction to their gifts and the effects of the market economy on those gifts were very different. Whitman focused his poetic gift on giving expression to the inarticulate, the erotic, the fecundity of nature. Whitman did not hold to material ambitions; he easily distinguished between earning a living and the labor of art — "The work of my life is making poems," he declared when Leaves of Grass first appeared. Whitman’s riches were founded in this refusal to take seriously things outside his art.

In contrast, Pound focused his poetic gift on bringing order to the forces of fertility and the erotic through sheer strength of will. He was incensed by the barrenness of his age, by its lack of generosity towards art and artists. (Pound himself was well known for his sponsorship of other artists, most notably T.S. Eliot and James Joyce.) Pound came to obsess on economics and the unjust distribution of wealth. His obsession was the death of his art.

Hyde is deeply interested in the transformative gift: the gift that changes us profoundly, often received in the form of psychological healing or spiritual teachings. An important aspect of a transformative gift is that the transformation is not instantaneous; it requires the recipient to undertake some extensive and often difficult inner work in order to effect the transformation completely. What motivates us to undertake this labor? In general, it is a feeling of love and gratitude toward our teacher or therapist.

This can lead to problems in today’s market economy, where healing and teaching are frequently sold rather than freely given. After all, even a gifted teacher, therapist, or spiritual guide must eat! It is nonetheless possible for an element of the gift economy to circulate above the cash. I recall some young parents at our Waldorf school who, although barely scraping by themselves, managed to come up each year with the full tuition for their child. When asked why they did not apply for financial aid, for which they certainly qualified, they looked surprised and said, "The tuition is our gift to the teachers for what they are giving our child. If we could afford more, we would certainly give it."

As an extreme example of the opposite approach, the author mentions the Church of Scientology, which in 1979 (when Hyde’s book was published) had a minimum initial ‘donation’ of $2,700 for a twelve-and-a-half intensive course. This kind of exaggerated cost tends to cut off the forces of love and gratitude necessary for true transformation.

The point is that a conversion, in the general sense, cannot be settled on ahead of time. We can’t predict the fruits of our labor; we can’t even know if we’ll really go through with it. Gratitude requires an unpaid debt, and we will be motivated to proceed only so long as the debt is felt. If we stop feeling indebted, we quit, and rightly so. To sell a transformative gift therefore falsifies the relationship; it implies that the return gift has been made when in fact it can’t be made until the transformation is finished. A prepaid fee suspends the weight of the gift and de-potentiates it as an agent of change. Therapies and spiritual systems delivered through the market will therefore tend to draw the energy required for conversion from an aversion to pain rather than from an attraction to a higher state.

There is another area of Western culture where a remnant of the old gift economy is still active: the scientific community. In examining the community of science, Hyde begins by noting that within this community it is the scientist who shares ideas with others— who gives away rather than acquires— who receives the most recognition and status. What, then, is the effect on science of treating ideas as gifts, as contributions to the community? Hyde presents an interesting case:

The task of science is to describe and explain the physical world, or more generally, to develop an integrated body of theory that can account for the facts, and predict them. Even such a brief prospectus points toward several reasons why ideas might be treated as gifts, the first being that the task of assembling a mass of disparate facts into a coherent whole clearly lies beyond the powers of a single mind or even a single generation. All such broad intellectual undertakings call for a community of scholars, one in which each individual thinker can be awash in the ideas of his comrades so that a sort of ‘group mind’ develops, one that is capable of cognitive tasks beyond the powers of any single person. The commerce of ideas— donated, accepted (or rejected), integrated—constitutes the thinking of such a mind. . . .. ‘[I]deas in physics are discussed, presented at meetings, tried out and known to the inner circle of physicists working in the great centers long before they are published in papers and books. . . .’ A scientist may conduct his research in solitude, but he cannot do it in isolation. The ends of science require coordination. Each individual’s work must ‘fit,’ and the synthetic nature of gift exchange makes it an appropriate medium for this integration; it is not just people that must be brought together but the ideas themselves.

In science, as elsewhere, the circulation of gifts produces and maintains community, whilst the conversion of gifts to commodities fragments or destroys that same community. However, we are now witnessing the commodification of ideas within the scientific community. Universities and industrial laboratories, which used to produce basic research that was released into ‘the public domain’ now patent and otherwise protect their research. Discoveries emerge not as contributions but as proprietary ideas for which users must pay a fee, a usury.

This trend began in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s with biotechnology, but here and now, at the end of the millennium, it seems to have spread to most fields of scientific inquiry. How does the "group mind" necessary to produce theoretical physics/chemistry/biology survive the free-market? Traditionally, academic freedom refers to the freedom of ideas; it is the perception that individuals in the research community must be allowed ‘fair use’ of other researcher’s ideas, must be allowed to explore these ideas without the payment of a usury. But in a free-market economy the concepts of academic freedom and fair use are indentured to the notion of intellectual property. People may be free, but ideas are most definitely not.

Lewis Hyde does not prescribe answers to the many questions his book brings up. Instead, he encourages us to challenge our current assumptions about the proper role of the market place in our relationships with each other and our institutions.

After Performative Check In we grew our gifts by working in twos, threes, fours or fives, creating an improvisation around the gifts and adding an opening and closing line. The actors thought of small sentences or phrases and then had the opportunity to choose two of these to top and tail their scene. they were able to add other dialogue if they wished.

Here are some images of the actors working on the floor:

sometimes around about images make us think more, so i am not adjusting…

everyone had the chance to perform, to experience ‘collage acting’ which is what ImpulseTraining is based on…

Day 2 Zen Zen Zo Stomping Ground, Old Museum, January 17, 2012

Margi Brown Ash — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 03:32:14 +0000

‘Rules for Acting’ by Zen Zen Zo’s Stomping Ground actors:

Today we explored curiosity and impulse as we created a list of qualities that watchable actors have, things like:

humour,
looking into your audience’s eyes (open heartedness) and welcoming our audience
calmness and stillness (where appropriate),
lightness of touch (not taking yourself too seriously)
deliberateness of movement (where appropriate)
use of poetry and metaphor and visual imagery
presence
openness
working intentionally and at the same time allowing impulse to take us into the unknown
strength of the voice by engaging the breath, breathing into the whole body
confidence in our work (no sense of apology)
being aware of context
going with the unknown, and discovering together
vulnerability and honest
restraint (when required)
simplicity
clarity of voice
setting up your scene before you begin
emotional honesty

We moved on the floor with curiosity, with awareness, surprising ourselves.we are adventurers, explorers, scientists, discovering something unknown.

We constantly sit in the unknown, which can be a very uncomfortable place to sit.For us to understand the ‘known’ we need perhaps to understand the ‘unknown’.

Impulsetraining helps us find comfort in not knowing.

Some of the goals that the actors had both day one and day two were:

i want to learn, to open to experience, to support, and to improve myself both as actor and person
i struggle to say
i want a new experience
i want to feel like an artist
i want to wed spiritual practice with artistic practice
i want to be brave
i want to help and nurture people
i want to stop judging myself
i want to believe that i am perfect just the way i am
i want to rest…it is a speedy world. i feel a bit empty
i want to learn
i want clarity, stillness, openness, relaxation…i am angy that i am so anxious and i judge my impulse
i am here to learn. to play. "I am a rope slowly unwinding
i want to open up my practice
i want to be nicer to myself
i want to be more confident
i am lost
i am a vessel
i want to deepen my spiritual work
i want to be more open more often. i want to connect more
where am i going? i want to find my own way of creating
i am impulsive. i am nervous i am tired
i am wanting to be open. i am shut down at the moment. i have dark spaces in my life
i have no where else to be
how to be articulately open? uncomfortable? good! without apology
i want to feel free
i think i want to be more grounded
i want a greater sense of sitting comfortably.
i want confidence in the power of the performer
i want to improve my skills
i want to connect with myself to understand more deeply
i want to start the journey home…to understand and acknowledge the internal stuff, and accept and acknowledge what i feel
i want to push boundaries
i want to enhance my understanding
i want to own my own body
i want to be ‘more ready’
i want to be a better performer with a free mind and from self judgement
i want to be a 9.
i want to play with different methods
i want to feel my feet on the ground
i want to deepen my craft and love of spirit
i want to share what i have as an artist…and not to over analyze
i like the idea of relational being
i have tension in my heart, which is stopping me dropping instincts