ANIMATING THE ANIMATORS MASTERCLASSES

THE LOGIC OF MOVEMENT
A one day workshop about why things move in the way they do, and how knowing about this helps the puppeteer to express ideas more successfully to an audience.

The elements which lie behind our vocabulary of movement are quite easy to identify - responses to gravity, the need to move from place to place, tension patterns and changes in movement tempo linked to emotions like fear or pleasure. Similarly we all continually read movement information in the world around us. We judge the speed of cars on the road; know when someone is happy or sad; recognise in the distance our friends and relatives simply by the way they walk.

Our ability to read this movement information lies deep in our animal past. Natural selection has favoured creatures with good survival strategies and knowing what the movement in the world around us means, has been a vital element in the survival of most creatures.  As a result, we humans decode movement information with a mind boggling degree of sophistication.
However, almost always in puppet theatre, where moving things about is so obviously a large part of what is being offered to the audience, movement itself is given little conscious attention and at best is assumed to be produced by the intuitive ability of the puppeteer.  Often this lack of attention to movement as a principal means of communication leaves performances far short of their potential.  It may well be that a puppeteer can intuitively make a puppet bird appear to fly, but an understanding of how it will appear to fly, needs to be present also during every moment of its design and construction.

Added to this, it is important for the puppeteer to become aware that every movement on stage means something to the audience. Often in order to communicate clearly with the audience we must reduce the movement activity of a puppet down to the bare essentials to be sure the correct information is conveyed. Often the 'intuition' of the puppeteer will add in movement details which feel right, but which in fact interfere with the message of the puppet.
I think that an understanding of how movement tells the audience things, needs to be a big part of the development of all performance work with puppets.

In my description of our day together at Diorama, I shall refer to the animal reading of movement information in terms of 'The Crocodile'.  My idea was to encourage the workshop participants  to check whether they were able to tell the crocodile things simply by the way they moved their puppets. (The structure of the day was built out of three elements:
1. Exercises and experiments, performed by individual participants or small groups in front of the other participants.
2. Small group projects and improvisations aimed at experimenting with or consolidating new knowledge from above.
3. Short discussions and pooling of group knowledge (as well as summing up of theoretical elements by myself) throughout the day.)The day was more or less like this:
15 minutes of introductions in pairs and groups, getting used to being part of a new group of people and preparing to collaborate together for the day.

Leading to a general warm up and short, movement based games.

Leading to activities in which a single movement can be seen to be made up of a sequence of movement events. Lying on the floor in a large circle, we made Egyptian waves with our hands to demonstrate how a lot of simple movements in sequence can convey complex movement information to the audience.

A detailed examination in pairs, of the human walk.

Identification of the key movement information which an audience needs to receive, in order to perceive human walking. What is the precise relationship between moving the whole body and moving the parts of the body for balance? How can the human walk be broken down into a simple sequence of events which can be expressed clearly with a puppet. How the crocodile recognises its next meal. 

Experimentation in groups with this key movement information about walking, involving:
• Time relationships of movement elements
•  Flexibility around balancing movements/where do they happen?
•Minimal movement information/clarity of expression.
We discovered that the movements of counterbalance are vital and complex, but possible to identify and reproduce clearly, with dramatic results.

These experiments were done using very simple cloth puppets with no human characteristics other than roughly having two legs, two arms and a head and body. Later we repeated some of them with five ping pong balls on sticks to show that it is the movement sequence which communicates to the audience, rather than the puppet itself.

Experiments, exercises and discussion about pendulums in nature -why are they complicated? How does the pendulum speed of things tell the crocodile whether to run away from or eat the other creatures it encounters? Playing with the audience's perceptions of size.

Why do marionettes usually look bad on TV? (Hard to explain, but easy to demonstrate. To do with the fact that we all see electronically reduced size humans on TV. They have normal human pendulum speeds built into their movement. When we see marionettes on the TV, They are filmed small, so the uncontrolled bits of their bodies have built in fast pendulum speeds. When we watch filmed marionettes, there is a conflict between the normality of their small size on the TV screen -which we are used to - and the unnaturally fast pendulum speed of some of their movements.  So we perceive their movement as unnatural and awkward.  On the other hand marionettes in their own environment become masters of how big or small we perceive them to be. The problem is the context of TV.)

Introduction to the movement codes for other animals. How physical structure relates to movement. The chicken has two legs like us, but its different centre of gravity and weight distribution means that its movement sequence is very different to our own. How do we analyse the probable movement qualities of a creature by looking at its structure?|

Group improvisations around movement sequences built on invented, mythical  animal structures. The creatures were quickly assembled out of items of clothing, the hands of the participants and a few odds and ends found in the room, so the 'puppets' were really little more than raw movement sequences. But the movement of the creature had to be based on detailed analysis of the demands of the structure of the creature.

These performances were watched formally by all the participants and we discussed the results. We felt this exercise was particularly successful in that it provided good evidence that by treating the audience as if they are intelligent enough to read a coherent, albeit previously unseen movement sequence, information about an unknown, mythical creature can be actively and consciously communicated.
Because of the intelligent content of the improvisations, they were also extremely interesting to watch, because there was a theatrical conflict between the simplicity of the means used and the depth of the meaning conveyed

Lunch

Short warm up to focus attention after

lunch

Putting emotion into the sequence - exercises by individuals around the expression of mood. Mood as combinations of relaxed/tense behaviour combined with open/closed behaviour. Happy as open, relaxed movement. Angry as Open, tense etc.

Group work around mood, body focus and intent. Group improvisations in which puppet figures quickly evoked from single pieces of cloth have to assume emotional states as they walk. What happens when two people with different emotional states meet each other. Every movement to convey emotion had to be overlaid onto the movement sequences for walking which we looked at during the morning. Complex and difficult stuff, but amazing. Then performed for the others.

Introduction to the idea of differences in qualities of movement. Group exercises to illustrate these. Canon balls, ships, hot air balloons and butterflies move in different ways. Why? How can we reproduce the essentials of these different movement types? A quick look at why the intuitive approach fails in this.

Discussion and exercises relating to medium. The effect of medium on movement - gravity, wind, water, ice. Butterflies, gravity and air; birds and wind; swans in water and on ice. Fishes.

A brief look at focus and how the most basic intuitive trick used by all puppeteers - the idea that making a puppet appear to look at things will make the audience think a puppet is thinking for itself - sometimes lets us down. Why is even this trick complicated in practise? How do we convey the idea of intent through our manipulation of a puppet?
Group improvisations to tell the crocodile things about medium and intent. Leading to short performances watched by all before the end of the day.

To finish off the day we sat and talked about the whole question of movement in puppet theatre for 20 minutes.  We shared thoughts and experiences and returned to some of the ideas we had experimented with during the day.

In fact the day was so full that we all collapsed in exhaustion at the end. The subject is so vast that it needs more than a rushed day to cover even the basic elements. And the constant analysis and care needed in watching things is tiring. It would be better to have sessions of maybe three hours per day for several days instead of a single long session. This would allow participants to mull over the things covered in each days work.

I enjoyed the day. The group was extremely motivated and the participants were very happy and able to collaborate with each other. I hope they found it stimulating and useful.
          

Stephen Mottram

The ideas contained in this paper are copyright Stephen Mottram, February 2005 and may not be reprinted without his written permission.