Intense and beautiful ensemble production directed by David Horn, Claire Karpen and James Ortiz, the woodsman is a play with a lot of movement and ritual. The play starts with a narrator who describes a village while the ensemble moves accordingly, setting the space and the mood. The village seems a calm place where we see a sense of unity with all the people moving together in harmony. When the narrator describes the calm breeze and the birds, the other actors as an ensemble move with flowers on their hands like the air is blowing, and they make bird sounds. The movements are slow and almost synchronized. On the other hand, when the witch and her terrifying story are introduced, there are loud noises, fast movements and a fast pace, creating a tense mood. It was a very interesting choice to have the witch be a prop handled by two actors, which gives her a sense of power and differentiates her from all the other ‘human’ characters.
As all the characters are introduced, the narrator becomes the main character and there is no text in the play anymore. The movements are very clear to tell the history. There is a mother, a father and a child and in a couple minutes we see the child growing into a man. Each stage of his life is shown with activities he and his family did and when a beat ends, they turn their back to the audience, then turn in actor neutral, take a breath together and then go to the new posture for that period. For instance when the parents are old, their posture is completely different, elongating arms, curvating their backs, and having the knees go first before the rest of the body; or when the child is young, trying to stand up but being out of balance versus when he is an adult moving intentionally and strong, making it clear by his posture which stage of his life he is, even though is the same actor. The use of the body and gestures to tell a story made me think a lot about the Lecoq work we did in class.
The breath is a big part of this play. The actors breathe together and set the mood for the scene. For instance when they all breathe together fast and loud there is a tension in the scene, when they breath slower and sustained, we really feel a sense of care. The witch’s breath is always intense, loud, tired, and she always comes in fast and goes to all sides of the stage. On the opposite side of that we have the princess, who is always calm, positive, and her breaths are longer, sustained and light. The ensemble, always on stage, moves very dynamically complementing the scenes. When there is a drastic change of mood the ensemble helps setting the atmosphere breathing in the same rhythm, and always looking directly at the focus where the audience should be looking. For instance when the witch with her power makes the book float in the air, one of the actors holds the book and moves it, but the movements are so intentional and their eyes are so concentrated in the book that the actor ‘becomes’ the object.
The story continues with the man and the princes falling in love and living happily together in the woods until the witch finds them and cuts one of the man’s arms out. Luckily a carpenter makes him a prosthetic wood arm that moves. On this point, another actor ‘becomes’ the arm, moving it around together with the main character. It was very interesting to watch it because it really became part of the character. The actor moving the arm became the arm by staring at it no matter what other actors were doing around him and by moving his entire body as the arm moved, like a piece of wood would, hard and defined. After a while the witch comes back and each time she takes another piece of his body, eventually transforming him into the woodsman, a man made of different parts of wood.
Analyzing a play after studying the fundamentals of Lecoq and Laban is very interesting, I was able to look at the storytelling with other eyes. I could observe that the movement’s intention has to be very clear so the message is also clear in the story. Watching woodsman that has basically no text, made me pay more attention to the movements and expressions than the verbal storytelling and made me realize how embodying the ‘thing’ is key. Sometimes I get too stuck on the text and interpreting it rather than embodying and I end up lacking in movement. The expression of feelings and the thoughts are clear when movements are intentional and consequently the inner reflects to the outer. The sense of unity is also something that was very much present in the play and made me observe the difference of the focus versus the surroundings and how 1. They have different moods and rhythm 2. How they interact with each other.
Plays that have an ensemble all the time on the stage creating the set/mood/sounds requires many layers of intentions and movements. The same actor that plays a character also is part of the ensemble and their body language changes completely when they represent these two. For instance when the ensemble became the woods, they held up sticks and had their bodies in all kinds of shapes, to be bushes or trees, moving in unity. It is going to be hard to watch a play and not go ‘aha, that is press’, or any other action drive. Action drives really indicate the intention of the thought and with the combination of the 7 tensions of the body, it really shows the emotions portrayed by the actors. The difference of how the woodsman moved from a child (playing with balance, hight, being light and with exaggerated gestures), an adult (strong posture, purposeful and mature movements, chest goes first) and then a man made of wood (robotic, heavy, arms and legs elongated leading the way) told who he was, without a need of verbal storytelling.