It's Guts.

After our visit to Rome, we scrambled to finish our papers - our final academic assignment. We finished all of our normal classes so we could begin our final 8 days in a workshop with Joe Fenner of the Scuola Teatro Dimitri. He specializes in Physical Theatre, so we were eager to see what he had up his sleeve.

The first few days were rough. We had a bit of a problem communicating with him. It was not clear what his goals were and what our goals were. It became easier when we did a few improvisational exercises as an entire group, and then did small group improvisations. We ended up spending our days with him working on these scenes or skits and cleaning them up to be presented on our last day.

We started many of these skits walking neutrally around the space, and then we began to take on different characters and situations. In total we had about 7 scenes "The Elevator", "The Hospital", "The Pterodactyls", "Siyahamba", "The Bird", "The Vulgars", and "I Will Write This Paper". We serendipitously created a lot of similar themes - the group and the individual, judgments, the primitive, the intellectual - they were all based on physical reactions. It was hard, but we started to learn to have sharp reactions with our bodies. Often times, we had to simplify our scenes because our improvisations would be 'too psychological'.

Joe said "This is not about analyzing texts. It cannot be too psychological. It's guts". He taught us about "feeling our emotions" with small physical movement, sensations, interactions, listening to sounds, feeling objects, paying attention to parts of the body: "Where do I feel fear? Joy?". And using respiration.
It is a different approach to improvisation. When it's rehearsed and cleaned, it becomes very stylized. The heavy attention we paid to physical reactions and our timing made it almost like a modern version of Commedia dell'Arte.

We were afraid our final performance was not going to go over well because all of our scenes were absurd. As it turns out, however, it was very well received. I think this is because we were working together as a complete ensemble for the last time. I felt that right before our performance when we were warming up. Despite the challenges and frustration, we pulled together a show that we worked hard on, and I think it paid off.