The Multifaceted Body

Multifaceted: having many facets or aspects. Many-sided, like a gemstone… Our bodies are multi-faceted gems, but how many of those facets do we make full use of? Ah, here is LUME’s Ana Cristina Colla to help us shine like a diamond, our many facets polished and gleaming.

Cris’s course offered an intense week of investigation into the body’s potential for physical expression. There was, of course, the intense physical training that LUME is renowned for: we jumped like frogs, coiled into scorpions, stretched to the skies whilst feeling our roots unite, stalked like panthers – and most fun of all, had intense, to-the-death, tiger battles.

Much of Cris’s work has been strongly influence by Butoh in general, and the work of Tadashi Endo in particular. Tadashi directed not only the renowned LUME ensemble work Shi-Zen 7 Cuias/Bowls, but also Cris’s solo work, Voce. So not surprisingly many of Tadashi’s Butoh exercises found their way into our week: we descended with painful slowness to the ground, taking ten minutes to make the journey; we swelled like balloons full of air, taking the outside in, then moving the inside out; we walked in slow-motion, containing worlds of emotion within.

Most of the week’s work focused on the physical expression of each individual body, but there was also work to raise whole-group awareness, as we stopped and started and formed clusters or lines or follow-my-leader snakes. There was also one memorable session where we worked on short improvisations in groups of three or four, aided by a bamboo screen, two stools and three birdcages. In this exercise, we took as our vocabulary a set of sound and movement motifs that we had developed from individual words of our own choice, these then abstracted and combined randomly to create what Augusto Boal would have called a concerto of sound and action. (And can I make a little aside here to say I’m surprised at how rarely I hear Boal’s name mentioned in Brazil – in Europe he is a legend, the most famous and admirable Brazilian theatre-maker, yet in Brazil itself his work seems to be rarely referenced.)

And talking of Boal and his methodologies – which infamously include many devices to blur the boundaries between ‘real life’ and ‘theatre, a session in The Multifaceted Body that I felt rather less comfortable with was a ‘hunter and hunted’ exercise in which a group of six or seven people chase after and restrain one person. For me, the bounds of safety and comfort were pushed too far, and I bowed out of the ‘game’. It did, though raise interesting questions about how much of the material that we use in our theatre-making makes use of ‘real’ physical experiences of the body and how much invites us to imagine how something feels. In this case, people were really being restrained – it was a physical experience which they were invited to then respond to. I suppose we each make our own decisions about whether we feel that is OK or not… 

Another aspect of the week’s work was the learning and singing of a selection of heart-warming songs from many and various homelands. My own contribution from my motherland was the Irish comic song Molly Malone. It was one of the highlights of my week to see and hear a roomful of Brazilians dancing and singing merrily: ‘Alive-alive-oh!  Alive-alive-oh! Crying cockles and mussels, alive-alive-oh!’

All-in-all, an inspirational and truly multi-faceted week!