Thoughts on What to Train

In a recent email conversation with Ben Spatz from Urban Performance Research, I combined the responses to several of his questions into four main points that I think performance training ought to address. In my previous post on Where to Train, I emphasized formal Pre-Arranged Movement Patterns and I suggest re-reading it before reading this one. There are three more elements that I think are vital.

1. Structure:

Pre-Arranged Movement Patterns in any given art serve to inculcate that art’s master view of how the body should move. This structuring is very important as it conditions a base level of stage presence and psychophysical engagement. Many approaches, both martial and performative, pass on to step 2 Interactivity, without properly dealing with this vital foundation.

2. Interactivity:

Training needs to include work with a partner that is truly interactive. Tasks and games predicated on real actions and proportional responses are vital to creating the ability to read, respond and propose credible actions on stage. Acrobatics and and combat sports are great objective tests of interactivity. Approaches more concerned with fiction than with form or with role-playing over physical response are doubly dangerous – they make you think you are training interactivity and they prevent you from creating real physical responses that can be transposed into the fiction of the performance situation.

3. Work Against Resistance:

Tempering, xiulian in Chinese, is required to make the performer able to resist the stressors of performance. Tasks that require physical, mental and emotional calm despite their increasingly complex and fatiguing nature are required.

4. Word Towards Refinement:

The other side of tempering is working with limited resistance in order to create awareness, flow and efficiency. Once the gross motor functions of the body have been mapped by structuring exercises and once they’ve been put into a partner relationship and under stress, performers are sufficiently self aware to work on subtle detail and to bring an increased efficiency to their training. Somatic approaches such as Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement and Taijiquan’s Push Hands can be very useful as refinement techniques, but only once the initial sweat and body mapping has been done in the phases of structure and resistance.

~ by Daniel Mroz on March 3, 2008.