VII - Following the joy
I celebrated joy in acting while inspiring kids through storytelling and improv and reflected on powerful theatre.
Last week I was very busy visiting schools, storytelling and performing for Freshwater Theatre. Every now and then, in the Q&A there’s a kid who asks me “Why did you decide becoming an actor?” The first time I got the question it took me a while to think what to say, but now I have the answer locked and loaded: “Because it brings me joy”. And I always encourage them to pursue in life doing the things that brings them joy.
🧠 The Improv bit
Kids have great imagination that, as they grow old, they succumb to the harshness of reality. That is why we should encourage them to cherish it. During the participative shows I perform in primary and secondary schools, I always have kids from the audience coming up to the stage to play different roles.
One day, while performing Don Quijote, a girl came up to play Rocinante, Don Quijote’s horse. She looked at me and said, with a little bit of smugness, “No, I want to be a helicopter.” I said “Cool, let’s go!”. She was surprised that I took her offer and I could see her face lighting up because an adult was “yesanding” her. That day Don Quijote rode a helicopter instead of a horse. And it was fine because that helicopter was fuelled by joy.
This is just one small example of how improv has become an invaluable professional tool for me, especially when dealing with unpredictable children.
Improv needs to be a staple in schools. My past experience running workshops for kids in Spain showed me just how much more rewarding and surprising they can be compared to adult sessions. Improv directly engages their sense of play, ensures they feel heard, and gets them working together.
🪑 The Playback Theatre (PT) bit
The PT intensive that I did earlier this month with Gerry Orkin still echoes in my head. Specially the part of conducting.
Taking on the conductor role in PT became part of my journey in 2017, building on four years of prior experience on the actor’s chair. It's a hat I've worn since, alternating between conducting, acting, and sporadically musician. My PT leadership training provided significant learning about the conducting role, and I’ve talked with colleagues around the complex issue of having to conduct tellers whose views, such as bigotry, challenge our values. I'm saving that topic for another time, though.
As a facilitator I feel comfortable conducting and holding the space because I’m kind of used to it. The real challenge in conducting is in the interviews with the tellers prior to handing the reenactment to the performing team.
What truly turned on a bulb on inside my head on Gerry's workshop, given his 40 years of expertise, was a couple of tips. I got the feedback of some of my questions being a bit irrelevant to the story, which made me realise the need for more intentional questions, and reducing the number of it. The big takeaway was the strategy of framing questions as statements and allowing the teller to respond. Instead of asking, “How did you feel in that moment?” trying to say, “You must've felt [insert emotion here]” which invites the teller to confirm or correct elaborating.
I’m looking forward to sanding the edges of my playback theatre conducting and I wonder how I will be in a decade or two.
🎭 The Theatre bit
Maria Goiricelaya's play, Altsasu, is a theatrical piece inspired by a controversial real-life incident. It spirals around the events of the 15th of October of 2016, when a bar brawl in the Basque town of Altsasu, involving local youth and off-duty civil guards, led to significant legal repercussions.
To provide some necessary context for those unfamiliar with Spain: the Civil Guard is one of the country's two main law enforcement bodies. However, particularly in areas with strong regional identities and languages such as Catalonia or the Basque Country, the Civil Guard still carries the heavy weight of being a symbol of Francisco Franco's dictatorial regime and its inherent brutality.
While the events might suggest a Brechtian drama, Goiricelaya took a remarkably different approach. Her style is highly objective, meticulously presenting facts and testimonies from all perspectives. Despite its unbiased nature, the play faced calls for a ban from some right-wing Spanish political parties. Altsasu does an excellent work featuring both Basque culture and language, using a journalistic approach alternating monologues and personal scenes, presenting the human perspective; and court scenes, presenting the facts.
I found it particularly enjoyable because it was both a compelling play and an educational experience about the incident.
🗣️ Shout-out!
In this week’s episode of “Improvisers that do cool things”, I want to shout-out to Rosalind Gregoire who happens to be an artist as well. And by art I don’t mean just improv.
She is the designer and one of the minds behind one of the best improv shows I saw last year, Allegory of the Cave, where improvisers play in front and behind a screen playing with shadows.
As a fine artist, Rosalind’s work is inspired by folklore and nature. I’m amazed of the amount of details she can add to her carving prints. Definitely, check her shop and her instagram.
📆 What is coming up
I’m going to be playing again with Shuffle on the Hoopla Pre-Party at The Miller, near London Bridge, on the 7th of June. I had a lot of fun last time, and I can’t wait to be playful again. Get your tickets.
And the following day, on the 8th of June, you have the chance to catch London Playback Theatre at the Rosemary Branch Theatre. Get your tickets.
📚 🎮 🎥 📺 The geeky dessert
I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was embarking myself in the adventure of reading J.R.R. Tolkien book’s in English for the first time.
After finishing with The Hobbit, I fancied watching the movie adaptation… if only wasn’t so bloated. Out of greed, Peter Jackson was commissioned three movies adapting Tolkien’s book. The problem was… the book is even shorter than The Fellowship of the Ring, the first book on The Lord of the Rings saga. The result was a mess introducing new plots and characters. You have to be very good if you want to add content cohesive with a cult piece of the fantasy genre. The overall consensus was that these movies weren’t up to par to The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Here comes Maple Films to the rescue. The Ohio based studio decided, out of love for the original source, to make a fan edit of Peter Jackson’s trilogy in order to keep it as faithful to the book as possible. After watching it, I can say they did an extraordinary job. They trimmed nine hours from the trilogy footage to fit J.R.R. Tolkien’s vision in roughly four hours. You can absolutely feel the dedication of sticking to the source material. It surely turned off my bitterness towards Peter Jackson’s original work, showing that the heart was there, only drowned in corporate ambition.
This project is already ten years old but, if you know how to sail the seven seas, you can find it easily.
✨ That’s all folks ✨
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Ferran Luengo