This week, By Jove artistic associate Susanna Dye provides some insight into the start of her process for the company’s upcoming project…
To begin our Season of Violent Women, By Jove are staging the British premiere of Margaret of Anjou. The play text has been pieced together from Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy and Richard III by Professor Elizabeth Schafer and Philippa Kelly, who have extracted the complete narrative arc following the rise and fall of this formidable figure, the She-Wolf of France. We see Margaret adopt the roles of feisty seductress, scheming queen, a ruthless killer, a bold political player in the War of the Roses, a devoted mother and an old crone. As By Jove’s movement director, I will be working on the physicality of this production. I will be collaborating with director David Bullen and dramaturg Sara Reimers, who are interested in exploring violence in ways that feel relevant to contemporary audiences. We want to address the violence we encounter in our own lives and how it shapes our behaviour and experience of the world. David and Sara asked me to think about how we could approach this through movement – so we arranged an exploratory workshop with some of the actors involved.
The three performers who participated were Adi Lev, who will be playing the part of Margaret in our production, actress Ella Garland and performance artist Heoweon Yi. We found each other at our rehearsal space in South London, on one of the hottest days of the summer, already warmed up and sweaty from our journeys, and ready to get moving! Before we dived right in with the physical work, I opened the session with a discussion so that we could share our ideas about the different types of violence we see in the play, and also how we relate this to our own lives and experiences.
Firstly, we noticed that violence surfaces in language. For Margaret of Anjou, Margaret’s own language becomes increasingly abusive and throughout the play and the text is crammed with repeated images of butchery and carnality, ferocious animals, revenge and spilt blood. This relates strongly to the way we experience violence in our millennial lives through hostile posts on social media and a constant intrusion of news headlines. I could identify here that I would need to find a way of exploring how our bodies and our physicality is shaped by this violent language.
Secondly, we decided that we wanted to emphasize how violence causes ruptured relationships and the way that war and death tear people apart: Margaret is separated from her allies, her lover and her son. Our challenge in this workshop would be to start physicalizing this concept of ‘violent separation:’ exploring interesting ways of bringing bodies together, creating bonds and then tearing them apart.
Initial discussion over, it was time to limber up and put these thoughts into actions! I set up the first exercise exploring the language of the play text. I had printed and cut out violent words and phrases from the text which we read out to each other as a stimulus for the movement improvisation. I asked the performers to respond physically to the words that they were hearing, observing the kinds of movements and sensations that they triggered, inviting responses that were both literal and abstract. The exercise allowed the performers to really familiarise themselves with the kinds of images that make up the violent world of Shakespeare’s pen which started to become ingrained in the way they felt and moved in their bodies. We experimented with these movements in different ways, developing them into scores, repeating them, making them big and exaggerated; filling the space or making them smaller, more internalised, even adding spoken word to the mix. Through this process the actors were able to explore a whole spectrum of different physical responses. For me, I was able to be the outside eye and think about how the audience might read what the actors were experiencing and to find ways of captivating their interest through contrasts and juxtapositions. I wanted to give instructions that produced mechanical repetitive sequences to evoke our relationship with violence and modern technology. I could see a movement language emerging that communicated the restrained, computer typing, button pushing presentations of violence in our 21st century lives.
For the second half of the workshop we explored the theme of violent separation culminating in a contact improvisation exercise in which the three performers were constantly forming partnerships and attachments, moving through and around each other’s bodies as if they were one being, only to have these partnerships disrupted by the third person. I loved the way these bodies, slithering over, under and through each other created the chaos of the battlefield through their twisting and contorting limbs.
One of the ways that really helped this idea to take shape was when I instructed the partner who had been left bereft to remain still, frozen in the mould of their partner’s absence like a shell or an imprint left behind: incomplete and unstable.
By the end of the workshop, Adi, Ella and Heoweon had given it their all- sweaty and exhausted they had been on a journey through some dark and disturbing emotional landscapes and had given their bodies over to the tensions and contortions that violence provokes. Overall, the workshop had been a productive early exploration into our physical relationship with violence, producing some intriguing raw material. The improvisations have given me the chance to see what reads well for the audience and will feed into the work I do as a movement director, with the full cast of Margaret of Anjou to create the movement language of our production. I walked away feeling stimulated by thoughts of how to develop these ideas further, and the exciting things to come in this meaty creative project!
Margaret of Anjou opens on 1st November and runs until the 6th at the Gallery on the Corner, Battersea. There is limited availability – so get your tickets here.
