Rhythm in Acting and Performance

The diversity of this conference reflects its theme. Perspectives on rhythm come from actors, musicians, medical doctors, ecologists, anthropologists, sociologists, teachers, and performance makers. Thirty-three contributors share their work, thoughts, practices, and perspectives on ‘rhythm’. The space of this review does not allow for an acknowledgment of every offering, but I share some of my own witnessing of the event which might give a flavour of its richness. Morris’s book Rhythm in Acting and Performance (Morris, 2017) provided the starting point for the conference.

‘Rhythm is what unites us’, Carla Fonseca tells us. This opening gambit and keynote admits reassuringly that ‘To begin is always a process of passing through fear’ (Fonseca, cited in Morris, 2021).

Fonseca takes us into the homes and streets of Buenos Aires where her students creatively embody the rhythmic realities of lockdown life; recovering their bodies which have been forgotten, the ‘lost records of singular feelings’ so that they may ‘build new memories and gestures to go on with life’ in a reorganisation of synergies mid-pandemic. We see a film of her students in their bathtubs, kitchens, and roof tops playing with ordinary objects like shoes, lemons, balls which are repurposed to surprise bodily sensation, to re-enliven the ‘real’ body from the screen body, to break it free from the imposed cycles of movement from house to screen, to street, to mask. Fonseca describes the perceptual emergency brought about by the pandemic and she tells us about the urgent need for play, to bring rhythm back into bodily sensation and into the streets which have been emptied of their hustle and bustle and where 2 metres distance empties the parks. She tells us that ‘measurement and distance can be a moment of encounter’.

Eilon Morris is our guide in this maze of rhythmic encounters, expertly nudging us through the conference’s ‘parts’ as he has organised them: from Defining Rhythm, though Inner and Outer Rhythms, into Structure and Spontaneity, opening to rhythms of Ecology and Consciousness, grounding rhythms in Words, Text, Meaning and Form and finally teetering on rhythm’s potential in Technology and Contemporary practices. Like Fonseca’s students we create our own ‘desire paths’ through the conference – ‘paths & tracks made over time by the wishes and feet of walkers, especially those paths that run contrary to design or planning. Free-will ways.’ (Macfarlane, 2018).

Stephanie Arsoska suggests that our acting and performance students can tread their own desire paths by moving from the longer, durational exercises common in studio-based practice towards micro-practices of two to five minutes as a way of sustaining training in a digital format. And whilst we celebrate the many up-sides of online training we lament the loss of ‘edge lands’ – the changing-room conversations, the post-rehearsal cup of tea, the bumping into colleagues and students in corridors: the possibility for unexpected exchanges as micro-moments of recovery, recuperation, balance. As a group, we speak up for the rights of our students to have live, studio-based training as we, perhaps, enter a new movement of resistance – we will not blindly accept online training as the new norm.

Cass Fleming’s paper on Suzanne Bing, a founding member of Jacques Copeau's Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, reminds us of the live body, where play invites the performer into a whole-body experience ‘that enables body-mind integration…Bing’s form of creative play was rooted in movement…always inseparably connected to what she defined as “the inner feeing of rhythm” and a specific form of “hidden musical feeling”’ (Fleming, cited in Morris, 2021). Fleming tells us that Bing’s contribution to actor training has been historically overlooked, another forgotten woman – an overridden rhythm which back-seated her behind Copeau and erased her from the canon.

Rhythms of liveness makes visible the invisible or forgotten. Heidi Feldmen brings into the light the extraordinary work of Victoria Santa Cruz who conceived of ‘rhythm as “the eternal organizer”, a cosmic force, and the key to human well-being’ (Feldmen, 2021). An Afro-Peruvian choreographer, composer, and activist, Santa Cruz created ‘Discovery and Development of Interior Rhythm,’ based on rhythmic exercises that she designed to guide young Afro-Peruvian artists to reconnect with their embodied ‘ancestral memory.’ (Feldmen, cited in Morris, 2021). Olu Taiwo’s ‘return beat’: a circular flow which guides us back to ourselves and to our ancestral lineages always returns us home, to the body and its relationship with the earth. The ‘return beat’ compels us to excavate our ancestral ‘desire paths’, our free will ways, which have laid dormant, forgotten, erased or hidden even from ourselves. Sinead O’Connor, Mia DiChiaro and Katherine Hal’s Plant Dramas offered us ways of thinking alongside the natural world in lockdown, where we meet within ecological design and attune to more human and non-human rhythms…a ‘fizziness’ in the multitemporal where we are ‘synchronizing our innate place in nature, and our capacity for empathy with ecosystemic flux itself’ (O’Connor, cited in Morris, 2021).

Through Rudolf Laban’s Effort phrasing, Vanio Papadelli reminds us that we can perceive an immersive flow of nature within our bodies. We can ‘drop’ like cliff edges, spread like tree roots, circle in continuous smoothness with nature’s curves or rebound elastically within our fascia. We can feel the ‘punctuation of nature’s rhythms’ (Papadelli, cited in Morris, 2021) in alignment with our own. Paola Crespi’s expert interrogation of Laban’s approach to rhythm as 'rhuthmos', a 'form of flowing' invites us to consider Laban’s lemniscate as a continuous flowing of rhythm in the body from the interior (Effort) to exterior (Space) and vice versa. In my own offering, I guide participants into an exploration of how Laban’s Effort and Recovery proposes a re-evaluation of how we live in or out of balance with our personal needs, with others and our environments. ‘Recovery’ is the rhythm of a wish whereby ‘wishful and purposeful action combined with the hope of experiencing something outside the drudging monotony of our everyday occupations’ (Laban, n.d., p. 1) can shift us out of our lockdown doldrums and help us to recover some ‘lost but essential qualities…weakened in the everyday struggle of life’ (Laban, n.d., p. 7). We heave a collective sigh when we give pause to reflect on our losses and struggles in the pandemic.

Christina Fulcher asks us to write ourselves ‘permission slips’ on the quiet Sunday morning of the conference, parenting ourselves into practices of self-care through the gentle rhythms of yoga flow. We connect with ‘vital energy’ in prana which propels the mover from one posture to another and brings awareness of our inner rhythms into focus. My screen is full of the shining, bright faces of her students where clearly this practice, even via zoom, has helped them to maintain vitality, optimism, and a sense of belonging in their bodies. As Maxwell Sly remarked in his presentation on the ‘walking rhythms of mime theatre’, when an actor puts on a Commedia Dell’ Arte mask and begins to walk as a stock character with the familiar rhythm, ‘it’s like seeing an old friend or family member, the character just arrives’. We watch a video of ‘walks’ and each one in its own rhythm tells its story, each foot and stride leaving its imprint in the world.

Zoe Katsilerou guides us into slowing down, to deep listening through micro-somatic and imaginative responses in the body – to wait, to find our song, speech, thought, inside the stillness all around us. We put our effort into simply being, standing still and moving away from solutions and end-goals. We enter a process of paying attention through listening to ourselves and being attentive to others in a radiation of attention. She asks, ‘how do we cultivate space to reflect, to train actors in perceiving’ in the busy academy where, ‘showing’ and the ‘outwarding’ of skill is prized above all else?

As I slow down, I am brought back into an image, a rare video clip shared by Paul Allain of a Grotowskian performer who, in sublime stillness meets their voice somehow just beyond them in the empty space. Sung most tenderly and lightly, a weighty moment hung with exquisite tremor; the actor appeared almost transcended, a luminous glow surrounding them, a vessel for creative energy which emanated through their entire body. Allain asks ‘How do we experience digitally what is predicated on liveness?’ Through his work on ‘Physical Actor Training – an online A-Z’, he aims at ‘digitising the ephemeral’ (Allain and Camilleri, 2021).

Through other presentations we encountered histories of rhythmic practices and how they have provided a foundation for practitioner’s today: in Andrew Davidson’s presentation of the cross-overs between Jacques Dalcroze’s Eurhythmics and Ann Bogart and Tina Landau’s Viewpoints in his pedagogic practice; Mariko Anno’s interrogation of structure and freedom within the rhythmic patterns of Noh Theatre; Andy Cryer’s playful snapshot of practice with Shakespeare’s use of iambic structure. We contemplated contemporary practices of rhythm and were catapulted to what the training of tomorrow might look like with technological interventions from Konstantinos Bakogiannis and Anastasia Georgaki who suggest that technology can retransform the dialogue between dance and music through an interactive model which composes in real time automation, structurally related to dance – a kind of mo-cap for music and sound. Lithuanian Physical Theatre artist Judita Vivas asks ‘if and how our internal perception of rhythm changes when creative processes become digitised?’ through her solo digital performance. She examines the rhythmic transformations which occur before and during training, and performance.

This conference might have been a bumpy ride with so much toing and froing, but was balanced with reflection, listening and sensing, and asks us: what are the rhythms through which we become and are transformed, and how, in what ways can we know them? The conference embodied both ‘a sense of spacious listening’ (Arsoska) and in the words of Irene Fiordilino, Director of Scirocco Dance Theatre Company, the conference was a 'Rhythmiscovering: a shared journey into the source of human pulsing.’ ‘Rhythmiscovering’ – ‘is covering’ or ‘re-discovering’ or ‘rhythm-discovering’ – the many ways to consider rhythm as ‘human pulsing’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Juliet Chambers-Coe

Juliet Chambers-Coe is a PhD researcher at GSA/University of Surrey; Director of the Labanarium Resource & Network Centre (www.labanarium.com), Associate Artistic Director of The Makings of the Actor (www.themakingsactor.com) and Lecturer in Movement at E15 Acting School.