COLLISIONS
A FESTIVAL OF
PRACTICE RESEARCH
IN PERFORMANCE
26-28 SEPTEMBER 2017
ON THE FLOOR – THE LIVING ANALYSIS OF MUSICAL THEATRE APPLIED TO THE INTEGRATED MUSICAL
Sally Rapier
Tuesday 26th September, 3:45pm
In the workshop, Sally will be working with actor(s) exploring material from SOUTH PACIFIC through what she terms the Living Analysis – applying aspects of breath, tone, presence, physical dynamic and scale and its relationship to the inner felt experience – as a new way of opening up possibilities for performance, in a singular active analysis which privileges the actor as final auteur in the creative process and aims for those ineffable moments of apotheosis we identify as the distinguishing outcome of the poetics of the genre.
My Research:
Sally’s development of The Living Analysis offers a different way of working from conventional script analysis. It is a singular active analysis and genre-specific approach, exploring the distinctive properties and congruent dialogisms of the musical’s theatrical synthesis to open enhanced possibilities in performance. It offers a focus for the development of new directorial or actors’ practices to enable individual responses to different shows and production contexts, beyond those already recognized. In the process, it acknowledges the actor as final auteur in the process of creating musical theatre as performed text.
Sally Rapier is a professional director/choreographer with extensive experience of teaching musical theatre actors in training at leading programmes both in the UK and overseas. She currently contributes to musical theatre programmes at Rare Studios, Liverpool and Liverpool John Moores University. Along with Dr Nick Phillips she is part of Musical Theatre Lab UK ‘in pursuit of excellence in musical theatre performance.’
[The musical in any mode remains] Insistently and exuberantly performative, already aware of itself as performance, even in those musicals that observe fourth wall realism in the spoken scenes….Audiences embrace and understand this curious essential bumpiness between modes……gleefully divided and contradictory (Wolf 2011: 3)
Wolf, S. (2011), Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical, New York, Oxford University Press.
In relation to the portrayal of character, the artificially intensified emotional state [of Number Time] is read as a means by which performers may transcend their book characters, externally projecting the character’s interior motivations through song, and [simultaneously] affording a heightened recognition of themselves as both performer and character within the world of the musical. (McMillin 2006:42)
McMillin, S. (2006), The Musical as Drama, Princeton, Princeton University Press.