Spangler Studios Blog

Last weekend I was back in NYC, this time not for work but for personal development. I participated in an intense three-day performance, singing and meditation workshop called Another City led by Ben Spatz (website: www.urbanresearchtheater.com ). There were six other people, all from various backgrounds but with at least some experience in performance or singing. The meditation was not something we did separately, but seemed to be at the core of everything we did, without this being a spoken fact.

Over the three days, during our exercises and experimentations, we were encouraged to begin by finding first our own internal centeredness (again, without this being something spoken outloud, but that was apparent in what we did), then exploring our individual methods of expression, then relating our physical expression to the environment around us, followed by altering our movement and awareness to join with another person’s movements, and then with the movements of the entire group.

Each evening we would take what we had learned into the streets of the city, first attempting to blend in with other pedestrians, then finding a suitable space, we would “perform” our movement and singing structure in a way that was not aggressively directed at passerbys, but so that we could still be observed and heard.

What was interesting about this experience in relation to stop-motion, was this particular style of performance, of which we were just touching the surface, but that I could feel was a very powerful method of connecting with an audience. From what I experienced, it seemed that what was at the heart of this method was that the actor (or animator?) gets to a place where they are feeling something, experiencing something within themselves that is also not shut off. There is an awareness generated that is apparent from the outside, and this visible internal awareness is what an audience or viewer would be drawn to and be able to connect with, as if they were experiencing the movement, the scene and the mental state of the performer through the performers eyes.

Normally I am not comfortable when moving and making noise in a way that draws attention to strangers, but because of the way our comfort zones were gradually expanded during this workshop, and because we quickly formed a strong supportive bond as a group, I was able to relax and be expressive in the moment (though I have no idea what I looked like from the outside!). What I’m wondering, since the main focus of this blog is stop-motion animation, is how can this expressiveness and genuine awareness be applied to the slow performance of an animator?

I’ve often said that stopmo animation of a puppet is a meditative experience, or that it must be somewhat meditative to be successful. Still, I so often lose that connection with the puppet when the movement gains momentum in the wrong direction and it all becomes a mathematical scrambling to save the shot.

I think it could be very helpful to do more improvisational animation with a puppet, where the focus is conveying the awareness of the puppet. This would also probably require the least possible amount of watching the framegrabber playbacks. If you haven’t seen it yet, I felt very connected to the awareness of my screwhead test puppet in this improvised test where I made a strong effort to stay with the puppet and not get caught up in the external view as seen through the camera and computer playback:

Before I sign off, I would also like to add a note about how I became interested in this performance workshop. After coming across the website for urban research theater, I was able to read some of the personal observations written by Ben, and these writings are what drew me to wanting to learn more about Ben and his work or his methods of performance, and what led eventually to me signing up for the workshop. Just recently, in the August newsletter, I felt an especially strong connection to what he wrote about creating proper foundations when learning and discovering your own work, truly understanding it and what you are doing. To quote a section:

“…I want everything to be clear. No muddy steps. I catch myself stopping work on a particular thing, because it is difficult, and moving on. Okay, it’s not the end of the world, but I will make a note to go back to it. Nothing will be left undone, nothing will be skipped. Nothing will be created that does not have a solid foundation. I am tired of doing and seeing theater that does not know what it is made of, that does not know what it is. We will discover or create what performance is for us.

There are different kinds of knowledge, different levels and depths. It is not just a matter of doing but of process. When you discover something through your own searching, you own it in a different way than if someone teaches it to you. That’s why the creator of a craft, someone like O Sensai, is always on a different level than even the first generation of students. There is something unique in quality that comes from discovering your own work. It comes from thoroughness, from having to go down every road, reaching every dead end and turning around before finally discovering the way through. Ultimately this depth of understanding is irreplaceable…”

He was talking about theatre, live performance, but I feel the same way about film and animation, and feel that this speaks very directly about the creative place I am now and what matters to me now. Earlier this month I had even been discussing with friends how I felt that a natural progression of self-motivated and self-directed learning is what was lacking from my own understanding of film, animation and art in general, and that I was finally getting around to learning what I really needed to learn.

So, time to get back to the learning and say goodnight to the computer!

ps: to people who have left comments, if I haven’t yet responded, please forgive me as this has been a busy time, and thank you for writing. I love reading what you have to say and it encourages me to keep posting.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 9:05 pm and is filed under performance/theatre, animation theory, Stop-motion, Animation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.