Drama Tuesday - Closely observed detail

Creating role is paying attention to the details.

Feet on a plane - See observations below.

When we step into role we draw on our powers of observation of human behaviour. We use our bodies to symbolically represent someone else. We overlay our physical self with details of others drawn from lives observed. 

I was struck by this idea when waiting in a call to jury duty recently ( Jury duty is another whole topic to explore. Remember the television drama that became a film Twelve Angry Men and female versions.)

Every Monday about 500 West Australian citizens of a certain age are called to be balloted onto the weeks juries for the District Court. With nervousness we sat waiting to be called. As I was sitting there (trying to read my novel but unable to do so) I was fascinated by the ways different people placed their feet. It occurred to me that the detail of feet told stories about those people. 

Some had their feet firmly placed on the ground, knees spread open, exuding a kind of open confidence. 

Others had feet and knees tightly bound together. 

Yet another one had one foot twisted and resting on the other. 

Someone has one foot placed ahead of the other implying they are about to spring forward. 

There’s the foot tappers. Twitchers. Shufflers. 

A long time ago I read an author’s notebook that was full of observed details with the advice to keep a similar notebook. And that habit of looking stuck with me. Maxine Green talks of wideawakeness to the senses. 

There’s an important point for us in drama. We draw on these closely observed details to represent the roles we create. The term is psychophysical acting. By that we mean using a physical form ~ gesture, posture, facial expression or vocal inflection ~ to re-present to others the imagined or interpreted psychological state of the role. 

That’s a big set of words for a simple process that is sometimes intuitively felt and realised. At the heart is the choices we make to move beyond the default language of our everyday bodies to show the role we become. 

Theory has meaning when we clothe it in an immediate example. In this observational vein I am sitting in Dubai Airport waiting  for QF8123 to Istanbul (heading to a conference run by Cagdas Drama Derniki, the Turkish drama education association.) Crowded. A middle aged wife has an argument with her husband about duty free when he asks her to hand over his passport and boarding pass. 

An impassive African woman swathed in blankets, huddled against cold. 

Despite the heat in the waiting area she is shivering cold. 

Beside her an Asian woman slumps in fitful sleep. 

On QF8123 to Istanbul, there was more to observe.

QF8123 has a completely different vibe. 

Passengers with a sense of swagger trading in entitlement. 

Three hooded young women are shuffled to upgrades seats. 

In the vacant space a forward young man in a black tracksuit gathers three or four flight blankets and makes a nest his bare feet swung up into the arrest wriggling and intruding into the aisle.  

There is a young couple beside me. He has a long flowing scrappy beard and he wears traditional long over shirt and loose fitting trousers. He pulls skinny legs up and bare feet scrunch up on the seat beside me. There is a strong smell of male urine. His wife is heavily closed. Together they share a vegan meal. When the other meals arrive he takes his wife’s meal, cherry picks,  and tucks into the biscuits and non vegan cheese. 

There’s a tour group from Hong Kong with an officiously efficient team leader with an autocratic iPad. 

A young African woman with heavily braided henna red hair sits so the ropes of hair cascade in the space between seats and over the vegan meal. 

The statuesque woman sitting in front of me struggles to collapse the handle of her roll on case. It won’t fit in the overhead locker (which Emirates quaintly call the hat rack). So she starts taking other people’s luggage out and moves it. No polite asking. Entitled. 

Look. The world is waiting for the stories you tell.