The second part of my post about Restless is a conversation with one of the co-founders and head of Marketing of the theatre company – Kristin Bacheva. As found on her Instagram page, she is “a theatre-maker or curious human that loves aesthetics”. Recently, she published her first book – a collection of poems in Bulgarian and English. My role in this project of hers is that I made simple illustrations, based on my initial emotions provoked by the writings. However, this is the theme for another blog post, which I will write as soon as I get my hardcopy and start bragging about it to my family.
I hope you have some midnight snack with you as you read our lovely conversation.
What is the theme of the play?
- Rest[less] is a movement piece dissecting the phenomenon of burnout through the curious lense of a beehive.
What do you love about physical theatre, and why did you choose it over traditional theatre?
- As I come from a dance background, I found in physical theatre a level of expression that resonates with who I am as a performer, and I kept choosing it over traditional theatre throughout my studies, which led me even into specializing in it deeper.
How do you use movement to express an idea or a feeling?
- Firstly I use imagination to access the movement, which then expresses the idea or feeling that I am trying to tell.
Do you use Stanislavski’s questions when building a character?
- Depending on the type of role I am working on. If it is a movement piece, I use physical acting methodologies (such as Michael Chekhov or Viewpoints), if I am working on building a character for a naturalistic play, I’d probably ask for Stanislavski’s help.
So what methods do you use when portraying an animal?
I’d use Chekhov’s Imaginary body exercise.
I would study the animal first- how it walks, sits, lies, eats, runs, communicates and all those details. After I’ve watched a couple of videos on YouTube as I tend to pick exotic animals that are not around us every day, I’d try to imagine the animal in front of me very precisely. Next, I’d imagine stepping into what I’ve imagined and physically make a step and get into the animal. Then I’d feel around how it is to be this animal and go for a walk around, exploring how it behaves and so on. Once I feel like I have it 100% (and in case I need to tone it down to a human character that behaves like a panther for example) I’d go down to 50% meaning I’d internalize the animal 50% and leave 50% of it to show on the outside, then 20% where physically the animal is not visible at all but I’m still imagining everything on the inside at a 100%. Here we talk about body versus mind relationship or the psycho-physical.
Actually, the methods I used to build my character from rest[less] are the same. Although as my character is not real but built from my imagination, inspired by bees, I had to do some additional imagination work to create it before I step into it. And I only tuned it down to 60% when performing. I imagined myself in a cacoon being born for the first time (this is another exercise from Jaques Lecoq but slightly altered). I only imagined it, while lying on the floor. Then I saw my character ‘Bubar’, a weird looking bee with very long and a lot of body hair/bee fluff, massive antennas and skinny bones but with very big hands and feet. And after that, I went on doing the exercise from above until I had Bubar in my body.
Chekhov’s Imaginary Body Exercise is a new concept for me. I’ve studied Stanislavski’s System in both theory and practice in my old uni. I will try to combine both methods for my animal study, and hopefully, the others will be able to tell that I am a … well, we will see in a week.
Bread and Butter,
Salt and Peaches,
Weetaibix and Oat Milk (because dairy is bad for your skin duh),
Nikol