This week I revisited my extended essay and decided to narrow its scope due to insufficient results in my workshops to fit the larger idea I was behind. I originally planned to investigate if Grotowski's method of the via negativa was a way to improve the actor's connection between their inner impulse and outer reactions, to reduce the lag time between the psychological and the physical.

From the get-go I knew that 20 hours would not be enough time for the process to actually yield any concise results, because from what i understood in Grotowski's book, this is a process which takes years to sink in and show any significant changes in the actors. Even though this was true, I did observe some significant changes in terms of physical tuning, and the exploration of the body by the actors.

The actors went mainly through a process of exploration, mainly through improvisation. This improvisation had no meaning behind it (in terms of creating a scene), the actor would just move through the stage using different body levels, efforts, paces, and perform different actions, but at no point in time should they think what they were going to do next, that was the whole point of the exercise, for them to experience a constant flow of actions that would emerge one after the other without any kind of pre-meditation.

In the process, problems emerged, and there was a lack of fluency, also called articulation, between the movements, this was mainly due to the actors stopping and thinking what to do next, which variation should they use, or which level had they not used, etc, etc. So I tried to create an environment where they didnt feel inhibitions, where they wouldn't fear doing what their bodies told them to. By doing embarrasing things like sticking the tongue out in front of everybody and opening your mouth as wide as you can, or screaming at the top of their lungs, and generally just trying to build up confidence, and a workspace where we all felt at ease with our bodies. This helped a lot in terms of energy and some articulation, yet there were some technical aspects to it aswell. Both the psychological and the physical had to be tweaked for the exercise to work.

After some exercises so that the body wouldnt injure itself when doing differnet ranges of actions, i though the process had taken the right direction. Improvisations became more fluid, articulated, and after the short sessions of this improvisations the actors were exhausted, yet some were extatic, they actually liked being in that "state" in which they just let themselves go to what their bodies desired, even for a few seconds.

It is a shame the workshops were so far apart form ach other, and momentum was lost, I really thought we were getting somewhere, and am really eager to keep looking into this and maybe start a workshop with people who are interested in some time.

To what extent can the results of the workshop be measured? The objective appreciation (articulation) only shows if the bodies are tuned and the actor can think fast, but it does not necessarily mean that the actor is in a state of  complete psycho/physical connection.