Acting Coach

This has been a season of firsts.  First I was asked to present a lecture about modern flamenco for a course at Duke University.  Then an article I wrote about foreigners in flamenco in 1998 has been reprinted on a web site run by an important New York flamenco guitarist.  Then just this past week I was asked to coach an actress who has to dance flamenco in character in a play.  I retired from performing over a year ago and, the entire 12 years I was most actively involved with flamenco, I never got asked to do anything but perform as part of a group of dancers.  They always needed someone to round out their number, but I was never under the illusion that I was  anyone's first choice as a dancer.

The play is Tennessee William's Summer and Smoke, a two-act play that I am not familiar with.  Set in 1916, one of the characters is a Mexican flamenco dancer.  (We won't go into the historical accuracy of this--because it is wacked.)  Let's just say I willfully suspended disbelief and was able to coach the actress who is supposed to dance a flamenco number while engaged in a lengthy and emotional dialog with her boyfriend.  Yeah, right!  The director also wanted some sort of music to play during this scene.  So here the poor actress, who not only is not a flamenco dancer but is not a dancer of any kind has to dance and deliver dialog over a musical accompaniment.  I knew I had my work cut out for me.  I cannot teach anyone, not even a professional dancer, to dance flamenco in a few hours.  The technique alone would take a professional several weeks to master (at least), and this is before learning any choreography.  I knew I had to take a different tack with this amateur actress who was not a dancer.  (And, yes, this is a local community theater company.)

I read the scene before going to tonight's rehearsal and frankly did not know how the director would direct the scene.  The stage directions that are part of the script work against the ideas I had for how the dance should be integrated into the scene.  I also didn't know what to do about the music.  The director said he had selected some possible pieces, but that I should bring some of my own as well.  I knew I wasn't going to have the dancer performing traditional flamenco so I wanted to steer clear of recognizable canonical flamenco music.  It would be too obvious that the actress was not a flamenco dancer.  So I chose a solo guitar work by a respected traditional Gypsy flamenco guitarist, what he called a "fantasy" that had the correct flamenco feel, but wouldn't require anything traditional in terms of dancing.  Next I decided that I wouldn't have the actress do any steps nor much set choreography.  Best to have her come in strong with something that involved the upper body and just walking on stage.  I decided to use the large flamenco shawl that is a traditional accessory of female flamenco dancers.  It is large, eye-catching and not so hard to manipulate that the actress couldn't be using it, moving around the stage and engaging in an extensive dialog with her male partner.  Also, the shawl could be used as an object of seduction.  The fringes can be draped seductively across the face of the male actor and she can even flip the shawl over his shoulders and trap him with it.  In the end, cued by a particular line of the text, the dancer can then drop the shawl and simply walk away from her soon to be former lover, disappointed and defeated by his lack of response to her attempts to seduce and even entrap him into marriage with her.  Yeah, the shawl can be used to communicate all of this in amplified fashion that will be totally legible even from the back row.  The actress is rather tiny and slight and, because of her young age, doesn't have a lot of emotional projection yet.  The shawl should make her every movement larger and more emotionally charged and can be linked to the dialog as need be.

I haven't acted since I was in junior school so it was a bit alien to have the actors communicating verbally rather than through their bodies, as we do in dance.  Hopefully, by working with this production, I can introduce a more integrated total body approach to acting that will make the productions of this local theater group more engaging for the audience.  Its kind of fun to throw a dancer, who is all non-verbal, into the midst of a totally text based group of actors and see what happens.  If the results are good, perhaps there will be opportunities to work with this director again on a different project.  So far, so good.  Opening night in August 28th.  Still a long way to go, but a lot of time before we have to get there.