![]() ![]() She began researching processes that had been developed elsewhere, and cites Vanessa Ewan from the Central School of Speech and Drama, who had been writing about using the choreography of on-set fight-coordination as a safety framework for stage intimacy. In the absence of existing guidelines, O’Brien worked with her performers to develop their own. Photograph: Sven Arnsteinīut this was 2014, when the global conversation around consent and rehearsal room exploitation was not what it is now. Ita O’Brien leading one of her workshops. Given the delicate nature of the subject matter, she recognised the risk of a careless process which could expose her performers to emotional distress or psychological injury. “I was very aware of creating a rehearsal space that would keep my actors safe,” she says. Within less than a decade she had expanded her practise again, as a director and deviser, and was creating a work about the dynamics of abuse. She trained as a professional dancer and, 10 years in, retrained as an actor. O’Brien was brought to this line of work by the instinct for safety and protection in her own creative practice. ![]() Many people have real difficulty in being able to say ‘no’ for themselves, even when a ‘no’ is needed.” “Practicing saying ‘no’ is powerful, and bringing it into the work is empowering. The value of the exercise is not just a detail of physical expression, she says: it’s an ends in itself. A ‘no’ from your head is the intellectual ‘no’ – a clear ‘no’, from considering all the aspects of something, mentally.” A heart ‘no’ is a love ‘no’, being able to say ‘no’ from love. O’Brien has observed patterns from her practitioners: “A belly ‘no’ is an emotional ‘no’, and there’s an aspect to it of a wailing, or grief. In this, the actor physicalises a refusal emanating from their belly, heart or head. It’s nuanced choreography, but it also facilitates a conversation between the production and the actors that affirms trust in what’s taking place.īut what does that actually look like in practice? O’Brien describes one powerful technique as the “practice of saying ‘no’”. ![]() Currently touring Australia, where the Geoffrey Rush defamation trial has dominated headlines in the past week, she was originally scheduled to present only in Sydney and Auckland – but Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne and Adelaide were added by demand.Īn intimacy director or coordinator encourages the navigation of a scene, through the negotiation of an actor’s boundaries of physical touch. Rare is the production that doesn’t recruit a specialist coordinator to choreograph fight scenes, or dance sequences – and in 2018, it’s unsurprising that O’Brien’s intimacy workshops are proving popular. “There’s no sense of the understanding of the damage done to that person,” O’Brien says. It was a professional and personal humiliation from which Schneider – only 19 when the movie was filmed – never recovered. She quotes Bertolucci who said, “I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress.” They didn’t choreograph it,” says O’Brien. “Even though what he was doing wasn’t real, she cried real tears. In a 2013 interview, Bertolucci described that an infamous sequence, in which Marlon Brando’s character anally rapes Schneider’s, was largely improvised. Intimacy director Ita O’Brien, who is in Australia in November to lead a series of workshops. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |