Shakespeare on Toast | Playing with Sticks & Speeches | Explore Shakespeare with Ben Crystal | 3mins @shakespeareontoast | Uploaded April 2021 | Updated October 2024, 3 hours ago.
This is a listening exercise, inviting you to physically respond to the stick’s movement. It aids proprioception, helps improve balance, focus, and can bring a lightness to a familiar speech or scene.
This is a very quick, and straight-forward way in to a very simple-looking exercise, that also has the potential for deeply complex exploration. There is infinite room to explore and refine, allowing your stick walk to become ever simpler.
It isn’t about keeping the stick balanced; the moments of pause that come when the stick falls are useful! A moment of off-balance can tip you out of your comfort zone, physically & vocally.
Notice what happens to your stick walk if your body doesn’t start as neutrally possible: what happens when you start off-balance?
I play the sticks in solo, as well as in pairs and trios and as many folx as are in the room (see Playing with Partners 3min film youtu.be/LI32jrMGecQ). Love playing with these exercises with music, often to artists like Steve Reich, Max Richter, Radiohead and Björk. Something that you can lose yourself in.
The music isn’t for dancing to: you’re simply taking a stick for a walk while music is playing, allowing the mood of the music to ripple through you.
When adding in Shakespeare, the stick can help lighten a speech that feels heavy, or stuck: this simple exercise changed my practice and approach to playing with the Bard’s words.
*****
The basic exercise:
- Start physically neutral, feet hip-width apart
- Balance the stick on the end of a finger
- Keep your heels and shoulders down
- Relax your jaw, keep your spare arm active and in flow
- Don’t try to stop the stick from falling
- When it does fall, catch it, hold a fixed point, then return to neutral, and start again
- Play some music, throw in some Shakespeare.
*****
Lineage
I first learnt this exercise from workshops with Theatre du Complicité, with Annabel Arden, & with Monika Pagneux, who learnt and taught it at Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris.
They said that at Lecoq, you are allowed to walk the stick in your 2nd year of training, having spent the 1st year acquiring the neutral body - and that’s IF you’re invited back for the 2nd year.
Over the last 20 years, the exercise has been redeveloped in my own explorations, as well as in Shaxplorations with the director Rob Gander, with Passion in Practice, with the actor and movement director Jennifer Jackson, with The Shakespeare Ensemble, and in schools, theatre companies, and community & professional acting workshops around the world.
Together with Joe England and Helen Foan, we three explored adapting these tools for neuro-diverse and disabled students in 2018-20.
I've explored these exercises with companies that have since taken the exercises in their own directions, including members of the Shakespeare Theatre Association, and the theatre companies Seven Stages Shakespeare and The Rude Grooms.
*****
Filmed by David Crystal
Throwing arm & Closed Captions c/o Hilary Crystal
@bencrystal
bencrystal.com
This is a listening exercise, inviting you to physically respond to the stick’s movement. It aids proprioception, helps improve balance, focus, and can bring a lightness to a familiar speech or scene.
This is a very quick, and straight-forward way in to a very simple-looking exercise, that also has the potential for deeply complex exploration. There is infinite room to explore and refine, allowing your stick walk to become ever simpler.
It isn’t about keeping the stick balanced; the moments of pause that come when the stick falls are useful! A moment of off-balance can tip you out of your comfort zone, physically & vocally.
Notice what happens to your stick walk if your body doesn’t start as neutrally possible: what happens when you start off-balance?
I play the sticks in solo, as well as in pairs and trios and as many folx as are in the room (see Playing with Partners 3min film youtu.be/LI32jrMGecQ). Love playing with these exercises with music, often to artists like Steve Reich, Max Richter, Radiohead and Björk. Something that you can lose yourself in.
The music isn’t for dancing to: you’re simply taking a stick for a walk while music is playing, allowing the mood of the music to ripple through you.
When adding in Shakespeare, the stick can help lighten a speech that feels heavy, or stuck: this simple exercise changed my practice and approach to playing with the Bard’s words.
*****
The basic exercise:
- Start physically neutral, feet hip-width apart
- Balance the stick on the end of a finger
- Keep your heels and shoulders down
- Relax your jaw, keep your spare arm active and in flow
- Don’t try to stop the stick from falling
- When it does fall, catch it, hold a fixed point, then return to neutral, and start again
- Play some music, throw in some Shakespeare.
*****
Lineage
I first learnt this exercise from workshops with Theatre du Complicité, with Annabel Arden, & with Monika Pagneux, who learnt and taught it at Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris.
They said that at Lecoq, you are allowed to walk the stick in your 2nd year of training, having spent the 1st year acquiring the neutral body - and that’s IF you’re invited back for the 2nd year.
Over the last 20 years, the exercise has been redeveloped in my own explorations, as well as in Shaxplorations with the director Rob Gander, with Passion in Practice, with the actor and movement director Jennifer Jackson, with The Shakespeare Ensemble, and in schools, theatre companies, and community & professional acting workshops around the world.
Together with Joe England and Helen Foan, we three explored adapting these tools for neuro-diverse and disabled students in 2018-20.
I've explored these exercises with companies that have since taken the exercises in their own directions, including members of the Shakespeare Theatre Association, and the theatre companies Seven Stages Shakespeare and The Rude Grooms.
*****
Filmed by David Crystal
Throwing arm & Closed Captions c/o Hilary Crystal
@bencrystal
bencrystal.com
