On the 24th of May Farah Karim-Cooper and a team of actors carried out a workshop which explored the relationship between architecture and the body; in the context of diverse 21stcentury bodies and early modern Shakespearean texts. The workshop had summoned most of us with its theoretic appeal; but it ultimately encouraged us to expand beyond the theoretical by physically involving our bodies.
That morning us interns waited in the coffee shop above lecture theatre 2 for the actors to arrive, anxious because of a Spring hail that we feared might affect the day’s event. They arrived smiling and immediately stood out in a room of laptop-loomed lunch breaks. They sank into the space like imprints on clay: they looked around, walked slowly and purposefully. This was the first glimpse of the overarching lesson of the day: to embrace your environment.
Farah Karim-Cooper inaugurated the event in a talk which introduced concepts somehow equally cutting and undeniable. That space is always there; that the body too is always there. That perhaps therefore it is useful to explore spaces and bodies in relation to theatrical texts. Especially too: that these are not modern revelations and that the early modern theatre and audience regularly recognised their coexistence.
It was a shock to see a Shakespeare academic talk about something that was at the core of my experience: a recognition that we do not exist without bodies and that we cannot control the way our environments treat our bodies. As an asian, my environment constantly reminded me of what my body meant to the world through racist remarks. I had to live my life recognising this. And despite the starkness of my example, I think this applies to everyone. We all live in a shared world of bodies.
As part of his lesson about the importance of being present and accepting of the space we perform in, one of the actors described a colleagues’ performance of Macbeth’s tomorrow and tomorrow speech. He told us how mid-way through this actor’s speech a pigeon landed on stage,and promptly heisted the audience’s attention. The actor however understood that his performance was a continuous conversation with the space in which he performed, and replied to the space’s changes. He pointed at the pigeon and continued: ‘A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage’; he stomped his foot, and the pigeon flew away: ‘and then is heard no more’. With a steady finger he followed the direction of the pigeon’s flight: ‘It is a tale told by an idiot’. The audience looked at the diminishing pigeon as his lines echoed through the space: ‘Full of sound and fury’ - and as the pigeon disappeared out of sight: ‘Signifying nothing’. The lecture theatre cheered, electric with the adrenaline of a performance that existed embedded in unpredictable surroundings.
I suddenly understood why the actors’ entrance in the coffee shop had calmed our anxieties about the weather. For them, unpredictable changes in the environment were not threats, but creative springboards.
It was interesting to see how this way of thinking, which emphasised body and space in conjunction with the mind, interacted with a traditional institution like Oxford. The contrast was first identified in the architecture. The actors frowned at each other when they walked into the lecture room. The tables and the chairs are fixed to the ground - they pointed out; and they all face in the same direction: the body here is bound to a hierarchical spatial arrangement. In the corridors, the actors spread their arms out and smiled. So the workshop was taken to the corridors: the unmapped margins of the building. Here, students’ bodies were coaxed from behind the mind, and asked to move with the mind: we read Shakespeare as we walked, bumping into each other.
Many of the interviews with students shared one common emotion: relief. As part of a feedback survey, students were asked to provide three words that came to mind in regards to the workshop. Dominic Cooper wrote ‘relationships, emotion, passion’; Faith Wong gave ‘community, invigorating, bodily’. When interviewed, students shared a gratefulness for how the workshop opened interaction with texts like Shakespeare’s to emotional and physical responses, which many lamented had been otherwise dismissed in their academic experience.
The workshop did not just provide theoretical information about the importance of considering space and the body, but rather taught that when our environment and our body become a part of our daily conversation, changes in either no longer present threats, but opportunities.
