The Dancing Word

Consciousness
&
Liter ture
the Arts 30

General Editor:
Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe

Editorial Board:
Anna Bonshek, Per Brask, John Danvers,
William S. Haney II, Amy Ione,
Michael Mangan, Arthur Versluis,
Christopher Webster, Ralph Yarrow
 The Dancing Word
An Embodied Approach to the
Preparation of Performers
and the Composition
of Performances

Daniel Mroz

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011

Cover photo: Calligraphy photo by Daniel Mroz

Cover design:
Aart Jan Bergshoeff

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.

ISBN: 978-90-420-3330-6
ISSN: 1573-2193
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0026-4
E-book ISSN: 1879-6044
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011
Printed in the Netherlands
 wu dao de yu yan

‘Dancing Word’, calligraphy by artist Joseph Lo, Winnipeg 1997

To my parents, Ann Matthews Mroz and Harry William Mroz
 Acknowledgements
I owe the completion of this work to a large group of people in-
deed. I would like to thank my parents, my wife, my teachers, my
friends, my colleagues and my students.
Thank you to Leela Alanis, Monique Alexander, Ganesh Anan-
dan, Laura Astwood, Artem Barry, Bruce Barton, Nicole Beaudry,
Joël Beddows, Mario Biaggini, Slade Billew, Adriaan Blaauw, Ray-
mond Bobgan, Peter Boneham, Jaime Bouvier, Mallorie Casey,
Menez Chapleau, Chen Zhonghua, Tony Chong, Carron Clarke, Mar-
garet Coderre-Williams, Ken Cohen, Frank Cox-O’Connell, John
Dahms, David Daniel, Stephie Demas, Lori Duncan, Colleen Durham,
Tibor Egevardi, Claire Faubert, Josette Féral, Megan Flynn, Peter
Froehlich, Richard Fowler, Royds Fuentes-Imbert, Nonoy Gallano,
Victor Garaway, Mike Geither, Randall Goodwin, Richard Gratton,
Varrick Grimes, Brandon Groves, Matt Haché, Jill Heath, Ame Hen-
derson, Sarah Dey Hirshan, Ishikuza Tamotsu, Stefka Iordanova,
Christine Irving, Scot Jorgenson, John Kavanaugh, Brian Kennedy,
Don Kitt, Tannis Kowalchuk, Brad Krumholz, Dominique Lafon,
Gabrielle Lalonde, Julie Larose, William Lau, Stephen Lawson, Tho-
mas Leabhart, Philippe Leblonde, Steve Lecky, Danielle LeSaux-
Farmer, Charles Levin, Randall Lightbown, Liu Ming, the late Venice
Manley, Sam Masich, Marie-Paule Martel-Reny, Alex McLean, Yana
Meerzon, David Mott, Shawn Mozen, Ann Mroz, the late Harry Mroz,
the late Govindankutty Nair, Serge Ouaknine, Kevin Orr, Oliver
Perrin, Scott Phillips, Allen Pittman, Karin Randoja, Simon Raybould,
Tedd Robinson, Liz Rucker, Kris Salata, Gavin Sandeman, Michael
Saso, Sylvain Schryburt, Scott Sonnon, Ben Spatz, Montie Stethem,
Kathryn Syssoyeva, Willem de Thouars, Olivier-Hugues Terreault,
Tamar Tembeck, Marc Tellez, Gerry Thurston, Luis Torreao, Selma
Trevino, William Trevino, Sarah Waisvisz, Devika Wasson, Ian Wat-
son, Brian Webb, Evan Webber, William Weiss, Jane Wells, Ker
Wells, Marnix Wells, Rainer Wiens, Wong Sui Meing, Wong Sui
Vuey, Lisa Wolford Wylam, Yuen Wei, Stéphane Zarov and Jacob
Zimmer.
My apologies to those I have left off the list – thank you nonethe-
less.
 Table of Contents

Dedication.............................................................................................6
Acknowledgements ..............................................................................7
Table of Contents..................................................................................8
List of Figures.......................................................................................9
Preface – Master Chen Zhonghua, M.Ed............................................13
Foreword – Professor Lisa Wolford Wylam, Ph.D. ...........................15
Introduction .......................................................................................17
Chapter 1 Beginnings in Embodied Learning.....................................33
Chapter 2 Chinese Martial Arts ..........................................................45
Chapter 3 Principles of Performer Preparation...................................93
Chapter 4 Principles of Performance Composition ..........................137
Chapter 5 Practice of Preparation and Composition.........................159
Chapter 6 Performance Pedagogy in Practice...................................173
Chapter 7 Martial Movement Training and Consciousness..............205
References ........................................................................................211
 List of Figures

Figure 1: Richard Fowler directing in the village square of Nocelle,

Italy. ...........................................................................................37
Figure 2: Don Kitt in Primus Theatre’s Scarabesque (1993),
directed by Richard Fowler........................................................41
Figure 3: Ker Wells in Primus Theatre’s The Night Room (1994),
directed by Richard Fowler....................................................... 41
Figure 4: Former Primus member Sean Dixon in his solo
performance Falling Back Home (1995) ...................................42
Figure 5: Fowler students Varrick Grimes and Jane Wells in
Number 11 Theatre’s Icaria, directed by Ker Wells (2000) ......42
Figure 6: Former Primus member Laura Astwood in her solo
performance, the garden, directed by former Primus member
Karin Randoja (2001) ................................................................42
Figure 7: Laura Astwood in Russe, Bulgaria, in NaCl’s Invisible
Neighborhood (2002), directed by Fowler student Brad
Krumholz ...................................................................................44
Figure 8: The author’s teacher Wong Sui Meing in his Montréal
studio,Wong Kung Fu ................................................................45
Figure 9: The author and his teacher Chen Zhonghua practicing
taijiquan tui shou on Daqingshan Mountain, Shandong,
China, May 2007........................................................................46
Figure 10: The author demonstrating a ‘hand combat’ movement
from cailifoquan called hu zhia, or Tiger Claw Striking ...........55
Figure 11: The author demonstrating a sabre cut from the
cailifoquan taolu called mei hua dao or Plum Flower Sabre.....56
Figure 12: The author demonstrating a thrust from the cailifoquan
taolu called mei hua qiang, or Plum Flower Spear....................57
Figure 13: The author demonstrating a movement from the
cailifoquan taolu called tang zi gun, or (Chinese) Boy’s Staff..68
Figure 14: The author performing an upward cut from a seated
position in the tangpeng taijijian taolu .....................................73
Figure 15: Hong Junsheng ..................................................................75
Figure 16: The author demonstrating Rub Right Foot or you cha
10 The Dancing Word

jiao from the first form of Hong’s Practical Method ................78

Figure 17: The late Liu Yanming, the author’s zhineng qigong
grand-teacher .............................................................................80
Figure 18: Combat Totality Chart.......................................................82
Figure 19: Masich’s Continuum .........................................................83
Figure 20: Relationship between the Combat Adaptive Traits and
the Pre-Expressive Principles and Concepts. .............................91
Figure 21: The author performing a Physical Score or PMP at
the Fictive Realities performance school in Winnipeg,
Canada, 1997 while colleagues and teachers look on; from
the right, Donald Kitt, Varrick Grimes, Ruth Madoc-Jones,
Jim Dowling and Eileen Lamourie ..........................................106
Figure 22: table of taijiquan tuishou skills and perceptions. ............110
Figure 23: The vertical, horizontal and saggital gates. .....................118
Figure 24: The 27 compartments. .....................................................118
Figure 25: Richard Fowler coaching Christine Irving’s vocal
training at the Fictive Realities performance school in
Winnipeg, Canada, 1997..........................................................126
Figures 26 a, b & c: frontal, alley and arena configurations.............145
Figure 27: The jiugong Nine Palace Trajectory................................146
Figures 28 a-p: The wudang taiyi wuxing quan performed by the
author .......................................................................................163
Figures 29 a-h: The author playing roushou with fellow taijiquan
exponent Randall Lightbown ...................................................168
Figures 30 a-j: Images from Laura Astwood’s Performance of
A Landfall.................................................................................172
Figures 31a-h: Wulunma - mabu, b - hengdangbu, c -mabu,
d- xubu, e - chabu, f - goutitui, g - dulibu, h – mabu ...............179
Figures 32a-d: Performers Danielle LeSaux-Farmer (left) and
Colleen Durham (right) practicing the contact version of the
yield/restore exercise ...............................................................184
Figure 33a-d: Colleen Durham and the author demonstrate the
non-contact version of the yield/restore exercise.....................185
Figures 34a-e: Colleen Durham and the author practicing the
molding/contouring exercise....................................................184
Figures 35a-b: The author and Danielle LeSaux-Farmer work on
the non-contact version of the molding/contouring exercise
while Colleen Durham looks on...............................................187
Figures 36 and 37: On the right, the author helping Gabrielle
 Introduction 11

Lalonde (Theseus) to train Danielle Lesaux-Farmer (Ariadne)

in pai da. On the left, Theseus stands on Ariadne as they
speak of their imminent marriage ............................................187
Figures 38a-e: Some examples of loteria cards................................194
Figure 39: One Reed in rehearsal, summer 2005. Marc Tellez
(Cortes) looks towards the future like the prow of a galleon,
while Megan Flynn (Malintzin) avoids his powerful blow.
An alert Frank Cox-O’Connell improvises music in the back-
ground ......................................................................................193
Figure 40: One Reed dress rehearsal, Léonard Beaulne Studio,
University of Ottawa, September 2006. Marc Tellez as an ec-
static Cortes and Megan Flynn as the lucid and pragmatic
Malintzin ..................................................................................196
Figure 41: Ariadne in rehearsal. Brandon Groves, the author,
Gabrielle Lalonde, Artem Barry and Danielle LeSaux-Farmer
coordinate the labyrinth scene. Note the cardinal and diagonal
lines and the sub-grid of the playing space have been clearly
marked......................................................................................198
Figure 42: Ariadne in performance, from left to right: Brandon
Groves (Minos), Colleen Durham (Passiphae), Gabrielle
Lalonde (Theseus), Artem Barry (Minotaur) and Danielle
LeSaux-Farmer (Ariadne) ........................................................200
Figure 43: The Four Quadrants of Expression of Combative
Behaviour.................................................................................209
 Preface

The Chinese martial arts have much to offer contemporary actors

and dancers. In China, martial arts have had a decisive influence on
the form and the content of our traditional styles of theatre and dance.
Paradoxically, the deepest teachings of the Chinese martial arts have
remained the unexpressed pervue of a very small number of expert
practitioners. This has in no way deterred generations of cosmopolitan
artists who in the last century have turned to the Chinese martial arts
in order to broaden their horizons and abilities. Now, at the beginning
of the Twenty-first Century, wushu, taijiquan and qigong have be-
come an established part of popular culture worldwide, but I believe
that their full potential remains untapped.
My disciple Daniel Mroz’ book offers readers two things that
have hitherto been unavailable in English. The first is a thorough sys-
temic description of the Chinese martial arts. The second is an innova-
tive and comprehensive application of this practical knowledge to the
training of actors and dancers. Practitioners and scholars interested in
both the traditional and contemporary manifestation of Chinese physi-
cal culture will find this work to be of great interest. It presents a syn-
thesis of traditional information from the point of view of a serious
practitioner and looks beyond exotic surface appearances and mysteri-
ous choreographies to both culturally specific concepts and universal
principles.
The most obvious and pragmatic purpose of martial arts training
is to facilitate a successful defensive response to an unexpected attack,
but few contemporary teachers and practitioners of taijiquan empha-
size the two-person nature of traditional taijiquan practice which is
interactive, contact-based and spontaneous. In keeping with the kind
of taijiquan training I advocate for my own students, the approach
presented in this book emphasizes not only the choreographed exer-
cises that serve to structure the practitioner’s body and mind, but also
the improvised, spontaneous and athletic partner-work that is the stu-
dent’s royal road to interpreting the impulses, intentions and actions of
another person.
This book will grant scholars and theorists a more accurate, de-
tailed and comprehensive understanding of the role martial arts can
14 The Dancing Word

play in contemporary theatrical creation and in the performing arts as

a whole. I am certain that this book will serve as an important source
for contemporary performing artists. I also hope that this work will
encourage them to tap into the rich source of taijiquan for their pro-
fession.

Master Chen Zhonghua, M.Ed. (  
)

19th generation lineage holder of Chen Taijiquan (  䈀  19

)
2nd generation lineage holder of Hunyuan Taijiquan
( 䈀  2

)
International Standard Bearer of Hong Junsheng’s Practical Method of
Chen Taijiquan (    䈀   
 
)
Edmonton, Canada, February, 2010
 Foreword

When I first met Daniel Mroz in 1995, he was working as an ap-

prentice to Richard Fowler, founder of Winnipeg’s landmark Primus
Theatre. As an actor with Eugenio Barba and Odin Teatret, Fowler
developed a keen apprehension of the physiological basis of the actor’s
scenic presence and a robust theatricality that embraced popular tradi-
tions and global influences. The approach to performance composition
that Fowler shared with the actors of Primus and other longtime stu-
dents and collaborators continues to exert a profound influence on de-
vised theatre in Canada through the independent work of this younger
generation of theatre artists, whose ability to interweave the virtuosic
physicality characteristic of Barba’s performances with the psycho-
logical realism promoted by mainstream North American theatre reper-
tories and actor training programs has given rise to a broad range of
innovative, collectively created works.
As a director and teacher, Mroz repeatedly acknowledges
Fowler’s profound influence on his work, which manifests not only in
the dynamic physicality of the performances he directs, but even more
significantly in an approach to training and performance creation that
foregrounds the actor’s agency and authorial input. In 2005, the year
he completed doctoral study at Université du Québec à Montréal,
Mroz became the founding director of One Reed Theatre, collaborat-
ing with four recent graduates of Canada’s National Theatre School
(Frank Cox-O’Connell, Megan Flynn, Marc Tellez and Evan Webber)
to create Nor the Cavaliers Who Come With Us, a theatrically vivid
and politically astute reflection on the colonization of Mexico that was
recognized with significant critical acclaim and multiple awards.
Mroz once told me that it was at Fowler’s suggestion that he first
began his prolonged investigation of Asian martial and meditative
practices, focusing specifically on qigong and taijiquan. For 17 years
thus far, he has systematically pursued this research through embodied
practice and scholarly inquiry, traveling to India, China, the United
States and across Canada to study with master practitioners. Mroz is
keenly aware of the depth and duration of conscious practice required
16 The Dancing Word

to achieve mastery in a given field, a sensibility that differentiates his

investigation of the Asian martial techniques from more cursory en-
gagements with traditional practices so common to the workshop cul-
ture of contemporary experimental theatre. Mroz’s prolonged study of
Asian embodied practices has also developed his sensitivity to the per-
former’s energy and other subtler dimensions of the actor’s craft,
along with a refreshing pragmatism toward aspects of the performer’s
psychophysical life for which Western discourse has yet to evolve
precise vocabularies.
The Dancing Word lucidly articulates applications of principles
derived from kinaesthetic, somatic and analytical exploration of tai-
jiquan and related practices for actor training and performance crea-
tion. Like any worthwhile book in this domain, it will prove most pro-
ductive if approached not as a repository of recipes for creativity or
solutions to scenic problems, but rather as a point of departure, an in-
vitation to take up an analogous exploration, similarly rigorous, reflec-
tive and sustained.

Lisa Wolford Wylam, Ph.D.

Toronto, Canada, March 1, 2010.
 Introduction

This book is my reflection on the nature and history of the tools I

use as an artist. It is also my attempt to share those tools. As a director
and a teacher of performers I am ultimately preoccupied with how
meaning is created, destroyed, hidden, revealed and sustained in per-
formances made using traditional Chinese technologies of the body
and conceptual tools developed by European avant-garde1 theatre di-
rector Eugenio Barba (b. 1936) and taught by his Canadian disciple,
Richard Fowler (b. 1947). This unusual synthesis of traditional culture
with an outlook formed by one of the key artists of 20th century cos-
mopolitan theatre practice, results from my particular history, envi-
ronment and interests. While this synthesis is particular to me, it has
also been of use to my fellow theatre artists, my students and to schol-
ars of performance as a lens through which to examine their own or
others’ practices.

Chinese traditional body technologies

While readers are likely familiar with the idea of avant-garde

theatre, the notion of Chinese traditional body technologies requires
further elaboration. The term was coined by Douglas Palmer in his
study of religiosity in contemporary China. For Palmer, the body is an
integrated whole, “englobing all interconnected human functions, in-
cluding thinking, feeling, moving, breathing, desiring, ingesting, di-
gesting and so on, rather than an objectified body differentiated from
mental functions and social persona” (Palmer 9).

1
To the historical avant-garde that flourished in Europe from the late nineteenth
through to the mid-twentieth century, Richard Schechner adds the notion of a current
avant-garde: “The current avant-garde is by definition what’s happening now. Of
course ‘now’ is always changing. Today’s current theatre avant-garde includes re-runs
of the historical avant-garde as well as the practices of formerly experimental artists
whose work is by now ‘classical’ in terms of its predictability, solidity and accep-
tance” (Future 5).
18 The Dancing Word

“Technology” refers to

a wide range of techniques of the body which are the subject of specialized
and highly elaborated discourses linking different body techniques to each
other as well as to cosmologies and life paths. Body technologies involve sets
of movements and forms which aim for the attainment of specific goals, and
are transmitted through a training process which forms the basis of a tradition.
(9)

These traditions are drawn from a pre-modern Chinese physical cul-

ture, a heterodox yet coherent set of practices ranging from shaman-
ism and medium spirit-possession practice, to life-nourishing gymnas-
tics, exorcistic processional ritual, martial art, theatrical performance,
dance and contemplative meditation. The traditional body technolo-
gies at the core of this study are the Chinese martial arts or wushu and
the healing and self-care movement arts or qigong.
Asian body technologies in general and Chinese practices in par-
ticular are increasingly present in the avant-garde theatre of the last
century and this one. The record shows the inspiration drawn from
Chinese performer Mei Lanfang (1894-1961) by such avant-garde lu-
minaries as Konstantin Stanislavski (1863-1938), Vsevolod Meyer-
hold (1874-1940) and Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) (Riley I). Jerzy Gro-
towski (1933-1999) developed his voice training inspired in part by
the exercises he observed on a visit to China (Grotowski 117-24). A
key element of director Eugenio Barba’s aesthetic procedures, that a
movement should always begin in the direction opposite to it, was
christened “the Chinese principle” after a similar practice in jingju or
Beijing Opera (Barba & Savarese 178).
Chinese body technologies in the form of martial arts and ener-
getic arts such as taijiquan (a 19th century Chinese martial art) and
different kinds of qigong (20th century syntheses of self-healing
movements of pre-modern origin) are now widely taught as auxiliary
movement exercises in North American and European theatre training
(Zarrilli, Acting 74-5). As a result of increased global communications
many actors, regardless of their style and language of performance,
practice taijiquan; many directors are inspired by the multi-disci-
plinary aesthetics of jingju acting, dance, acrobatics and singing; and
many artists share the Chinese ethic of daily practice of a personal
training method.
 Introduction 19

Ontological Research

The performer training and performance creation system I present

continues an investigation of theatre practice begun by Polish theatre
director Jerzy Grotowski, continued and modified by his student
Eugenio Barba and taught to me by Richard Fowler, who studied with
them both. For me this theatre is a theatre of ontological research2, an
artistic practice that is preoccupied with the investigation of being.
This concern is seen in these artists’ attitude towards the content and
structure of the performance, the preparation of the performers and the
role of the audience. While Grotowski’s version of ontological re-
search was increasingly concerned with religion, soteriology and
meditative procedures, Barba and Fowler’s take is a more existential-
ist one, preoccupied with the individual’s construction of personal
identity and her life’s meaning in a humanistic and independent fash-
ion. In both cases ontological research is a search for the social, aes-
thetic, existential and spiritual possibilities of the human being via
practice and innovation in the field of theatre.
This research is above all an embodied one. A rigorous progres-
sion of training exercises was created by the actors in Grotowski’s and
Barba’s ensembles who prepared themselves with the diligence of as-
piring athletes, devoting thousands of hours of work to the compara-
tively short moments of actual performance. This work was done in
order to provide the audience with the most credible and visceral per-
formance possible and to grant the performer the opportunity for onto-
logical research offered by self-observation during moments of
heightened psychophysical focus and clarity. This standing-outside-of-
herself or ecstasy of the performer was actualized not through chaotic,
cathartic and explosive improvisations but rather through composi-
tions, precisely repeatable sequences of physical actions and their cor-
relate mental intentions.
The athleticism and novelty of the performer training developed
and used by Grotowski, Barba and Fowler and the arresting presence
of the performers led by these directors has resulted in the de-em-
phasis of the intellectual and conceptual components of their work.
The theatrical performances destined to be occasions of ontological

2
I have taken this term from martial artist and teacher Peter Ralston (Effortless Power
passim) who uses it to describe activities both martial and meditative that are used as
a means of investigating the experience of being.
20 The Dancing Word

research are exemplary instances of late- and post-modernist composi-

tion. Texts and images are framed and edited in such a way as to pro-
duce palimpsestic layers of meaning. Juxtaposition, irony and mon-
tage characterize the directing style. The conception of the perfor-
mance space also subverts institutional norms, creating intimate per-
formances for small numbers of spectators, site-specific works and dy-
namic outdoor public pageants.

Unitive Experience

The idea of ontological research is considered central to the goals

of Asian martial and performing arts. Philosopher Yasuo Yuasa goes
as far as to call the criteria of Japanese performing arts the occurrence
of a “catharsis in the soul” of the performer (Yuasa, Self-Cultivation
27). In his typological study of ecstatic experiences, Jordan Paper de-
scribes this ideal as a unitive experience. Paper’s study is significant
in that it differentiates the ecstatic enlightenment experiences popu-
larly associated with Asian aesthetic and martial expressions into three
distinct categories. In a unitive experience “there is nothing but the
experience of the moment, a moment in which the experiencer feels at
one with all that is perceived and the activity in and of itself” (Paper,
Mystic Experience 46). The pure consciousness event, often confused
with the unitive experience, is non-conceptual self-awareness free
from the processes and contents of knowing. While unitive experi-
ences occur in relation to an outside object or an activity – a master-
fully intuitive sword-stroke in martial arts or the sensation of merging
with a magnificent landscape or artwork – pure consciousness events
are the results of sustained training in non-conceptual meditation (48).
The third type of ecstatic experience proposed by Paper is the mystic
experience proper, which is characterized by the loss of the sense of
self and a resulting lack of awareness, at the height of the experience,
that it is happening at all (50). The triggers of these three kinds of ec-
stasy are distinct: unitive experiences arise due to engagement with a
physical or conceptual structure that preceded the present moment;
pure consciousness events are the result of non-conceptual meditation;
and mystical experiences are just that, unpredictable, unrepeatable and
most importantly, not prone to coaxing from procedural or codified
methods.
 Introduction 21

When it occurs in performance the unitive experience allows the

perfomer and the audience to share what sociologist and martial artist
Kenji Tokitsu describes as a “thickening of time” that is:

…a brief moment of stillness in a harmonious movement that creates a con-

densation of time integrating the person who has made the movement and the
other performers with respect to the space that surrounds them. (57, my trans-
lation)3

For the purposes of my discussion, I will be using the term unitive

experience to refer to the moments of self-awareness that are produced
by the conscious use of theatre arts and martial arts as frameworks for
ontological research. These moments are of vital importance. They are
the potential states in which the mind reorganizes its perception of
itself and its contents. They are simultaneously the form, content,
cause and result of creativity.

Pre-Arranged Movement Patterns

The pragmatic tool that facilitates the unitive experience in both

traditional Chinese body technologies and the performance practice of
Grotowski, Barba and Fowler is the use of precisely set and repeatable
patterns of movement animated by conscious intentions and impulses.
Engagement with these set forms offers a direct and efficient approach
to the unitive experience. The conscious repetition of intimately well-
known actions brings with it the opportunity for the cultivation of a
very deep level of body/mind awareness and a capacity for self-obser-
vation in the moment. Set movement patterns, called taolu, are the
backbone of the individual’s training in both the martial arts and the
self-care and restorative practices of China where the movements and
mental focus engrained in set personal practice are the same ones that
are spontaneously restored in such situations of random stress as com-
bat or accident. In the theatrical practice of Grotowski, Barba and
Fowler set patterns of movement are used in both the training of the
performer and as the fundamental building blocks of the actual per-
formance.

3
‘un bref temps d’arrêt dans un mouvement harmonieux qui correspond à une
condensation du temps rassemblant celui qui fait le geste et les autres participants par
rapport à l’espace qui entoure le sujet.’
22 The Dancing Word

In his study of human combative behaviour, Hunter Armstrong

refers to these set forms as Pre-Arranged Movement Patterns or PMPs
(Pre-Arranged Movement Patterns 24). The unitive experience of self-
awareness that the use of PMP in both the martial arts and the per-
forming arts facilitates is due not only to intimacy and repetition, but
also to formalization or ritualization. Theatre arts and martial arts
practiced through the lens of PMPs are not simply fighting or perform-
ing – the rigorous examination of one’s bodily form and behaviour
that PMPs oblige make any activity involving them not only that
activity, but also the practical study of that activity. It is the PMP that
makes martial arts not simply fighting, but the study of fighting and
ultimately the self-study of the individual via the study of fighting.
Likewise, by constructing their approach to performer training and
performance creation around the PMP, Grotowski, Barba and Fowler
have engendered an artistic practice that is not only the making of per-
formance, but the study of the making of performance and a self-study
by those engaged in its making.

Wushu and Theatre

Wushu or marital art, the traditional body technology central to

this work, is historically so linked to theatre and popular religion that
is becomes possible to view it as a performing art its own right. Jiyi,
the performance of taolu, occurred throughout Chinese history as part
of an annual cycle of rituals and theatrical presentations along with
such virtuosic folkdance and puppetry displays as mou si martial lion
dances and qi lin acrobatic ‘unicorn’ dances. A common martial
physical culture informs Chinese martial arts, theatre, folk religion,
Daoist ritual and health gymnastics. This physical culture was a vital
part of popular spirit medium or jitong worship, providing the pos-
sessed mediums with the appropriate choreographic vocabulary for the
deity whose presence they channelled (Chan 23). It also likely pro-
vided a form of physical conditioning that mitigated the violence done
to the body of the spirit medium during possession. It subtends the
exorcistic procession of the jiajang, the “infernal generals” whose
processional performance entertains the gods and punishes evil spirits
(Sutton 3). It further gives form and content to the zhentou, the per-
formance of traditional group battlefield drills, that accompanies sea-
sonal festivities. The depth and age of the martial physical culture that
 Introduction 23

provides the embodied ground of the activities contemporary Western

thought would differentiate into theatre, ritual and martial arts leads
Margaret Chan to assert:

The notion of theatre has been diminished in the secular world where theatre
is equated with entertainment by poor actors who have to win the approval
of rich patrons. This attitude blinds itself to the truth; that theatre is older
than language, that it is the primal form of human expression, where the
body is employed to make and share meaning. (9)

Wuwei and Ziran

The different roles played by the Chinese martial body are united
by the philosophical concerns of wuwei and ziran, which appear in the
first canonical work of Daoism, the Daodejing. Wuwei is described
using the example of water, which does not actively achieve anything,
though its presence causes the environment to thrive (Ames and Lau,
1998:18). Wuwei is usually translated as “non-action” or “non-
aggression” and can be understood as both appropriate and effortless
action as well as freedom from compulsion, freedom from having to
act, rather than either passive indifference or unexamined spontaneity.
The expression of wuwei is ziran. Literally translated ziran means
natural or spontaneous. The term is used in the assignment of aesthetic
values, but does not indicate the same appreciation for the artifice or
ingenious conception of an individual artist as found in contemporary
Western sensibilities. Ziran describes the spontaneity and appropriate-
ness of a world barely contaminated by human intentions. It is tradi-
tionally used to express a feeling of integration with the wilderness
environment, a cultivated yet natural sense of freedom. It expresses a
sense of intrinsic conservation, an event appropriate to the present
moment.

Ontological Research in Chinese Body Technologies

Chinese body technologies lead practitioners to experience wuwei

and ziran by quieting their discursive minds, thereby producing self-
defence ability, self-healing and unitive experience. Another way of
conceiving of these philosophical concepts is in terms of creativity. In
Daoism, creativity is the potential for an object or a concept to change
into its opposite and then back into itself, a self that has been modified
24 The Dancing Word

by that change. The classical example of this is drawn from the second
canonical Daoist work, the Zhuangzi. In it, the author who is named
Zhuangzi recounts how he dreamed he was a butterfly, and now upon
awakening cannot be sure that he is not in fact a butterfly dreaming he
is man (Watson). While it may be arguable whether or not a butterfly
is the opposite of a man, the circumstance Daoists require for creative
change to occur is a state referred to as emptiness. The mind will
spontaneously generate new and extraordinary notions if it is first
made quiet and receptive. Likewise, objects in the physical universe
require space in order to change and enter into new and innovative
relationships. How far towards actualizing its opposite an idea or an
object can move, and how that opposite is in fact defined, depend on
the matrix in which it finds itself. The traditional Daoist view is that
the universe and its inhabitants form a complex synergy, a weaver-less
web in which no two elements can be finally considered to be sepa-
rate. Creativity and change thus seem to be dependent on contradic-
tory phenomena: the linked nature of all existence on the one hand,
and the need for conceptual or physical emptiness and space on the
other. All practices of Daoist origin work simultaneously towards
these two goals. Daoist arts, from painting and calligraphy to music
and martial arts, are highly formalized. This formality exists not for its
own sake but rather to generate a meditative quiet in the mind of the
artist. When the creative spark arises in the quiet mind (which is inevi-
table according to the Daoists), the formal nature of the artist’s proce-
dures grants her the tools to express her creativity by relating it to the
matrix of life in which she finds herself. As it is the result of a medita-
tive process, the resulting artwork is considered to be an authentic and
essential expression of both the individual who made it and the very
universe itself. The power and potential of the universe or shili is
made manifest through quietude and space.
This description may sound like a romantic quest for a natural
kind of self-expression, untouched by the constraints of civilization.
However the formal procedures in which Daoist arts are enshrined
align them more closely with a classical vision. This classical creativ-
ity recognizes the limits of self-expression. Creativity is not a pure,
unlimited and personal expression, but rather involves collaboration
between an artist’s subjectivity and an impersonal tradition and tech-
nique.
 Introduction 25

This conception of the creative process can be summarized as

“quietude and space = creativity, creativity + formal skills = authentic
expression”. It is consistently used in both the theory and practice of
Chinese martial arts. I propose that it also applies to the work of Gro-
towski, Barba and Fowler.

Asian Influences on Grotowski, Barba and Fowler

In addition to the common use of PMPs by Chinese body tech-

nologies and the theatres of Grotowski, Barba and Fowler, there are
instances of actual Asian influence on the practices of these artists.
Grotowski visited Central Asia in 1956, Shanghai in 1962 and Kurdi-
stan and India in 1970 (Kumiega, Grotowski 4). Based on these visits
he created training exercises with his actors modeled on jingju voice
training and on Indian hatha yoga (116). However, both scholars of
his work and Grotowski himself maintain that these Asian procedures
and techniques had only a minor effect on his overall work (116). I
propose that the most significant Asian influences on Grotowski were
the Advaita Vedanta and Hindu Tantric teachings of the Indian mys-
tics Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950) and Ramakrishna (1836-1886),
whose writings continued to serve as a touchstone for Grotowski
throughout his life4 (Schechner and Wolford 254–55).
Barba’s Asian influences derive both from his studies under Gro-
towski and from his own travels. In 1963 Barba traveled to India for
six months to research the South Indian performance form kathakakli.
His experiences at the Kerala Kalamandalam, a kathakali training
school in Cheruthuruty (a village in Kerala, South India), offered him
a model of theatre that integrated acting technique, performance style
and ethos. For Barba, kathakali synthesized a non-realistic perform-
ance style with a rigorous and skill-based actor training, both of which
were driven by an ethos of self-fulfillment through devotion to craft
and self-sacrifice. Kathakali was an example of an extant form of
theatre whose practice and appreciation aimed at a transcendental tar-
get beyond the professional. It was, in Barba’s interpretation, the thea-

4
The other major representative of Asian ontological research that Grotowski spoke
about at length was G.I. Gurdjieff, an Armenian teacher of a school of ontological
research referred to by participants simply as The Work. Gurdjieff is an influential
and enigmatic figure beyond the scope of this study. Grotowski’s discussion of Gurd-
jieff reveals a lively interest and perhaps even an influence. (Grotowski, 1999)
26 The Dancing Word

tre that Grotowski was seeking to re-create in the context of twentieth

century Poland (Christoffersen 12-13).
Richard Fowler’s extensive work with Barba as an actor and his
participation in the International School of Theatre Anthropology ex-
posed him both to Barba’s idealized vision of the Asian actor and to
many actual Asian actors from a variety of traditions and cultures.
Thanks to Theatre Anthropology, Fowler met and worked with Bali-
nese, Chinese, Japanese and Indian performers. During the 1986 tour
of his solo performance Wait for the Dawn in India, Fowler saw a
demonstration of the South Indian martial art kalarippayattu. Inspired
by a dramatic display of urumi fencing (urumis are two meter long
flexible steel whip/swords which can be worn as belts), he made in-
quiries about receiving instruction and eventually spent several
months as a student of the late Govindankutty Nair (d. 2006) at the
C.V.N. Kalari, a kalarippayattu school in Thiruvananathapuram, Ker-
ala, South India.
Fowler explained to me that it had always been his desire to take
his Canadian company Primus Theatre to Kerala for a long-term visit
(personal communications). He felt that the actors would benefit
greatly from sharing a common training in kalarippayattu. Due to fac-
tors of time, distance and expense, the Kerala visit never happened.
The Primus actors’ first introduction to kalarippayattu took place in
Toronto in the spring of 1994 when, on my return from studying the
form in India, I gave the group a demonstration of the training I had
received.
Fowler’s feeling was that Asian martial arts contained the results
of many generations of research into effective and energetic move-
ment. While he still considered the physical training he’d received
from Barba and Grotowski to be excellent, he wondered what actors in
possession of refined physical techniques that had been honed over
hundreds of years would be able to accomplish. How would it affect
their choices as creators? How would it change the way they perceived
their craft? A large part of the motivation for my work with theatre
and martial arts has been my desire to see how these elements that
Fowler intuited were complementary related to each other in a practi-
cal way.
The Eastern influences on Grotowski, Barba and Fowler are pri-
marily South Asian in origin and Hindu in outlook. The approach I am
presenting in this book differs from the ones established by my fore-
 Introduction 27

bearers both in terms of the actual body technologies used and in

terms of the view or outlook that underpins them. To risk a broad
characterization the Chinese tradition is more embodied, less abstract-
edly analytic and less radically transcendental than the Indian one.
Seen from the point of view of Daoism, wushu and qigong are princi-
pally concerned with revealing a practitioner’s actual state of being,
rather than with self-improvement and productive transformation.
Framed in Daoist terms, the practice of ontological research I am pro-
posing is less concerned with peak experiences and radical transfor-
mations than it is with the patient examination of the reality available
to our limited perception and the expression of those largely tacit and
unknown appetites and preoccupations that in the Daoist tradition are
referred to as our original nature.

Overview

Chapter 1 presents the common ground of embodied pedagogy

shared by Asian approaches to artist training and the work of Cana-
dian teacher and director Richard Fowler.
Chapter 2 offers a systemic analysis of the Chinese martial arts
and related practices. These arts are presented in terms of an overall
classification system and then particular examples are given in the
form of the four disciplines practiced and taught by the author,
Shaolin Hongsheng Cailifoquan, Wu Shi Tang Peng Taijiquan, Zhi
Neng Qigong and Chen Taiji Shiyong Quanfa. This systemic descrip-
tion culminates in a comparison between the overarching principles of
martial movement and the principles of Eugenio Barba’s Theatre An-
thropology.
Chapter 3 offers a detailed presentation of the principles govern-
ing the development of theatrical performers. These principles are de-
rived from a synthesis of the concepts informing traditional Chinese
‘body technologies’ and the structure of the Pre-Expressive Training
taught by Richard Fowler.
Chapter 4 presents a conceptual framework and practical tools for
organizing the process of original performance creation.
Chapter 5 offers a more phenomenological and experiential per-
spective on the principles described in Chapters 3 and 4. Examples are
drawn from the training and creation experience of the author.
28 The Dancing Word

Chapter 6 describes specific instances of the application of The

Dancing Word. The various phases of preparation and composition are
systematically discussed in terms of concrete examples drawn from
professional master-classes, the work of One Reed Theatre Ensemble
and practical work with undergraduate theatre students.
Chapter 7 develops a working model for a concept of conscious-
ness for contemporary performing artists trained in a system of martial
movement. The model is an open-ended proposal that both concludes
the presentation of the Dancing Word with a broad, conceptual state-
ment and also offers paths for further application, research and explo-
ration.

Intended Audience

This book welcomes practitioners, students, teachers and scholars

alike. The practitioners to whom this work is primarily directed are
theatrical performers and directors seeking methods for creating their
own original performance aesthetics. It appeals in a secondary way to
actors and directors who are seeking to develop their expressive pal-
ettes for the purpose of mounting theatrical repertoire in a more con-
ventional and normative style. Finally it is addressed to artists from
other styles of live performance such as dance, music, circus arts and
performance art in the hope that there are elements here useful to all
stage performers.
This work is directed to students of performance practice who are
interested in learning how to create their own original performance
aesthetics. The processes and procedures move from interpretation
into composition in a smooth and continuous way. In this approach,
the ultimate phases of learning how to act are concerned with learning
how to direct.
In a way less constrained by the student’s need to assimilate pri-
mary skills, teachers of acting and directing who wish to encourage
their students to create original performances are welcomed to this
exhibit in order that they might adopt as much or as little of the mate-
rial presented as meets their needs. Teachers can ‘steal’ as they see fit
in order to use the ‘stolen’ property either as it was intended or in
completely different contexts.
Scholars are invited to examine material from two unusual areas:
one, the work of Canadian theatre artist Richard Fowler, who through
 Introduction 29

his work with both Barba and Grotowski represents a rare North
American branch of a major European avant-garde theatre family tree
and two, the structure, procedures, ethics and cosmology of Chinese
martial arts. Actual examples of training exercises and creative proce-
dures are presented in a direct and comprehensive way that is accessi-
ble to practitioners and scholars alike.
As a result of its multiple intended audiences, this book speaks
from a number of different perspectives. Rather than imagining four
closed camps of specialists – students, teachers, practitioners and
scholars – I envision each chapter speaking to the student, artist,
teacher and scholar present in each individual reader.

Methodology

The methodology followed in this study blends multidisciplinary

scholarship with insight acquired from artistic and martial practices. It
is based on personal experience, dialogue with seniors and peers and
academic research. In the terms used by cultural anthropologists it
takes the point of view of emic inquiry and describes the object of
study from the perspective of the initiated participant as opposed to
that of the outside observer. The emic testimony in this book is de-
rived from my experiences as a student of the trainings described be-
low, as a director using certain procedures to create original perform-
ance and as a teacher seeking to initiate students into a particular way
of working.
The through-line of this study is biographical and it unfolds in the
field of apprenticeship and practice. The personal particulars of my
experiences are described in the first person and then contextualized in
terms of scholarly research in a variety of disciplines and in terms of
the writings and oral teachings of relevant artists. In order to fully pre-
sent my training system, I narrate it as a story with frequent stops
along the way for comments that situate it in different historical and
theoretical contexts.
The disciplines synthesized in this study, martial arts and theatre
arts, come with internal languages of their own. In addition to these
vocabularies, I propose a series of definitions to be applied in the con-
text of this particular approach to practice. These are indicated in
boldface when they first appear and are defined as they occur. Given
the potential volume of technical and theoretical jargon, clarity has
30 The Dancing Word

been a principal concern. While frequently reviewing and summariz-

ing my presentation, I strive to keep my language and style of presen-
tation simple and direct.
As this book presents particular practices and ways of working, I
do use the imperative when describing how certain aspects of training
or composition ought to be accomplished. There are obviously many
creative strategies available to artists and my imperatives reflect my
own experiences, needs and preferences. Even the most confident
sounding of assertions is ultimately only one of many possibilities. I
trust my tone conveys my enthusiasm, not my dogmatism.

Languages

This book uses the Hanyu Pinyin standard phonetic system to

represent Pitonghua (Mandarin, the official Chinese dialect) pronun-
ciation of Chinese characters. Pinyin is used consistently in transla-
tions published in China. Readers may be more familiar with the ear-
lier system of Romanization, the Wade-Giles, which unfortunately did
not set an international standard and is falling into disuse. Neverthe-
less, older publications using Wade-Giles will refer to the martial art
of taijiquan as T’ai Chi Ch’uan, the religion of Daoism as Taoism and
Romanize such martial arts terminology as breath or qi as ch’i and
qigong as ch’i-kung. The use of the Wade-Giles system has led to
some confusion about how common Chinese words ought to be pro-
nounced and what they actually mean. For example while the charac-
ter “tai” by itself can mean “ultimate” or “great” and “chi” can mean
breath or energy, the martial art of taijiquan, named after the cosmo-
logical principle of undifferentiated unity, does not mean “ultimate
energy” or taiqi, as its Wade-Giles spelling of T’ai Chi Ch’uan would
suggest.
In Hanyu Pinyin, vowels and consonants are pronounced as fol-
lows:

Consonants
c is pronounced like ts (tsetse fly)
q is pronounced like ch (cheese)
x is pronounced like sh (ship)
zh is pronounced like j (joke)
 Introduction 31

Vowels
e is pronounced like er where the r is silent (parent)
e before ng is pronounced like u (lung)
o is pronounced like aw (raw)
ou is pronounced like o (no)

All Chinese words and words from languages other than English
in this text are indicated by the use of lower case italics. Chinese per-
sonal names are presented Asian style with the last name first. Not all
Chinese martial artists and qigong practitioners speak Mandarin, thus
some of the terms and names in this book are in Guangzhouhua, or
Cantonese. As much as possible I have provided the standardized
Mandarin as well as the Cantonese and English pronunciations and
meanings for all Chinese terms.

Gender

I have chosen to use the ‘universal feminine’ of ‘she’ as my pro-

noun of choice. I have done so to pay tribute to the women who have
with only a few exceptions made up at least 70% of every group of
students I have taught.
 Chapter 1

Beginnings in Embodied Learning

Shinichi Suzuki and Talent Education

My early education led me east. My father wanted me to study

Western classical music. My mother’s progressive ideas about educa-
tion led her to choose the Talent Education method created by the late
Japanese violinist Shinichi Suzuki (1899-1999)1. Suzuki owed his
success as a teacher to a seemingly banal insight: it occurred to him
that all Japanese children learn to speak Japanese, despite the immense
complexity of that language. Inspired by this realization he came to
believe that talent was an ability that could be cultivated through pa-
tient training and environmental conditioning. Suzuki noticed that
children learn language physically, through exposure to the aural and
affective environment created by their parents. Reading and writing
come later. He applied this insight to the teaching of Western Classi-
cal music for the violin, where notation and music theory were tradi-
tionally taught first. His remarkable results are now world famous.
At the age of three, I joined the thousands of children the world
over who participate in Suzuki’s program. Wielding a 1/4-size violin –
an instrument so small that an adult cannot play it – I was taken to
weekly private and group lessons. The first piece I learned to play was
Mozart’s variations on Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, which I learned
by memorizing hand and bowing positions and the resulting notes. In
order to help me practice, my mother accompanied me in my lessons,
learning herself on a full-size violin. My mother and I would practice
at first for twenty minutes every day. In between practice and lessons,
my father took me to concerts of orchestral and chamber music. I also
attended the concerts put on by my fellow students, children a few

1
Please note that I am not discussing the work of the reknowned Japanese stage direc-
tor Tadashi Suzuki (born 1939), whose approach to actor training is often referred to
as the Suzuki Method.
34 The Dancing Word

years older than I. I remember them playing just as well as the adults
my father took me to see.
I believe that Suzuki intuitively based his method on a vision of
human experience found throughout Chinese and Japanese cultural
history. Confucianism and Daoism, the two philosophies respectively
responsible for Oriental social structures and medicine are both based
on three part hierarchies. Confucianism seeks harmonious relations
between the san cai, the three powers of tian, ren and di or Heaven,
Man and Earth, representing the traditional social ranks of Chinese
society: rulers, artisans and labourers. Daoism seeks to preserve the
health of the individual by balancing the san bao, the three treasures,
jing or Vitality, qi or Energy and shen or Spirit, which represent the
body, the breath and the mind (Cohen, Way of Qigong 30-41). In the
Daoist tradition, which gave birth to most of China’s artistic disci-
plines, any kind of education begins not with the absorption of ab-
stract concepts, but with the concrete preparation of the body.
Informed by these perennial insights, Suzuki’s violin method en-
sures that his tiny violin students master perfect posture before playing
a single note. His extraordinary emphasis on ear training, the ability to
play what is heard rather than what is read, developes his students’
sensitivity to the embodied experience of music. The students are in-
troduced to written musical notation and to theories of interpretation
only after a high level of ear training has been achieved. All of these
phases are accompanied by parental and community involvement,
providing an affective environment favourable to learning. This in-
cremental approach to music training seems to actually create talent
and creativity in students. Suzuki’s approach presents a remarkable
synthesis of traditional and modern ideas. While his developmental
world-view and educational procedures are clearly derived from tradi-
tional Asian cosmology and philosophy, his concern with the student’s
individual development and happiness is clearly a modern develop-
ment, firmly differentiated from the harsh and punitive rote learning
approaches that dominate traditional Asian education.
“Talent is no accident of birth” reads the first line in Suzuki’s
book Nurtured by Love (1). Of course some students show a natural
aptitude that sets them apart from their peers, but it is more decent and
more fruitful to assume that a student’s potential is hidden rather than
absent. While I had no idea that it was going on at the time, the effect
of Suzuki’s method on my developing ethic of art, teaching and learn-
 Beginnings in Embodied Learning 35

ing was enormous. As an adult, I can say that the first four corner-
stones of my approach are derived from the simple Suzuki lessons of
my childhood. They are:

x That willingness to work, not innate talent be the measure of a

student
x That teachers subscribe to the ethic of teaching students in an
incremental and developmental manner modelled on native
language learning
x That students subscribe to the ethic of regularly practicing
simple elements that, when fitted together form a complex
aesthetic work
x That artistic practice should be a tool for profound self-
awareness for the artist, having as its goal the creation of aes-
thetic objects that both result from and produce unitive ex-
periences.

Suzuki’s approach lay dormant in my subconscious until I began

to pursue acting in my late teens and early twenties. I experienced
considerable friction between the assumptions of the Suzuki Talent
Education Method and those of the American Method, the standard
approach to acting taught in English Canada. It was only when I en-
countered the work of Richard Fowler and Primus Theatre that I found
an approach to theatre consonant with Suzuki’s insights.

Richard Fowler and Primus Theatre

I first encountered Primus Theatre in the summer of 1992. They

performed their creation Alkoremmi in a studio at the National Theatre
School of Canada in Montréal. For the first time in my rather sheltered
life as a spectator I saw a theatre that danced and spoke and sang, cre-
ating a world apart. At the time I wrote this in my journal:

There is a quiet presence in the bodies on the stage that goes before any ex-
pression, be it in motion or in sound. Muscles and bones dance because of
possibility; these are not bodies wracked by the creation that they execute. In
song and dance, in theme and variation, Alkoremmi tells the story of the last
human soul to be born, a creature dropped into a circus of giants and angels, of
dwarves and masked demons. The audience watches this remarkable arrange-
ment of bodies and wood and fabric and light as it also watches itself. The ar-
36 The Dancing Word

chitecture of the scene is such that spectators surround the performance, creat-
ing a circle of attendance. There are only about eighty seats, so one never feels
lost in the crowd. It is impossible to see just one angle of Alkoremmi. One gets
comfortable with the view, and the action moves up into the air, is hidden by a
curtain that becomes trapeze, music strikes up behind the audience, darkness
rises. (Author’s journal, June, 1992)

I sat enraptured by this opposition: the vigorous execution of a per-

formance in a simple and fragile physical environment. On the one
hand the bodies moved and sounded with a level of precision and abil-
ity that induced gaping amazement. On the other hand, the almost total
absence of technology on stage revealed a voluntary poverty, a rejec-
tion of artifice. Actors worked wonders with large copper funnels and
flashlights. They made all the music themselves, live, and somehow
managed to run their lights as they performed. How had they learned
to do that? It is a rare thing in theatre, to see something from which
nothing can be subtracted.
The address of Primus Theatre appeared on the back of the pro-
gram. I wrote and asked, more or less, the question I posed above.
How did you learn to do this? And how do I learn to do it too? The
eventual outcome of this inquiry was an invitation to attend a three-
week performance course the troupe was offering in Winnipeg, in Au-
gust of 1993.
Primus Theatre was led by Richard Fowler, a Canadian who had
studied acting with André Gregory (b. 1934) and Jerzy Grotowski and
gone on to join Barba’s Odin Teatret, where he worked for a decade as
an actor and teacher. Barba directed Fowler’s solo performance Wait
for the Dawn (1985) and Fowler performed in the Odin’s creation Ta-
labot (1988) and in countless outdoor performances. Fowler was an
invited teacher in the English acting section of the National Theatre
School of Canada2 in 1986; at the end of their work together he of-
fered his students a challenge and a proposal - that they continue work
together professionally, outside of the school environment. They ac-
cepted and got organized and two years later he left the Odin to found
a company with them.
After the kind of acting I had become accustomed to seeing and
doing in the English-speaking theatre community in Montréal, Richard

2
The National Theatre School of Canada, founded by Michel Saint Denis in 1960 is a
co-lingual institution with both English and French-language streams for acting, pro-
duction, directing and design.
 Beginnings in Embodied Learning 37

Fowler was a bit of a shock. He didn’t ask us to represent daily life

nor did we have to change our emotional states in order to act. Instead
he put us to work on demanding physical exercises to make our bodies
more interesting to watch and direct vocal exercises to make our
voices louder and more resonant. The reason for this disciplined work
was one that was familiar to me from my Suzuki days. What I heard
again from Fowler was that most ethical principle, that craft can be
learned and this makes the question of talent initially irrelevant.
Everything worthwhile I have learned to do as an artist arose
from my meeting with Richard Fowler, a master teacher who could
do, describe and transmit every aspect of theatrical practice. He re-
mains the most complete theatre artist I personally know. The actors
he trained himself and the network of ‘cousins’ trained by his col-
leagues have become my artistic family, people whose work I look
forward to, whose company I seek and whose wisdom I treasure.

Figure 1: Richard Fowler directing in the village square of Nocelle, Italy

(Photo by Laura Astwood)

I studied with Richard Fowler on two later occasions, once in

1996 for a week at Espace La Veillée (now Espace Prospero) in Mon-
38 The Dancing Word

tréal and for three months full time in Winnipeg in the winter of 1997.
Between 1993 and 1997 I estimate that I received between 1200 and
1500 hours of personal and group instruction.
Along with a very strong attitude of self-reliance and a deep con-
cern for the contextual relevance of the art being created, Fowler’s
approach can be divided into three activities: physical training, vocal
training and composition. In the world of avant-garde theatre, the first
two, the physical and vocal training, are rather famous. They were
originally developed at the Laboratory Theatre in Poland by Jerzy
Grotowski’s actors and were modified and added to by the actors of
the Odin Teatret. These two types of exercise have been taught far and
wide in workshops given by Laboratory Theatre and Odin Teatret ac-
tors.
I would characterize Fowler’s approach to actor training as sim-
ple, direct and effective. The physical training is used to create
strength and stamina. The vocal exercises are used to create volume
and colour. The inner life is stimulated by the ‘outer’ life of the body.
The imagination must express itself concretely in physical acts and
vocalized sounds. All the exercises are built around principles that
govern the accumulation of potential energy and the release of kinetic
energy. According to Barba and Fowler, mastery of these principles
makes the body interesting to watch and the voice interesting to listen
to. The exercises are also the key to theatrical formalism, the ability to
set and replay physical and vocal sequences as material, like musical
phrases or pieces of choreography.
Fowler also taught us how to make a performance using this kind
of training. The choreographies and sounds created by the actors in
their training are supervised by the director who cuts and pastes them
together to create meaning for the spectator. From the actors' points of
view, the performance is composed of movements and sounds – cho-
reographies, songs, texts - that they have created with the director.
They are important to the actor because they are the actor, and their
quality comes from the care of preparation and the vigour of execu-
tion. From the audience’s point of view, characters, situations and
events appear, but this often has nothing at all to do with the subjec-
tive experience of the actors. There is not necessarily any identifica-
tion between an actor and a character. It is a method of working de-
pendant on the discipline and creativity of the actors and on the ability
of the director to build everything from that creativity.
 Beginnings in Embodied Learning 39

Richard Fowler describes the results of such a process in an in-

terview with Per Brask:

The final performance then is like a piece of music played by an orchestra,

each one of the musicians (actors) playing a score which when combined be-
comes the full performance. The full performance score is not only composed
of the actors’ actions. There are many other elements – the sounds they make,
the songs they sing, the texts they speak, the music they make, they way the
lights are used, the scenic architecture constructed for the event, the use of
props – and combinations and interactions of all these elements. The mean-
ings, associations and denotations perceived by the audience are arrived at by
the dramaturgical relationship of these elements, of which the text is only one.
Hence the text is not the primary conveyor of the performance’s meaning and
the actor no longer has the onus for the transmission of meaning to the specta-
tor. The meaning that the audience derives from a given scene is the result of
the way all the various elements interact. The spectator ‘reads’ the perform-
ance on the basis of all the signs that make up the performance score. (Brask
87)

In order to realize this vision, the actors that Fowler directed required
particular skills. Fowler was still performing his solo Wait for the
Dawn and training on a daily basis when he began to direct Primus.
He took it upon himself to personally teach his new actors everything
he felt they should know in order to create the kind of theatre he
wanted to see:

I am training actors to have the inclinations and abilities to give form to any
impulse or image that they may be stimulated by, whether by a text, the idea of
a character, an emotion, an animal or whatever … They must be able to use
their bodies in space to create signs, they must be able to sing, to make music,
to design a physical environment, to be fully involved in and responsible for
all aspects of their work.

When I go to the theatre I want a primarily kinaesthetic experience, not a pri-

marily intellectual one. I don’t go to the theatre to sit and think, activities for
which I have other times and places, but to experience, to be taken out of my-
self, to have my expectations and presumptions about life and living surprised
and changed, not confirmed and reassured. And when I go to the theatre, I
want to see magicians not reciters, I want to see actors using their bodies,
minds, emotions, energy, in ways which astonish and transport me to other
levels of reality and perceptions. (87-88).

Implicit in Fowler’s vision is the artist’s drive towards self-awareness.

His implied desire to teach audiences to expect more requires that he
40 The Dancing Word

and his actors expect more of themselves. Fowler describes the ideas
that led him to seek out Grotowski and Barba:

I wanted to change things. I wanted to change myself. I wanted to use the thea-
tre for change. I began to develop the idea of the artist as the instigator or the
element of change. That the function of an actor could be other than to enter-
tain, as it is normally understood; that the actor’s function could be to change
the perception of reality, to open up people’s perceptions to other levels of re-
ality beyond the daily. I didn’t know how to give this form. I only had a
murky, ambiguous desire, a combination of malaise and dissatisfaction. (81)

While such statements on their own might appear banal or pretentious,

in all of my dealings with him Fowler’s deeds matched his words. He
was the first person I met who actually embodied the aesthetic and
ethical principles he proclaimed. During the decade of its existence
Primus created five original performances that toured across Canada,
including parts of the North where professional theatre seldom ven-
tures. Fowler had the texts of these performances translated into
French and the company reworked their shows so that French versions
could be performed in Québec City, Montréal and in the francophone
parts of Manitoba. Primus created countless community events, taught
literally hundreds of workshops and in 1996 organized Survivors of
the Ice Age, a unique conference of independent theatre artists from
English Canada, Québec, the U.S.A. and Italy. Primus’ multidiscipli-
nary skills and original approach were instrumental in changing the
criteria for the evaluation and funding of theatre projects in the Eng-
lish section of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Following the conclusion of Primus Theatre’s activities in 1997,
Fowler moved to the village of Nocelle in Southern Italy, where over
the course of the next three years, he created three community plays
involving some of his former Primus collaborators, his former stu-
dents and the residents of that remote mountain village. The project,
entitled C’era una volta in montagna..., told the story of the village,
past and future. During the same period Fowler held a month-long
intensive performer’s workshop with his colleagues Laura Astwood,
Alessandra di Castri and Stephen Lawson and directed Astwood and
di Castri in the creation of an Italian/English performance Una donna
che conosco/A Woman I Know. Since the conclusion of this project in
2002, Fowler has concentrated exclusively on his work as a profes-
sional translator and editor.
 Beginnings in Embodied Learning 41

Figure 2: Don Kitt in Primus Theatre’s Figure 3: Ker Wells in Primus Thea-
Scarabesque (1993), directed by Richard tre’s The Night Room (1994), directed
Fowler. by Richard Fowler.
(Photos by Laura Astwood)

Fowler’s presence has had a major effect on contemporary theatre

practice in English Canada. Primus Theatre’s many workshops and
their final training school have been directly responsible for the crea-
tion of numerous solo and group performances. These works are espe-
cially significant in English Canada for their rejection of normative
aesthetics, of repertoire and of traditional venues of presentation. In
Canada and the United States Fowler’s work continues thanks to for-
mer students with companies in New York (Brad Krumholz and Tan-
nis Kowalchuk: North American Cultural Laboratory), Toronto
(Daniel Mroz and associates: One Reed Theatre Ensemble), Ottawa
(Laura Astwood and associates: Ottawa Stilt Union) and Halifax (Alex
McClean and associates: Zuppa Circus Theatre). Freelance directors,
performers and teachers Karin Randoja, Ker Wells, Jane Wells, Var-
rick Grimes and Elizabeth Rucker also continue the line of Fowler’s
work in Toronto, Canada.
42 The Dancing Word

Figure 4: Former Primus member Figure 5: Fowler students Varrick

Sean Dixon in his solo performance Grimes and Jane Wells in Number 11
Falling Back Home (1995). Theatre’s Icaria, directed by KerWells
(Photo by Laura Astwood) (2000). (Photo by Laura Astwood)

Figure 6: Former Primus member Laura Astwood

in her solo performance the garden, directed by former
Primus member Karin Randoja (2001).
(Photo by Anjy Cameron)

In the practical, ethical and aesthetic principles I learned from

Fowler I recognized the authenticity and compassion of Suzuki’s ap-
proach. Summarized below they bear more than a passing resem-
blance to the principles inspired in me by Suzuki.
 Beginnings in Embodied Learning 43

Practically, Fowler’s process can be summed up as follows:

x That a performer undertake to create a structured and personal
daily training for herself that is composed of physical and vo-
cal elements,
x That a performer in tandem with this technical training proc-
ess create fragments of performance material,
x That a performer, led by a director and working in a group
with other performers use these fragments to create a full
theatre performance,
x That the group use its performance i.e. its collective identity,
to enter into relationships with other communities, thus en-
couraging tolerance, social growth, and change.
Aesthetically he requires:
x That performances integrate movement, music and text,
x That actors therefore be integrated performers who can move,
speak and sing,
x That performances deploy signs in such a way as to transcend
narrative realism and create aesthetic diversity.
Ethically he proposes:
x That craft can be learned and this makes the question of talent
initially irrelevant,
x That performers be responsible for all aspects of their crea-
tion,
x That a performance be intended as a transformational experi-
ence for its audience, evoking other levels of reality and per-
ceptions,
x That the performers’ artistic activities be directed towards
their own development and change.
44 The Dancing Word

Figure 7: Laura Astwood in Russe, Bulgaria, in NaCl’s Invisible Neighborhood

(2002), directed by Fowler student Brad Krumholz.
(Photo by Brad Krumholz)

It was at Fowler’s suggestion that I undertook the next phase of

my journey. Following the 1993 workshop I asked him for an evalua-
tion of my work. I wanted to know what I needed to do to keep pro-
gressing once I’d returned to my home in Montreal. Fowler advised
me to study a martial art. He felt that the specialized body usage found
in the martial arts, which is based on the control of potential and ki-
netic energy, would be a sustainable way for me to practice the princi-
ples, if not the form, of the training he had shown me.
 Chapter 2

Chinese Martial Arts

My adult life has been defined by the practice of traditional Chi-

nese body technologies, a long-term practical research project I began
on Richard Fowler’s suggestion. From September 1993 to September
2005 I studied cailifoquan (Cantonese: choy li fut kuen), a martial art
from Southern China; tang peng taijiquan (Cantonese: tong ping
taigek kuen), a Northern Chinese martial art; and zhi neng qigong, a
contemporary body technology designed to develop the student’s
health and longevity, with Wong Sui Meing in Montréal. Since I
started in 1993 I estimate I have completed at least 10,000 hours of
training under Wong’s direct supervision.

Figure 8: The author’s teacher Wong Sui Meing in his Montréal studio,
Wong Kung Fu.
(Photo by Daniel Mroz)
46 The Dancing Word

In September of 2005 I began to study chen taiji shiyong quanfa,

a very old form of taijiquan, under the instruction of Chen Zhonghua.
I participated in a series of intensive workshops and private lessons
over a two-year period and in May 2007 traveled to Daqingshan
Mountain in Shandong Province, China, for a one-month full-time
intensive training period. I continue to study privately with Chen as
often as his busy international teaching schedule allows. In August
2007 Chen granted me a formal teaching license in the style.
In addition to these long-term studies, I have cross-trained in a
variety of other styles of martial movement, including Indian kalarip-
payattu under the late Govindankutty Nair (d. 2006), Indonesian kun-
tao and silat under Willem deThouars and his senior student Randall
Goodwin and Chinese baguazhang with Ken Cohen and Allen
Pittman. I have also practiced the contemporary combat sport of Bra-
zilian jujutsu with athletes of Team Renzo Gracie, Ottawa. Most of
these studies have been in the format of workshops, private lessons
and informal training and have served to shed light on my principal
practices.

Figure 9: The author and his teacher Chen Zhonghua practicing taijiquan tui shou on
Daqingshan Mountain, Shandong, China, May 2007. (Photo by Daniel Mroz)

This chapter will present a comprehensive historical and systemic

description of the Chinese martial arts. It will also present the theo-
retical basis for the relationship between martial movement and the
training of contemporary theatrical performers.
 Chinese Martial Arts 47

1. Wushu

It is difficult to overstress the significance the concept of the mar-

tial or wu in pre-Communist Chinese society. Every aspect of Chinese
history, society and cosmology is divided according to a martial/civil
binary (Boretz 6, 13). The complement of the martial wu is the civil
wen and as much as the offical, written and static elements of Chinese
culture reflect wen, so do the violent, chaotic and performative aspects
reflect wu. Much as it represents violence the character wu is made up
of two other characters, one meaning ‘lance’ and the other ‘to stop’,
thus implicit in the notion of martial is also the stoppage or prevention
of fighting (Liang and Wu Kung Fu 16).
The collective name for the Chinese martial arts has changed
over the centuries. The general term used in the People’s Republic of
China is wushu, a Mandarin word meaning “martial method”. In the
past, wushu has been referred to as ji ji (striking techniques), wuyi
(martial arts), guoshu (national methods) and gongfu (Kang 1). Gong
fu, often written as “kung fu” and meaning meritorious action, refers
to a deep level of commitment that yields skill – the character gong
means work and fu is time. The quality of gongfu is not restricted to
wushu. One can display gongfu in painting, calligraphy, musicianship,
cooking and virtually any other craft-based activity.
Since the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese government has pro-
moted a gymnastic art created by combining martial arts with acrobat-
ics and tumbling drawn from the Chinese circus arts, which it hopes
will become an Olympic sport. As a result, there are currently two
streams of wushu. Xiandai wushu or modern wushu has two areas of
competition: the performance of virtuosic taolu that are effectively
floor gymnastics using a specifically Chinese movement vocabulary
and a combat sport named sanda which combines kickboxing with
standing grappling and throwing. Minjian wushu meaning folk or tra-
ditional wushu, encompasses the hundreds of styles of traditional or
folk martial art to be found in China which are inextricably embedded
in a matrix of theatre, popular religion, Daoist ritual, folklore and per-
sonal and regional idiosyncracy. Traditional Chinese martial artists
outside of the People’s Republic of China tend to prefer to use the
term gongfu or “kung fu” to describe their practice in order to differ-
entiate it from the government sanctioned and controlled variant.
48 The Dancing Word

2. The Primary Characteristics of Combative Behaviour

Before delving into the specifics of Chinese martial arts it is help-

ful to introduce some general categories that underpin martial systems
overall. The scholarly discipline that examines systems of human
combative behaviour is named Hoplology and was founded by the
British author and adventurer Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890) (Burton
1). Fascinated by the history of warfare, Burton elaborated a discipline
for the study of human combative behaviour in both its physical and
its cultural aspects. Hoplology as an organized academic discipline
remained dormant from Burton’s death until the late 1950's when it
was revived by Donn F. Draeger (1922-1982). A former major in the
United States Marine Corps and an expert in the martial arts of Japan,
Draeger lived in Tokyo from the mid-1950s until his death. In the
1970s he spent considerable time at the East West Center of the Uni-
versity of Hawaii at Manoa, lecturing and composing his many books
and articles. Following Draeger’s death, his collaborators Hunter B.
Armstrong and Richard Hayes have continued to publish Hoplos, the
Journal of the International Hoplology Society wherein are elaborated
the results of independent research into martial art.
What the general public refers to as a martial art, Hoplology calls
a combative system: “A body of organized, codified, repeatable ac-
tions, techniques, behaviours and attitudes, the primary intended func-
tion and planful design of which is to be used in, or as preparation for,
combative applications” (Armstrong, The Two Faces of Combatives
13). Combative systems arise from the human ability to “apprehend,
discern, abstract, identify and label the salient features of combat”
(Hayes, Paleolithic Adaptive Traits and the Fighting Man 10). Com-
bat itself occurs due to combative behaviour. Armstrong defines com-
bative behaviour as “behaviour displayed when man fights, prepares
to fight, or participates in activity that simulates fighting. Especially in
the latter case, combative behaviour can be non-aggressive.” Further-
more, “combative behaviour takes place in many forms of activity and
under many conditions, from play to professional performance; and
includes emotional ranges from fear to calmness to rage” (Armstrong,
The Two Faces of Combatives 2).
Combative behaviour is itself the outgrowth of a key element of
Paleolithic survival behaviour. This aspect, displayed by adult males
in stalking and hunting behaviour is considered to be the locus of the
 Chinese Martial Arts 49

origin of the eight combat adaptive traits that “comprise the phenome-
nology of combat. In their interaction, these traits animate any and all
systems by which weapons are articulated, as well as unarmed com-
bative systems,” and as such are the regarded as the “dynamic core of
hoplological inquiry and knowledge” (Hayes, Paleolithic Adaptive
Traits And the Fighting Man 10). The traits are cultivated in combat-
ive systems through the rehearsal of Pre-Arranged Movement Patterns
(PMP), set sequences of solo, partner and group martial movement of
varying degrees of sophistication, the practice of which serves to in-
corporate the movement vocabulary of the particular system and allow
its spontaneous expression in combat (Armstrong 24).
The first three Combat Adaptive Traits are referred to as mental,
or ‘brain-bound’ in so far as they precede and are internal to the ex-
pression of the other traits which are manifest in the movement pat-
terns of the particular combative system. They are:

x Cognitive/Intuitive Trait: responsible for the apprehension of

danger, the management of the normal consciousness of daily
life and the “executive functioning of the self-system” (Hayes,
Hoplology Theoretics 1 24).
x Volitional Trait: refers to will, volition and initiative mediated
by the Cognitive/Intuitive Trait that determines whether action
is taken or withheld.
x Imperturbable-Mind/Steadfast-Mind Trait: allows the previ-
ous two traits to function optimally by limiting or preventing
the Alarm Reaction (AR) that triggers the General Adaptation
Syndrome (GAS) that prepares the individual for fight or
flight. The AR and GAS lead to a state of high emotional
arousal that is deeply counterproductive to high-level per-
formance given the nervous and hormonal activation that at
best makes the heart pound, shrinks the field of vision and in-
hibits fine motor control. As Hayes states: “The AR, when
completely blocked is Imperturbable-mind; when partially
blocked is Steadfast-mind and the complete failure to block is
panic, mindless rage or mindless fear” (25).

The final five traits are embodied in both the pre-arranged and
spontaneous expression of the characteristic movement patterns of
each combative system or martial art:
50 The Dancing Word

x Omni-Poise Trait “begins in the natural human posture of

standing upright. All motility begins from, and returns to,
natural posture. Natural posture is the nexus between mobility
and stability, the baseline or tonic for all stancing, stepping
and body/weight shifting. It is the basis for all leverage and
momentum. The natural posture embodies the ‘potential en-
ergy’ from which kinetic energy emerges. The evolution of all
balance and displacement emerges from and returns to the
natural posture of man” (25).
x Abdominal Trait “unites the torso; hence unites and consoli-
dates the biomechanical exertions of the lower and upper
body. Optimum abdominal tensing is interfaced (at the dia-
phragm) with abdominal breathing (Respiratory-Vocality
Trait), optimizes the integration and concentration of all
movement/behaviour patterns in the combative context” (25).
x Respiratory-Vocality Trait “assists in the integration and con-
centration of bio-mechanical exertion, when interfaced with
the Abdominal Trait given above. Vocal emission can be
without specific meaning or it can be symbolic (the spoken
word), with the intention of creating an opening in the oppo-
nent’s guard or posture” (25).
x Force/Yield Trait “invests movement/behaviour patterns in
which the interplay of yielding (to force), and forcing, is in-
herent to the strategic and tactical objectives of a combative
system” (25).
x Synchronous Trait “invests movement/behaviour patterns in
which the space interval and the time factor, with respect to an
opponent’s actions, are anticipated (seamlessly) and one’s
own actions are coordinate and synchronous in neutralizing
and resolving the opponent’s kinetic energy (in its mechanical
expression)” (25).

These eight traits interact and combine to produce a result that is

greater than the sum of its parts, the Transcendent Synergy of the
Manifest Adaptive Traits, a state of “diffuse, omni-directional alert-
ness which precludes the slightest opening or weakness with respect to
an opponent or opponents” (Hayes, Hoplology Theoretics 8 20).
According to Richard Hayes, the evocation of the Transcendent
Synergy of the Manifest Adaptive Traits occurs as follows: the per-
 Chinese Martial Arts 51

ception of a danger or threat leads to the activation of the trait of Ini-

tiative or Volition, mediated by Cognitive/Intuitive processing, al-
lowed by the interdicting of the Alarm Reaction by the Imperturbable-
Mind/Steadfast-Mind and implemented by the other five traits. This
mobilization is expressed or manifested through movement/behaviour
patterns of combative-systems (system-bound) or through personal
idiosyncratic movement patterns (system-free) and an appropriate re-
sponse to danger/threat occurs (21).
In execution, the three internal Combat Adaptive Traits are ex-
pressed via the five externally visible traits. In training and practice, it
is the drilling of the five visible traits that is used to cultivate the three
mental or internal traits. Ultimately, the eight traits can be viewed as
being united in a circling pattern of causation, the state of transcendent
unity.
In the Chinese tradition the recognition of such traits and their
subsequent elaboration via training methods requires qiao, or ingenu-
ity (Kang 1). This ingenuity is expressed in the integrated and multi-
purpose procedures and philosophy of wushu.

3. The Conceptual Structure of Wushu

Each individual system of minjian wushu contains organizing

categories and principles of varying elaboration and sophistication. In
an effort to present and organize the Chinese martial arts as a coherent
set of body technologies, contemporary Chinese scholars and govern-
ment sports officials have produced an overarching description into
which all styles, xiandai and minjian, with a little prodding and pok-
ing, can be seen to fit. Thus according to current definitions, the term
wushu may be applied to any martial art of Chinese origin that teaches
hand-to-hand and armed combat in the following four ways:

1. gong fa yung dong: Force training exercises that strengthen

the exponent while teaching him or her how to express a
maximum amount of kinetic energy.
2. taolu yung dong: Forms or choreographed routines whose
abstract movements contain the fighting techniques of the
specific style practiced by the exponent.
52 The Dancing Word

3. ge dou yung dong: The application of the techniques

learned in taolu yung dong against uncooperative training
partners - learning to fight by sparring.
4. li fa yung dong: The theory or principles upon which a
given style is based, and their relationship to Chinese cos-
mological, medical and ethical theories. (Kang 1)

4. A Sophisticated Notion of ‘Defense’

Self-defense in wushu has three meanings. In the first case self-

defence is the subject’s ability to defend his or her body from direct
physical assault. Recalling the Chinese conception of the body as a
social phenomenon evoked earlier, it is prudent to include the defence
of family, clan and village in this category. In the second it is the sub-
ject’s ability to protect herself from ill health by practicing a system of
exercises that mitigates inherited or environmental health risks. The
third definition, traditionally called wude or ‘martial virtue’ is an ethi-
cal code of behaviour that requires trained fighters to seek diplomatic
and reasonable solutions to conflicts and virtually prohibits them from
perpetrating violence. This code is designed to protect the martial art-
ist and society in general from its own worst tendencies. As a result of
these three notions of self-defence many teachers of martial arts were
also practitioners of Chinese medicine. In doing so they were able to
treat battlefield injuries, prescribe preventative measures to maintain
their own health and that of their students, and hold a credible peace-
time social position (Kang 3).
Contemporary wushu instructor and author Liang Shou Yu di-
vides wude into two categories, behavioural and intentional. Behav-
ioural wude is expressed as a code of behaviour to which the wushu
practitioner adheres despite his or her personal feelings. These princi-
ples are qian xu (humility), zun jing (respect), zheng yi (righteous-
ness), xin yong (trust), and zhong cheng (loyalty). Intentional wude is
the attitude that the practitioner aspires to. One who has actualized
intentional wude will naturally express all the characteristics of behav-
ioural wude. Its components are zhi yi (will power), ren nai, yi li, heng
xin (endurance, perseverance, patience), and yong gan (courage) (Li-
ang, Baguazhang 9).
Kang Gewu, one of China’s foremost martial arts historians con-
siders the presence of these three unified streams – the martial, healing
 Chinese Martial Arts 53

and ethical – in traditional wushu as the sign of its holistic nature

(Kang 3). There is evidence both for and against the attribution of a
perennial holistic character to Chinese martial arts. Douglas Wile,
whose work will be discussed in detail below, argues that the theoreti-
cal and practical integration of fighting, spirituality and healing is a
recent 19th century phenomenon (Wile, Lost T’ai Chi Classics). Yet
the terminology found in Kang’s ancient source is of prime signifi-
cance. Such terms as ‘internal,’ ‘external’ and ‘qi’ are all of capital
importance when used in the context of traditional wushu.

5. Structure and Classification of Wushu

There are four families of combat techniques shared by all styles

of traditional wushu. The emphasis given to each family varies from
style to style, but all four are present to some degree in all styles. An
important aspect of Chinese martial arts as currently practiced world-
wide is that barehanded fighting, or “hand combat” is taught before
armed combat and armed techniques are generally derived from un-
armed ones (Shahar 113).

x quan or da: fist or punching - striking with the fists, arms,

shoulders and upper body in a percussive manner designed to
cause local tissue damage,
x tui or ti: kick or kicking - striking with the feet, legs, knees
and hips in a percussive manner designed to cause local tissue
damage,
x qinna: joint-locking - seizing and twisting the limbs to immo-
bilize the adversary,
x shuai: wrestling - throwing the adversary at the ground in or-
der to cause global damage to his or her body.

These methods are learned through the instructor’s demonstration

of individual punches, kicks, locks and throws as well as through the
student’s analysis of the taolu. Every movement in a taolu can be used
as all four of the above methods. Punches, kicks, locks and throws
become one another as the student learns to interpret the taolu’s posi-
tions, transitions and syncopation in a variety of self-defense contexts.
The movements of each taolu or form, rather than being a linked chain
54 The Dancing Word

of abstracted self-defense techniques, represent energy vectors that

can be meaningfully applied in unlimited ways.
There are two basic approaches to these four activities, the inter-
nal and the external. Nei jia pai (internal family) and wai jia pai (ex-
ternal family) are terms used in popular martial arts literature to de-
scribe practices that respectively appear to be more meditative and
passive or more combative and active. The reader is likely familiar
with the internal martial art of taijiquan, the taolu of which is usually
practiced in a slow and contemplative manner. The internal is con-
trasted with the external, which involves rapid and forceful taolu prac-
tice that in fact characterizes the majority of martial arts practiced in
China and indeed most of Asia. The internal martial arts are popularly
believed to have originated at the Daoist centre on Mount Wudang in
Hubei Province while the external martial arts are thought to come
from the famous Buddhist Shaolin Monastery in Henan Province.
These distinctions are somewhat facile and historically inaccurate. The
difference between the two approaches is best seen in how each trains
the beginner.

Figure 10: The author demonstrating a ‘hand combat’ movement from cailifoquan
called hu zhia, or Tiger Claw Striking. (photo by Laura Astwood)
 Chinese Martial Arts 55

An external type of body conditioning increases muscular

strength and endurance. In the external approach to fighting, the
striker’s hands retract away from the opponent after every attempted
hit in a series of percussive beats. The fighting style is external be-
cause the strikes come from outside of the close contact range. The
kind of concentration cultivated by this training is single-minded, ide-
ally capable of blocking out all distractions and holding to a single
object. External sparring consists mainly of quan (punching) and tui
(kicking) that are chang ji, or delivered at arms-length from the oppo-
nent. Sparring is initially practiced as single movement attack and de-
fence sets called san shou, meaning separated hands, or techniques
that are launched from a distance. External fencing with short weap-
ons or jian ji (sword fighting), and with long weapons or qiang-ji
(spear fighting), follows the same principles and training methods as
unarmed combat.

Figure 11: The author demonstrating a sabre cut from the cailifoquan taolu called
mei hua dao or Plum Flower Sabre. (photo by Laura Astwood)
56 The Dancing Word

An internal approach emphasizes conditioning that trains the

nervous system’s ability to operate smoothly under stress, without the
triggering of the alarm reaction. An internal approach to fighting
makes contact with and then sticks to the opponent in order to either
smother or outflank his attack at very short range. Internal fighting
mainly makes use of duan da, or short range striking, shuai (wres-
tling) and qinna (joint-locking). Rather than a series of percussive
beats, an internal attack is a single sustained note. It is internal be-
cause it stays inside the range of close contact. The kind of concentra-
tion developed by internal training is reflective. All phenomena are
accepted in a consciousness that strives for a mirror-like awareness of
its surroundings (Cartmell A-5). Internal sparring is initially practiced
in two-person sensitivity and balance exercises or tui shou, meaning
joined hands, wherein the subject attempts to push or throw a partner
from touch distance. Internal fencing with short weapons or jian ji
(sword fighting) and with long weapons or qiang ji (spear fighting)
follows the same principles and training methods as unarmed combat.
Both types of training are vital in traditional wushu. Such terms
as internal and external merely serve to indicate the type of training a
given style deems most appropriate for the beginner. It is also impor-
tant to recognize that while the descriptions of internal and external
above describe the official definitions, they do not necessarily reflect
the particularities of individual teachers’ and traditions’ idiosyncra-
cies. For instance my first teacher Wong Sui Meing rejects the distinc-
tion between internal and external as so much bureaucratic theory,
while my second teacher Chen Zhonghua uses the term internal to re-
fer to a specific type of body usage found in his branch of Chen style
taijiquan. Both masters’ thought processes are internally coherent, but
exist at one remove from the dominant discourse, a common situation
according to the anecdotal testimony of my fellow martial artists.
Wushu practitioners also categorize their training according to
movement types and region of origin within China. The categories of
northern and southern styles of hand combat, or bei quan and nan
quan are frequently used by practitioners to imply both regional origin
and style of performance. Formally it seems that the northern systems
originate in the line drills of infantrymen. Taijiquan and xingyiquan,
two northern systems, are composed of linked short movement se-
quences that advance straight or at a 45-degree angle, patterns that are
easily drilled by a large group moving shoulder to shoulder. The ori-
 Chinese Martial Arts 57

gin of the southern styles in the village militia training practiced in

temple courtyards is apparent in the use of the cardinal and diagonal
points of orientation that take the exponent through all the main lines
of a square during the execution of a taolu.

Figure 12: The author demonstrating a thrust from the cailifoquan taolu called mei
hua qiang, or Plum Flower Spear. (Photo by Laura Astwood)

The official categorization system recognized by the Chinese gov-

ernment divides wushu into five broad styles of movement:

x Circular Movement and Soft Appearance, referring to tai-

jiquan and related systems such as baguazhang and liuhebafa,
x Long Fist Type, referring to styles using wide open postures
and extended strikes and kicks, for example changquan, liter-
ally ‘long fist’,
x Long Range1 Type, referring to styles that engage an oppo-
nent from a maximum distance, such as tongbeiquan, piguaq-
uan and cailifoquan,

1
The idea of ideal combat ranges for hand combat is likely a vestige of armed combat
where weapon length was decisive. Contemporary mixed martial arts competitions,
where all kinds of empty-handed fighting are permitted, have replaced the idea of
spatial ranges with a concept of temporal phases (Gracie and Danaher 52-55). Fights
unconstrained by competition rules or weapon usage pass through three broad phases:
free movement of both fighters, fighters joined in a standing clinch and finally wres-
tling in ground combat (51). While maintained in many systematic descriptions of
fighting, the concept of range is now widely considered to be misleading and out-
moded.
58 The Dancing Word

x Short Range Type, referring to styles that engage an opponent

from a minimum distance, such as xingyiquan and yongchun-
quan,
x Imitation Type, referring to styles that imitate the behaviour
of an animal or a person in a specfic state, for example ‘prey-
ing mantis style’, ‘monkey style’ and even ‘drunken man’
style (Liang and Wu, Kung Fu Elements 33-34).

The practice of all training activities embraced by internal and ex-

ternal approaches is often referred to as xiulian. While contemporary
practitioners seeking to emphasize the self-healing aspects of Chinese
body technologies interpret xiulian as the act of “cultivation”, it is
more accurately translated as “tempering” or even “smelting”, reflect-
ing both the cyclical effort and repose and the constructed, artisanal
nature of wushu training.
Wushu training also makes reference to a phenomenon called qi,
mentioned briefly above in relation to Daoist cosmology. This phe-
nomenon is trained with a family of body technologies that since 1949
have been known as qigong.

6. Qigong

Qigong is a recent term for a body of exercises both vast and an-
cient. These exercises were traditionally associated with Daoist, Bud-
dhist, Confucian and folk martial, medical and spiritual traditions. The
Communist government of China adopted the name qigong as a blan-
ket term in 1949 (Palmer 18), emphasizing the secular and healing
aspects of the practices. Literally, it means “energy work” or “breath
work”. In the last half of the 20th century, the term qigong grew to be
synonymous with a unique expression of popular religiosity in the os-
tensibly secular People’s Republic of China. Qigong was initially ap-
proved and encouraged by the Communist Party as an inexpensive
means of treating such chronic psychosomatic disorders as neurasthe-
nia, ulcers, asthma, osteoarthritis and the like. The public’s enthusiasm
for the practices, which rushed in to fill the vast gap left by the de-
struction of religion and traditional Chinese culture by the Commu-
nists, rose to a fever pitch that culminated in 1999 in the suppression
of the movement as dangerous and subversive (6-7). Enthusiasm was
 Chinese Martial Arts 59

so inflamed that the popular term for the craze was qigong re or
‘qigong fever!’
Qigong exercises can be said to be composed of the san jiao, or
Three Regulations: the regulation of body, of breath and of mind. Tra-
ditionally in China, the human being has been viewed as an integra-
tion of three increasingly subtle fields: jing or Essence, the dense bod-
ily form that interacts directly with the outside world; qi or Energy,
the breath that animates that form; and shen or Spirit, the extremely
subtle mind or consciousness that permeates both the body and its
functional energy. Jing, qi and shen are some of the components of the
cosmological system that provides the theoretical framework for Chi-
nese martial, healing and spiritual qigong. Jing, qi and shen are collec-
tively known as the san bao, the Three Treasures, possessions that
must be protected and cultivated if health and happiness are to be
achieved and maintained.
Western medicine and psychology use the Greek terms soma and
psyche to refer to bodily form and mind respectively. To complete the
triad a word with more archaic connotations is required - pneuma, the
breath of life. Expressed in more Western terms the san bao of jing, qi
and shen are soma, pneuma and psyche.
Qi, breath or life-energy, is the most important element of the
cosmological system that describes the psychosomatic practice that is
qigong. It is also the most problematic. Qi, in its culture of origin, is a
term with a vast number of context-specific meanings. Qi as an ele-
ment of cosmology is used to describe process and function. While the
term qi is used to refer to similar phenomena, how it is experienced or
understood varies depending on the martial, medical or spiritual con-
text. China scholar and qigong teacher Kenneth Cohen offers the most
succinct general definition: “the energy produced when complemen-
tary polar opposites are harmonized” (Cohen, The Way of Qigong 4).
In the case of the human body, qi is the energy produced by the oppo-
sition of the dense energy of the body or jing and the subtle energy of
the mind or shen. The harmonization Cohen describes is not static. Qi
is described as the source and substance of both form (zao) and trans-
formation (hua). Zaohua is thus creation, but it is a self-regulating,
creator-free activity of transformation. Qi moves from the formless
and undetectable state of potentiality to the visible, condensed and
definite incarnation of being (Robinet 8).
60 The Dancing Word

Differences in experience and understanding of qi can be illus-

trated as follows: a practitioner of Chinese medicine, whether she
practices phytotherapy (herbal medicine) or acupuncture, uses the
concept of qi to permit the coherence of her interventions: certain
symptoms are associated with certain states of qi. The doctor of Chi-
nese medicine does not perceive the state of qi directly, but rather in-
terprets the state of qi via physiological signs. Likewise, therapy, be it
by herbs or needles, treats physiology directly and qi indirectly. In this
case, qi is part of a theoretical system in the way that Einstein’s The-
ory of Relativity, or Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity are a part of
modern physics. It is a theoretical construct that describes subtle and
gross physical phenomena, rather than being a subtle or gross physical
phenomenon itself.
Qi in the spiritual context is a means of expressing the positive
and negative results of actions. Actions arising from cruelty, anger and
deceit are seen as depleting the qi of the individual who has commit-
ted these acts, reducing her quality of life. Compassionate and loving
behaviour is viewed as being a means to accumulate positive qi and
thereby achieve health and happiness. Qi in this context is not directly
perceived either, but is abstracted as the “coin of good karma,” the
valued substance influenced by moral and social behaviour. The com-
plement to moral discipline in all three major Chinese religious tradi-
tions, Daoism, Confucianism and Buddhism, is meditation.
Xin zhai, or the fasting of the mind is a Daoist term, but its
equivalent is practiced in all three traditions. The process of xin zhai
can be described as the purging of the mind of conceptual thought.
This process is often begun by attending to the breath. The path of
muscle activations followed by the breath from the nostrils to the ab-
domen becomes the sole object of contemplation. The practice of re-
laxed deep breathing reduces stress on the nervous system, creating a
health-producing environment within the practitioner. The mental si-
lence and attention to the body required by xin zhai are pre- or co-
requisites to qigong training. Both the concentration stressed by exter-
nal martial training, and the awareness cultivated by internal style
training are aspects of xin zhai. Under the guidance of an experienced
teacher, a qigong student learns to give attention to subtle sensations
within the body unavailable to the conscious mind without xin zhai.
These sensations are referred to as qi gan and include sensations of
heat in the body, of weight in the limbs and lower abdomen, of pleas-
 Chinese Martial Arts 61

urable vibration in the body and a feeling of physical and mental ex-
pansiveness. The subtle qi gan sensations that lead towards an active
unitive experience are also considered the precursors of pure con-
sciousness, the actualization of xin zhai.
Awareness of qi gan allows the student to become conscious of
the activities of her nervous system. Subjectively, we associate our
various experiences of living to different parts of the body: the cra-
nium is experienced as containing the seat of thought, the thorax as the
house of the emotions, the abdomen as the locus of hunger and the
pelvis the root of sexual desire and vitality. Qigong practice can per-
mit an individual to experience his or her own body on a more subtle
level. Meditative concentration on a particular bodily structure or
process permits self-sensing as when deprived of external objects the
body’s senses sense themselves and their internal surroundings.
Gradually the abstract concept of qi through which the physician
balances the energies of the internal organs and through which the
theocrat structures an ordered society becomes a concrete experience
to the qigong practitioner. The practitioner of medical qigong directly
manipulates qi to heal and maintain his or her own body, and can even
extend this healing to another being by directly manipulating the
other’s qi. The practitioner of martial qigong directs her qi to different
parts of her body in order to increase the power of a strike or to resist
the force of another’s blow. At advanced levels, perception of the
practitioner’s training partner’s or opponent’s qi allows the practitio-
ner to sense impending actions and act to pre-empt them almost before
they occur. The practitioner of spiritual qigong uses her perception of
qi to go beyond dogma and myth to actually experience the transper-
sonal reality described in the scriptures of her particular tradition.

7. General Principles of Qigong Excercises

The goal of healing, martial and spiritual qigong is to refine the

san bao of jing, qi and shen. These constituent ingredients of being are
not accessible to everyday consciousness. As Yuaso Yasua puts it,
they are part of ‘dark consciousness,’ a term which embraces all usu-
ally uncontrollable aspects of being, from the autonomic nervous sys-
tem to the unconscious mind (The Body 4). In order to refine the san
bao, they must be initially brought into what Yuasa calls ‘bright con-
sciousness,’ the rational, deliberating mind. In qigong, this is achieved
62 The Dancing Word

by psychophysical exercises composed of mental intent or yi, and

physical form or xing. Xing combined with yi creates jin or energetic
force. It is in learning to recognize and produce force or jin that the
qigong practitioner can become acquainted with qi sensations and ac-
quire qi sensitivity.
Depending on the healing, martial or spiritual context of the
qigong practiced, the jin or force is used in different ways. In the con-
text of personal development, it can be fed back into the body to culti-
vate health. In the context of interpersonal relations, it can be applied
to others, disarranging or harmonizing their jing, qi and shen for self-
defense or healing purposes. In a transpersonal context it can be used
to suspend the distinction between subject and object.
In Chinese martial arts training the concept of jin is used to de-
scribe three general levels of martial skill. These three levels of skill
are defined in terms of the kind of physical force the student is capable
of expressing. The first level is called ming jin, or ‘bright’, observable
power. Ming jin is the skilled but evident use of the body to produce
great force. A good daily example of ming jin is the golf swing which
uses the inherent structure of the body in a relaxed manner that when
combined with the force of gravity produces a strike of great power.
At the next level, an jin, or ‘hidden power’, the student becomes able
to generate the same amount of force but with far less visible external
motion. The final level, hua jin or ‘mysterious power’ represents the
ultimate refinement of skill – the practitioner barely seems to move at
all and yet expresses devastating power.
By using intent (yi) and form (xing) to regulate force (jin),
qigong training seeks to initially quell expenditure of jing, qi and shen
at their inception, and to recycle this energy before there is too much
loss. While the practitioner of qigong recognizes his or her progress in
terms of an increase in qi gan, other people notice the objective effect
of qigong practice, the augmentation of the practitioner’s shi or pres-
ence. Wushu teacher Xu Guo Ming (George Xu) describes shi as
‘space power’ and ‘presence’ using as an example the charged poten-
tial of the space around a powerful creature such as a tiger (Xu in
Smalheiser 16).
Shi is a word with multiple meanings. It first appears in the 4th
century B.C.E. in the text known in the West as The Art of War by
Sunzi. Francois Julien defines it as “a potential born of disposition”
where disposition refers to an awareness of placement and environ-
 Chinese Martial Arts 63

ment (27). It is a common practice in Chinese martial arts to employ

the same concepts that govern the mobilization of entire armies to the
use of the individual body in single combat. Thus at the microcosmic
level of individual martial artists, shi is the sense of their potential,
their personal presence. It is this quality that is of paramount interest
to performing artists.

To summarize:
1. in a human being: jing (essence) + shen (spirit) = qi (en-
ergy),
2. in a qigong exercise xing (form) + yi (intent) = jin (force),
3. jin applied internally cultivates jing, qi and shen,
4. jin applied externally heals or assaults jing, qi and shen of
another,
5. the three levels of martial power that qigong training helps
actualize are ming jin, an jin and hua jin, or observable,
hidden and mysterious force,
6. qi gan, the subjective sensations associated with the cultiva-
tion of jing, qi and shen are heat, weight, vibration and ex-
pansiveness,
7. shi is the quality of presence experienced by those observ-
ing an actualized qigong practitioner.

8. The Yu Step

As noted above, wushu in China is part of the same family as

theatre and ritual and in addition to the common social reception of
the performance of these three activities they also share common ob-
jective components. A strong example of this is the Yu Step, a dy-
namic weight transfer movement that is described in the baopuzi, a
text of ritual instruction from the 4th century C.E. attributed to the sage
Ge Hong. The Yu Step is still employed by the spirit mediums of
popular Chinese religion and by Daoist priests as part of their ritual
practices. It also appears as the characteristic gait of the martial
painted-face characters in Chinese traditional theatres. Finally, it
shows up as a fundamental weight transfer in numerous styles of
wushu, including every form of taijiquan:
64 The Dancing Word

The fighter would stand with feet apart, then step out with the right foot, bring
the left foot to the right without a transfer of weight, then kick out with the left
foot. The left foot is placed on the ground a pace forward, weight is transferred
to the left when the right foot is brought up to the left and then kicked. (Chan
27-28)

This description of the Yu Step is also that of the stepping for the
first pre-arranged movement pattern in both the hand combat taolu
and the sabre taolu of chen shi taijiquan, a sequence named jingang
daodui, or ‘Buddha’s Warrior Attendant/Vajrapani Pounds the Mor-
tar’. In the later styles of wu- and yang shi taijiquan the stepping pat-
tern has been renamed you lan que wei, ‘Grab the Bird’s Tail’ and the
vigor of the kick has been gentrified and replaced with a low step.
Nevertheless, the fundamental weight transfers and stepping remain.

9. Review of the General Characteristics of Traditional Wushu and

Qigong

To summarize, traditional wushu:

1. Is a manifestation of combative behaviour and combative

systems that have emerged from the evolutionary human
traits called the Combat Adaptive Traits:
a. Cognitive/Intuitive Trait,
b. Volitional Trait,
c. Imperturbable-Mind/Steadfast-Mind Trait,
d. Omni-Poise Trait,
e. Abdominal Trait,
f. Respiratory-Vocality Trait,
g. Force/Yield Trait,
h. Synchronous Trait,
i. Transcendent Synergy of the Manifest Adaptive
Traits;
2. Is characterized by ingenuity: qiao;
3. Offers three kinds of self-defense:
a. Against physical threats,
b. Against inherited or environmental factors damaging
to health,
c. Against social conflict by developing an instinctive
ethical code of conduct: wude;
Chinese Martial Arts 65

4. Is composed of four foundation practices:

a. gong fa yung dong: force training exercises that
strengthen the exponent while teaching him or her
how to express a maximum amount of kinetic energy,
b. taolu yung dong: forms or choreographed routines
whose abstract movements contain fighting tech-
niques of the specific style practiced by the exponent,
c. ge dou yung dong: the application of the techniques
learned in taolu yung dong against uncooperative
training partners - learning to fight by sparring,
d. li fa yung dong: the theory or principles upon which a
given style is based, and their relationship to Chinese
cosmological, medical and ethical models (Kang 1);
5. Is composed of four kinds of skills:
a. quan: boxing - striking with the fists, arms, shoulders
and upper body,
b. tui: kickboxing - striking with the feet, legs, knees and
hips,
c. qinna: joint-locking - seizing and twisting the limbs to
immobilize the adversary,
d. shuai: wrestling - throwing the adversary at the
ground;
6. Is trained following two principle approaches:
a. wai jia pai: external approach which conditions
strength and endurance, favors ‘multiple beat’ fight-
ing and cultivates single-minded concentration,
b. nei jia pai: internal approach which conditions the
nervous system, emphasizes ‘sustained note’ fighting
and cultivates a mirror-like mind;
7. Styles are divided by area of origin:
a. Northern China,
b. Southern China;
8. Styles are divided by Movement:
a. Circular Movement and Soft Appearance Type,
b. Long Fist Type,
c. Long Range Type,
d. Short Range Type,
e. Imitation Type;
9. Is characterized as xiulian, or tempering;
66 The Dancing Word

10. Includes qigong or life-force enhancement exercise, which

contemporary practice divides into three main types:
a. Martial arts qigong to develop striking power, mobil
ity and resistance to blows,
b. Healing qigong to promote good health and longevity,
c. Spiritual qigong to cultivate transpersonal experiences.

In qigong:

1. A human being is considered to be composed of the san bao,

or three treasures of jing (essence), qi (energy) and shen
(spirit),
2. jing (essence) + shen (spirit) = qi (energy),
3. A martial exercise is composed of:
a. xing (form) + yi (intent) = jin (force),
b. jin applied internally cultivates jing , qi and shen,
c. jin applied externally heals or assaults jing, qi and
shen of another;
4. There are three levels of martial power:
a. ming jin (observable force),
b. an jin (hidden force),
c. hua jin (mysterious force);
5. qi gan refers to the subjective sensations associated with
the cultivation of jing, qi and shen which are heat, weight,
vibration and expansiveness,
6. shi refers to the quality of presence experienced by those
observing an actualized qigong practitioner.

10. Specific Styles of Traditional Wushu and Qigong

With this general framework in mind, I should like to provide the

reader with a historical introduction to the arts that I have learned
from Wong Sui Meing and Chen Zhonghua.

i. Specific Styles: Cailifoquan

Cailifoquan, or choy li fut kuen as it is pronounced in Guang-

zhouhua, the Cantonese dialect spoken by its original practitioners,
 Chinese Martial Arts 67

was founded in 1836 by Chan Heung2 (1805-1875), a martial artist

from the village of Jing Mei in Guangdong Province in southern
China. It is a system born from the combination of three older styles
of wushu: fojiaquan and lijiaquan from the South of China and cai-
jiaquan, a Northern style taught by Caifu, a Buddhist monk. Due to
the founder’s skill, charisma and anti-Manchurian political activities –
the Qing rulers of the last Chinese imperial dynasty (1644-1912) were
resented by most Chinese as foreign interlopers – cailifoquan was
widely practiced in Guangzhou. Over time various branches of the
style appeared (Carmona, De Shaolin 216). The late Leung Kai Weng
(d. 1992), Wong Sui Meing’s first teacher, taught the hongsheng vari-
ant while his current teacher, Chiu Kwok Cheung (n.d.), teaches the
beisheng variant. According to Wong, Leung Kai Weng was a fourth
generation practitioner of the art, having learned from Fong Yok Su
who studied under the founder’s son Chan Koon Pak.

Transmission of
hong sheng cailifo-
quan
1. Chan Heung
(founder)
2. Chan Koon Pak
3. Fong Yok Su
4. Leung Kai Weng
5. Wong Sui Meing

Both streams of cailifoquan use the long reaching arm move-

ments common in the south of China and combine them with the
rooted and lively footwork of the northern provinces. The initial train-
ing procedures of cailifoquan are of the external school and the de-
manding postural training serves to cultivate the student’s endurance
and strength. The taolu of cailifoquan are numerous and very chal-
lenging, demanding both endurance and coordination. Included in the
practice are various kinds of martial qigong; the use of both long and
short traditional weapons; partner fighting drills or san shou; the
auxiliary practice of mou si, or martial lion dancing; and the playing of

2
The names listed in this cailifoquan lineage are all in Guangzhouhua (Cantonese)
reflecting the pronounciations they would have used themselves in public life.
68 The Dancing Word

iliary practice of mou si, or martial lion dancing; and the playing of
the martial percussion instruments, the drum (gu) and the gong (luo).

Figure 13: The author demonstrating a movement from the cailifoquan taolu called
tang zi gun, or (Chinese) Boy’s Staff. (Photo by Laura Astwood)

ii. Specific Styles: Taijiquan’s Early History

The second martial art I learned from Wong Sui Meing is tang
peng taijiquan (tong ping taigek kuen in Cantonese), a branch of wu
shi taijiquan, the Wu family’s style of taijiquan. Taijiquan is very im-
portant in the history of wushu and in the cultural history of China in
general. While it was derived from earlier martial arts and is often pre-
sented as an ancient Daoist practice, taijiquan as we know it today
dates from approximately 1851. The earliest written records of tai-
jiquan indicate that it was a synthesis of military calisthenics and
combative dills put together by one Chen Wangting (1600-1680).
Chen was a successful military officer in charge of the garrison of
Wen County in the Henan province of China between 1641 and 1644.
With the fall of the Ming Dynasty in 1644, his advancement through
 Chinese Martial Arts 69

the military hierarchy was blocked by the change of regime and he

retired to his family home of Chenjiagou, the village of the Chen fam-
ily, also in Henan province (Sim and Gaffney 12). In the early years of
the Qing Dynasty, Chen synthesised a new system of martial training
for the militia of his home village. It was based on the best training
techniques that he had come across during his military career. His ma-
jor source was a military training manual authored by a Ming dynasty
general named Qi Jiguang (1528-1587). Composed in 1561, Qi’s
book, Ji Xiao Xin Shu or The New Book of Effective Techniques, is
itself a synthesis of sixteen different military training systems popular
in the Ming dynasty (Wile, Lost T’ai-Chi Classics 7).
In the Ming and early Qing dynasties soldiers trained for battle
by executing group manoeuvres in formation. They spent virtually no
time on unarmed tactics and their fighting training consisted of count-
less repetitions of simple movements with such weapons as the spear
and the sabre. Chen Wangting’s principal contribution to the story of
the Chinese martial art seems to be his development of incrementally
resistant partner training. Soldiers who might be called up for active
duty at any time cannot engage in training that might leave them in-
jured and unfit for combat. This meant that the peacetime training of
Ming-dynasty soldiers was limited to the rote repetition of short, set
sequences of armed attack and defence in battlefield formations. As
fighting techniques could not be practised with anything approaching
real intensity without the risk of injuring the troops, improvisation and
spontaneity could not be sanctioned. Improvisation and spontaneity
are the two qualities most needed by combatants who will be faced
with the unpredictability of actual combat. The absence of improvisa-
tion and spontaneity in training meant that Ming-dynasty Chinese sol-
diers had little chance of improving their skills through safe practice.
Chen Wangting’s solution to this dilemma was a methodology by
which soldiers could practise fighting techniques in a spontaneous and
improvised way that resembled actual combat, without running the
risk of serious injury. This practice is now called tuishou, which is
usually translated as ‘push hands’. It refers to a training game played
by two partners who practise body movements that generate force
while keeping their forearms in contact. The goal for each player is to
maintain control of her posture in the face of perturbations provided
by her partner. To the casual observer, the practice looks like a kind of
wrestling done standing up. Tuishou practice begins very slowly with
70 The Dancing Word

minimal force and allows the players to learn how to defend against
the four major types of attack listed above: grappling, throwing, kick-
ing and striking. As the partners become more and more used to ab-
sorbing or reversing the forces directed at them, they can gradually
increase the intensity of the game until they are providing each other
with significant amounts of resistance and impellent force.3 Impor-
tantly this approach allowed older, more experienced practitioners to
maintain their fighting form into middle age and to progressively re-
fine it over their lifetimes. Chen Wangting and his immediate descen-
dents seem to have devised armed versions of tuishou based on similar
principles (Sim and Gaffney 16). They also synthesised a series of
solo movement-training sequences or taolu combining their innova-
tions with pre-existing sets.
Chen Wangting’s system, in his lifetime and beyond, became
firmly established as a training method for a rural civilian militia. It
remained confined to the Chen family village until sometime between
1799 and 1853 when one Yang Lu Chan (1799-1871), who is himself
so undocumented as to be practically a legend4, journeyed to Chen-
jiagou in order to study martial art with Chen Wangting’s descendant
Chen Changxing (1771-1853). Many rumours have grown up around
Yang’s studies under Chen Changxing and the transmission remains
mysterious for the simple reason that the taolu and tuishou of the tai-
jiquan taught by Yang Lu Chan’s descendants is quite different from
that practised by the Chen family.
Itemising the structural differences between the Yang style of tai-
jiquan and the original Chen style and speculating on the reasons for
these differences is beyond the scope of this study. What is especially
significant about Yang’s studies with Chen is his subsequent teaching
of his own modified system of taijiquan in Beijing after 1851. Due to
his reknown as a fighter, Yang was much sought after as a teacher. His

3
Contemporary presentations of tuishou vary widely in intensity and structure. Prac-
tice can range from flowing and graceful choreographed exchanges to intense com-
petitive grappling reminiscent of such combat sports as Olympic wrestling, Japanese
judo and Russian sambo.
4
According to taijiquan scholar José Carmona, almost no documentation on Yang Lu
Chan can be found (Carmona, La Transmission du Taiji Quan 22). Nevertheless, his
son Yang Banhou (1837-1892), who unlike the rural Yang was literate and who taught
martial arts to the officers of a Manchurian battalion of fusiliers, (the shenjiying), has
made it into the official records.
 Chinese Martial Arts 71

students included the bodyguards of the Manchurian rulers of Imperial

China. Yang, an illiterate fighter in a society that prized literacy above
all else, was suddenly exposed to a class of people he had never met
before, the upper class Chinese intelligentsia who, at the turn of the
nineteenth century, had a very particular cultural agenda.
Late nineteenth-century China faced internal corruption and ex-
ternal colonial pressure. The native Han population had been subju-
gated by the Manchurian rulers of the Qing dynasty, and these rulers
themselves faced the combined military and economic aggression of
Russia, the USA, Britain and France. Prior to the nineteenth century,
the literate governing classes of China looked down on martial art.
China, after all, was an empire that for hundreds of years had been
governed by an intellectual class to whose authority the military de-
ferred. Fighting was for professional soldiers, bodyguards, peasant
militias and bandits. What were the upper classes of late nineteenth-
century Beijing doing practising taijiquan with an illiterate ruffian like
Yang Lu Chan? Even more curious, why did they begin to attribute all
sorts of healing properties, Confucian values and Daoist meditative
qualities to it?
Douglas Wile suggests that the members of the disempowered
Chinese élite created a holistic myth about taijiquan in response to
their existential situation. In order to confirm their cultural identity,
they brought together things that had previously been separate and
even antagonistic: Confucianism and Daoism, healing exercises and
martial art were united under the banner of silent resistance to the
forces that besieged them. Training was not for the purpose of actual
insurrection – personal practice of taijiquan was sufficient revolution
in itself - rather the élite could rely on an embodied practice to con-
firm its personal and ethnic resistance to the overwhelming forces of
history (Wile, Lost T’ai-chi Classics xvii).
This sudden declaration of the perennial and holistic nature of
taijiquan was supported by reference to an anonymous and supposedly
ancient text that mysteriously appeared soon after Yang’s arrival in
Beijing. These writings are called the taiji jing, or taiji classics, and
they provided the Beijing intelligentsia with textual support for its
claims. These writings could not have been produced by the illiterate
Yang and are not found in Chenjiagou, the home of the Chen family
style. The taiji classics were likely authored by Wu Yuxiang (1812-
1880), one of Yang’s erudite students. Wu did two brilliant things. He
72 The Dancing Word

wrote a text that described taijiquan as a synthesis of native Han phi-

losophies and practices and he presented it as being an ancient docu-
ment of divine origin, revealed to a long-dead Daoist sage in medita-
tion (Wile, Lost T’ai-Chi Classics i). Indeed the prefix taiji, which
means “undifferentiated unity” and refers to one of the phases of crea-
tion in Daoist metaphysics, was likely coined at this time, over 300
years after Chen Wangting’s original synthesis which was originally
referred to as chen shi quan xie, meaning simply ‘the martial practices
of the Chen family’.
All styles of wushu used written mnemonic formulae that were
transmitted from generation to generation. These quange or boxing
poems were short, obscure and designed to be understood only by stu-
dents of a particular style who had also received the orally transmitted
kou ju or spoken secrets that completed the instructions. The cosmo-
logical and philosophical content of the taiji classics took the standard
of the quange to a whole new level of erudition and complexity.

iii. Specific Styles: Tang Peng Taijiquan

In the early years of the twentieth century, various students of

Yang Lu Chan founded their own versions of taijiquan. Public policy
during the early Chinese Republican Period (1912-1918) advocated
that the people should take part in what was called ‘self-
strengthening’, and the practice of taijiquan spread widely due to state
sanction and support (14). Different students of Yang’s school estab-
lished their own variants. Wu Quanyou, a Manchurian, was a class-
mate of Yang’s son Banhou and one of the elder Yang’s original stu-
dents. His son, Wu Jianquan, moved south, teaching his own version
of taijiquan in Guangdong and later in Hong Kong. During the chaos
of the Japanese invasion, Wong Sui Meing’s teacher Leung Kai Weng
found himself in a militia with Wu Jianquan (or Wu Kam Chin as he
would have been called in Cantonese). According to Wong, Wu was
the only man in the militia whom Leung could not defeat in single
combat. As was traditional for the loser of a ‘friendly’ martial chal-
lenge, Leung asked Wu to teach him his martial art. Wu obliged and
was eventually sufficiently satisfied with Leung’s skill to accept him
as a formal disciple and grant him permission to start his own variant,
which Leung named the tang peng taijiquan (tong ping taigek kuen in
Cantonese), or the Chinese ‘Great Bird’ branch of wu shi taijiquan.
 Chinese Martial Arts 73

Figure 14: The author performing an upward cut from a seated position in the tang-
peng taijijian taolu. (Photo by Laura Astwood)

Tang peng taijiquan is characterized by a concise training sylla-

bus. The principal taolu is a 108 movement series. This training is
supplemented by a sophisticated taolu for the jian, or narrow-bladed
straight-sword. In addition, students learn a sequence of niegong or
preparatory conditioning exercises. Partner practice is characterized
by dan tuishou or one-handed push hands and shuang tui shou or two-
handed push hands. Tuishou exercises are mostly freeform in order to
cultivate spontaneity in the student. Over the course of their training,
students are set various coordination challenges, including learning to
perform the first taolu with spatial restrictions, in mirror image and
with a cup of hot tea balanced on their heads!
74 The Dancing Word

Transmission of wu
shi taijiquan
1.Wu Jianquan
(founder)
2. Leung Kai Weng
(founder of tang
peng taiji)
3. Wong Sui Meing

iv. Specific Styles: Chen Taiji Shiyong Quanfa

The Practical Method or shiyong quanfa of Chen style taijiquan

was developed by Hong Junsheng (1907-1996), himself a long-time
student of the 20th century patriarch of chen shi taijiquan, Chen Fake
(1887-1957). Hong became Chen Fake’s disciple5 in 1930. Hong stud-
ied with Chen Fake for fifteen years until the end 1944, when he
moved to the city of Jinan in Shandong Province. In 1956, Hong re-
turned to visit Chen Fake in Beijing for four months of further train-
ing. This visit further clarified Hong’s understanding of chen shi tai-
jiquan and upon his return to Jinan he incorporated his new level of
comprehension into his teaching.
Chen Fake is an important node in the history of 20th century tai-
jiquan. Hailing from a rural agrarian background, his arrival in Beijing
in 1928 caused a stir amongst the bourgeois practitioners of the al-
ready gentrified forms of wu shi and yang shi taijiquan. Numerous
exponents of these styles including Hong Junsheng, who was then a
student of Wu style teacher Liu Musan, were struck by the overtly
martial character of Chen Fake’s taijiquan, hailing as it did from the
very real violence he had experienced in rural China (Carmona, La

5
Discipleship was a custom among the practitioners of traditional Chinese martial arts
that was discouraged as reactionary by Mao. A formal ceremony, the baishi, wherein
the student would serve the prospective master tea and prostrate himself or koutou
before him, established a kind of adoption. The disciple or tudi would become the
social responsibility of the master or shifu, who would also supervise his training.
These commitments are still taken very seriously by traditional martial artists for
whom students form a kind of extended family. The practice remains current in the
Chinese Diaspora and has made a resurgence in the People’s Republic.
 Chinese Martial Arts 75

Figure 15: Hong Junsheng. (Photo courtesy of Chen Zhonghua)

Transmission du Taiji Quan 114). Liu’s entire school of wu shi tai-

jiquan practitioners, Hong included, became Chen Fake’s students and
Hong’s relationship with him was a long and supportive one. Hong
came from an affluent bourgeois family and was extremely well edu-
cated. In addition to Mandarin and Classical Chinese, he was also flu-
ent in French and offered Chinese language lessons to the staff of the
French Embassy during the Republican Period. A fragile young man,
Hong’s family fortune allowed him to devote his energies to his stud-
ies and to bolstering his health through taijiquan practice. The rise of
the Communists and the Cultural Revolution saw Hong sent down as a
class enemy, stripped of possessions and social standing. According to
Chen Zhonghua, Hong was an adaptable and enduring personality,
whom he characterizes as being true to the Daoist spirit of wuwei. He
was the student of an elite level martial artist yet he did not use this
connection to improve his social position. He was highly skilled but
never made an overt show of his abilities. He was direct to the point of
brutal negativity in his criticism of his students’ taijiquan, but the sen-
ior practitioners who had been his students, and who I met in Shan-
dong in 2007, spoke of him with deep, unsentimental affection.
Chen’s accounts of his teacher conjure a man in the world but not
quite of it, more interested in taijiquan than in the vicissitudes of the
turbulent times he lived through (Chen, personal communications).
Chen Zhonghua (b. 1961), who also goes by the English name of
Joseph Chen, is an iconoclastic and devoted student of Hong Jun-
sheng. Chen studied under Hong from 1979 to 1985 and then again
76 The Dancing Word

from 1991 until Hong’s death in 1996. While completing his master’s
degree in linguistics at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan,
Canada, Chen began to establish himself as a major North American
taijiquan teacher. He opened his studio in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
in 1988. In 2004 he was designated the International Standard Bearer
or hai wai zhang menren of Hong’s Practical Method by the Hong
family in a ceremony held in Jinan. Formerly a teacher of Social Stud-
ies in the Canadian secondary school system, Chen currently devotes
himself to teaching taijiquan full-time. He travels widely and has stu-
dents and branch schools across Canada, the United States and West-
ern Europe. Since 2006 he has run a residential taijiquan training pro-
gram on Daqingshan – “Big Green Mountain” – in Shandong Prov-
ince, China, where much of my training with him has taken place.
The Practical Method exists to remedy numerous aspects of tai-
jiquan that Hong, who identified with the pragmatic rigours of modern
Western science, felt were compromising its transmission. In Hong’s
vision, traditional taijiquan texts and their attendant vocabulary are
problematic because they present end-state descriptions of the desired
outcomes of training rather than incremental instructions on how to
achieve practical results. As the Chinese language lacks discipline-
specific technical vocabularies, these outcomes are described using
vocabulary drawn from traditional Chinese religious, medical and
cosmological models. While these metaphors were perhaps well un-
derstood by the original authors, they remain sources of ambiguity and
confusion for contemporary practitioners. Thus in all of his oral in-
structions and writings, Hong Junsheng was very careful to use direct
and concise physical terminology to describe the movements and
physical requirements of chen shi taijiquan, a practice that has been
continued by Chen Zhonghua.
Hong’s approach is characterized by several important structural
innovations, two of which merit special attention. Hong Junsheng per-
formed a movement analysis on the taolu of chen shi taijiquan in
terms of its actual fighting applications or yung fa. He discovered that
every movement in the form was a variation on one of two possible
circular movements. He therefore composed a series of fundamental
exercises or jibengong that directly trained these two foundational mo-
tions (He, Foreword to Hong xxviii). From this, he divided the
movements of the two open-handed taolu of chen shi taijiquan into
twenty distinct categories, or families of movements. His innovations
 Chinese Martial Arts 77

permit students to structure their practice around principles and to de-

velop sophistication of movement through incremental combination of
previously learned patterns.

Figure 16: The author demonstrating Rub Right Foot or you cha jiao from the first
form of Hong’s Practical Method. (Photo by Laura Astwood)

Hong’s work is also characterized by a hard-headed rejection of

ephemeral and spiritual jargon and concepts often associated with tai-
jiquan. In his foreward to Hong’s book, He Shugan characterizes the
Practical Method as stressing “practical self-defence skills” while
avoiding “bogus talks of “mind-intent” and “qi””, an assertion that is
decidedly iconoclastic against the neo-spiritual backdrop of both con-
temporary taijiquan and qigong fever (He, Foreword to Hong xxvii).
Indeed Hong’s writings and Chen Zhonghua’s subsequent teaching
stand out in terms of their lack of ambiguous concepts. The body is
78 The Dancing Word

deemed to be capable of re-articulating itself into a perfectly balanced

and oiled system of cogs and wheels. Relaxation, “centering”,
“groundedness” and other watchwords of mainstream taijiquan prac-
tice are dismissed in favour of a series of strict guidelines for the pa-
rameters of movement of each joint and of the temporal sequencing of
that movement. Especially valuable to this study is Hong and Chen’s
contrasting definitions of the terms movement and action, to which I
will return below.
The Practical Method curriculum consists of the foundation exer-
cises mentioned above (jibengong): two barehanded training routines
(yilu and erlu); routines for both the narrow-bladed straightsword and
the sabre (jian and dao); and various training exercises done with ei-
ther the staff (gun) or the spear (qiang). Tuishou in this system tends
to be freeform and quite intense when compared to that of other tai-
jiquan styles and wrestling, grappling and throwing are quite common
in the practice.

Transmission of
Chen Taiji Shiyong
Quanfa
1. Chen Wangting
(late 1400s)
17. Chen Fake
18. Hong Junsheng
19. Chen Zhonghua

v. Specific Styles: Zhi Neng Qigong

Zhi neng qigong, the last of the three body technologies that I
learned from Wong Sui Meing, is the public name for the qigong sys-
tem of the Liu family of Hubei province, given its most recent and
developed form by the late Liu Yanming (1908-2001). Zhi neng
qigong was one of the major synthetic styles of qigong that appeared
during the ‘qigong fever’ period of the late 20th century. The art is of-
ficially attributed to Pan He Ming (Zhou and Becchio 34), whose high
 Chinese Martial Arts 79

position in the Communist hierarchy allowed him the freedom to dis-

seminate zhi neng qigong. As Liu Yanming came from a scholarly,
landowning background, he was deemed an inappropriate leader for a
government sanctioned qigong style, and so he simply introduced
himself as Pan’s student. After Liu’s death, his family, now living in
Montréal, explained this pragmatic reversal of the title of student and
teacher. Pan He Ming was the leader of a qigong sect that at its height,
according to Liu, had at least eight million members. Pan also founded
a hospital in Hubei, China whose mandate was to treat illnesses solely
with qigong exercises. The hospital was extremely successful and held
out the longest against the government crackdown on qigong sects
brought about by the fa lun gong agitators in 1999 – it was closed in
2000. Liu Yanming moved to Montréal in the early 1990s and Wong
Sui Meing became his student and teaching assistant. While I had the
chance to observe Liu demonstrating his qigong exercises, we had no
language in common. Contact between us was limited to a few smiles
and silent, friendly cups of tea. Needless to say, I learned the zhi neng
qigong from Wong.

Figure 17: the late Liu Yanming, the author’s zhineng qigong grand-teacher.
(Photo Daniel Mroz)
80 The Dancing Word

Zhi neng qigong or liu shi qigong (Liu style) as it should perhaps
be called, is synthetic, supposedly combining nineteen earlier qigong
practices. It uses the full gamut of traditional Chinese health exercises.
Movement, meditation, visualization and vocalization are all used to
strengthen the body and improve the functioning of the nervous sys-
tem. The system taught by Liu consisted of two long series, each tak-
ing approximately an hour and twenty minutes to execute. The exer-
cises were explained in terms of purifying the qi, gathering it and stor-
ing it, circulating it through the body and finally showering the body
with qi to relieve any energetic congestion.

Transmission of zhi
neng qigong
1. Liu Yanming (syn-
thesizer of various
family traditions)
2. Wong Sui Meing

11. The Martial-to-Performance Continuum

Three practitioners and scholars of martial arts have noted the

performance aspect inherent to these arts and have proposed spectrum
models to account for it. In his study of capoeira, the Brazilian com-
bative system and dance form, J. Lowell Lewis notes the tension be-
tween “agonistic” and “ludic” tendencies in the interaction between
conflict and “playful cooperation.” Lewis seeks to create a terminol-
ogy that can satisfactorily articulate the nature of a combative system
that reposes, as capoeira does on the seemingly incompatible practice
of collaborative dancing between fellow players using pre-arranged
movement patterns designed to cause lethal damage. His proposal is
an “agonistic to ludic” continuum that embraces all aspects of the art,
both combative and performative (xxv).
Parallel to Lewis, Armstrong proposes a continuum to include
mortal and agonistic combat systems as well as more passive activities
such as meditation using the following overlapping categories:
 Chinese Martial Arts 81

x Battlefield mortal combat (involving profes-

sional soldiers)
o Single combat
o Group combat
x Self Defense (occurring in non-wartime con-
ditions)
o Single defense
o Group defense
x Dueling Arts (rare in today’s society but
common in history)
x Agonistic Arts (sporting combat of all sorts)
x Psychological Arts (focusing on religious,
philosophical or spiritual goals) (Armstrong
in Donohue and Taylor 187)

To elucidate this continuum, Armstrong proposes a ‘combat

totality chart’:

Melee Transition Static

Battlefield; Self defense; Duels; Agonistic; Psychological Art

Figure 18: Combat Totality Chart (Armstrong in Donohue and Taylor, 1994).

Sam Masich’s (b.1961) continuum echoes Armstrong’s universal

spectrum from the specific perspective of a teacher and practitioner of
both contemporary and traditional wushu and taijiquan.
82 The Dancing Word

Martial Art Continuum

War Sport Aesthetic- Art

martial- martial- Sport martial-
combat, ‘func- contest, inci- martial- performance,
tionally’ aes- dentally aes- portrayal, par- wholly aes-
thetic thetic tially aesthetic thetic

invasion, mili- football, bas- gymnastics, dance, mime,

tary occupa- ketball, track diving, figure- clown,
tion, insur- & field, skating physical
gency hockey theatre, film

martial com- martial athlete martial athlete- martial per-

batant (soldier- artist formance-
warrior) artist
Wins by mate- Wins by point Wins/succeeds Succeeds by
rial victory, accumulation by a combina- audience
control of terri- (eg. Goals), tion of judge appreciation
tory, resources, distance (and possibly and by sub-
political influ- achievements, audience) ap- jective defi-
ence. Evalu- time superior- preciation & nitions. Ex-
ated culturally ity translated awarding of ternal indica-
via relative into place- points trans- tors include
casualties. Pro- value. lated into attendance,
nouncement of place-value. applause,
conquest often popularity.
defines success Internal sat-
for the victor. isfaction of-
ten defines
success for
the artist.

Figure 19: Masich’s Continuum (Masich, 2006, unpublished document).

What ties these typologies together and allows us to examine the mar-
tial arts and performing arts using a single lens is Armstrong’s general
definition of combative behaviour, explained above, that states such
behaviour can be non-aggressive in nature. This inclusive definition
 Chinese Martial Arts 83

allows us to blend the tools of analysis that have been developed for
the description of both martial and performance behaviour.

12. Principles and Concepts of Theatre Anthropology

Like the Combat Adaptive Traits of Hoplology, the Pre-Expres-

sive Principles, developed under the banner of Theatre Anthropology
by director Eugenio Barba and his fellow researchers, are tools that
facilitate a pragmatic structural analysis of performance behaviour.
At the core of Barba’s approach is the notion that stage presence,
the crucial attribute for a performer, is the result of a very particular
way of being and doing. Presence has been a lifelong preoccupation
for Barba. His research into the fundamental training exercises of nu-
merous approaches to performance, from traditional Asian dance/
theatres to contemporary cosmopolitan performance, has led him to
develop the discipline of Theatre Anthropology, the study of the hu-
man organism under conditions of performance. The use of the word
‘anthropology’ and the fact that many of his research collaborators
represent traditional performing arts from non-Western cultures has
led to inevitable confusion between Barba’s research and the academic
discipline of cultural anthropology, leading him to firmly differentiate
the two fields, stating that Theatre Anthropology is neither the appli-
cation of the tools of cultural anthropology to theatre and dance nor
the study of the exotic performances of non-Western cultures (Paper
Canoe 10).
Theatre Anthropology can be summarized as the intersection of
two orders of investigation. The first is a monological or objective
study of the human body in performance that asks the question “what
do all these performing bodies have in common?” The second is a dia-
logical investigation in which practitioners are interviewed and asked
to explain the conceptual structures that they use to create their per-
formances: “what do the conceptual categories and structures used by
these performers have in common?”
In response to the first question, Barba proposes that in order to
create their stage presence, performers, regardless of in which genre or
style they perform, use a series of principles to create what he calls
extra-daily behaviour: a performance specific behaviour that is de-
84 The Dancing Word

signed either consciously or tacitly with the creation of stage presence

in mind. Barba’s observed principles are as follows:

x Amplification and activation of the forces that deter-

mine balance,
x The opposition that determines the dynamic of the
movement,
x The application of a consistent inconsistency,
x The breaking of daily norms and the application of ex-
tra-daily equivalents (Paper Canoe 34, my emphasis).

The first principle refers to the use by performers of positions and

ways of moving that are more effortful than those used in daily life.
Barba calls the performer’s balance a luxury balance (Barba and
Savarese, The Secret Art 34), wasteful in terms of energy conservation
but useful in terms of drawing the attention of onlookers. Opposition
here refers to lines of tension dividing the body in order to produce the
luxury balance. The consistent inconsistency refers to the internal co-
herence of the performer’s choices. In the case of a codified system,
for example the Chinese performance system of jingju or Corporeal
Mime codified by Étienne Decroux (1898-1991) in the mid-twentieth
century, the idiosyncrasies of the form apply to all of its practitioners
and recur thematically throughout its repertoire. In less strictly codi-
fied genres, such as clowning, physical theatre or post-modern dance,
the performer’s personal idiosyncrasies, contextualized for perform-
ance, become a physical vocabulary. This performance vocabulary is
composed of actions that have, through the alteration of balance and
the application of opposition, been made more visible and visceral, in
other words, extra-daily.
The second order of inquiry yielded a series of pragmatic con-
cepts that were found to structure how the surveyed performers
thought about their work:

x Outer Score: a precise and repeatable pattern of move-

ments and sounds that could be empirically observed in
every performance,
x Inner Score: a precise and repeatable pattern of inten-
tions, whose existence was determined in dialogue and
interview with the performers,
 Chinese Martial Arts 85

x North Pole performer: belonging to a codified and styl-

ized tradition, training begins with Outer Scores,
x South Pole performer: belonging to no explicit system
of physical or vocal codes, training begins with and is
usually restricted to Inner Scores,
x Energy: defined as physically perceivable actions of
thought,
x Animus Energy: dynamic and vigorous physically per-
ceivable actions of thought which in traditional per-
formance forms are used to portray idealized ‘male’
characteristics,
x Anima Energy: soft and subtle physically perceivable
actions of thought which in traditional performance
forms are used to portray idealized ‘female’ characteris-
tics,
x Sats: a Norwegian word meaning ‘impluse’, used by
Barba in his work with Odin Teatret to indicate the
preparation for action in which the organism ‘fills’ with
potential energy,
x Kraft: a Norwegian word meaning ‘force’ or ‘ability’,
used by Barba in his work with Odin Teatret to indicate
the action or the emission of energy from the previously
‘full’ organism (Barba, Paper Canoe 61-68).

When applied to actor training, the principles and concepts of

Theatre Anthropology are used to create original forms and not to imi-
tate or synthesize the aesthetic or appearances of various traditional
theatre forms. While the approach has no formal name and is usually
referred to as “Barba’s approach” or “Barba’s training” it can be cor-
rectly called Pre-Expressive Training, which is how I shall be refer-
ring to it here.
The underlying assumption of Barba’s training system and the
pre-expressive principles is that potential energy is the key to pres-
ence. The body that is ‘loaded’ with potential energy and can move in
an unexpected and surprising way catches and holds our attention be-
cause of the dynamic tensions within it. Where we detect potential
energy we anticipate action, and we will watch and wait for the mo-
ment when the potential energy is fulfilled. The performer who mas-
ters the pre-expressive principles knows how to express her energy in
86 The Dancing Word

a dynamic way and also how to withhold and re-load it so that her ex-
pressive potential is never exhausted; thus she dances with her audi-
ence’s attention for the duration of her performance. It is this preoccu-
pation with potential and kinetic energy upon which the relationship
between martial movement training and performance training is based.
In other words, while the contexts of the martial artist and the per-
forming artist may differ, they have in common key principles of
movement.

13. The Combat Adaptive Traits as source of Key Performer Quali-

ties and Resulting Attributes and Skills

Based on the work of Hayes and Armstrong cited above, I pro-

pose the following correlations between martial training and Pre-
Expressive Training. Martial movement training for performers is the
practice of Pre-arranged Movement Patterns drawn from a combative
system in the context of non-aggressive combative behaviour. This
training seeks to manifest and refine the combat adaptive traits of its
practitioners that are considered to be the source of key performer
qualities.
The eight combat adaptive traits and their transcendent synergy
that are cultivated by the practice of martial movement map onto the
key qualities of stage performers. As the augmentation of the five
physically demonstrable traits represents the overall goal of any given
martial movement training curriculum, it is the practical work on them
that subsequently actualizes the remaining essential, though less im-
mediately discernable mental traits.
Training the omni-poise trait sets up posture that is martially effi-
cient and thus capable of expressing extra-daily amounts of kinetic
energy. These same alignments create presence in the performer’s
body, corresponding to Barba’s principle of luxury balance.
Training the abdominal trait develops high levels of coordination
within and between different areas of the body and through careful
and responsive modulation of abdominal tension permits the expres-
sion of extra-daily force and the conservation of potential energy. The
abdominal trait is the result of Barba’s principle of opposition that is
created between the lower, stronger part of the body and the upper,
more mobile and coordinated torso and arms.
 Chinese Martial Arts 87

Training the respiratory-vocality trait prepares an efficient, re-

sponsive and conscious type of breathing that reduces psychophysical
arousal and fatigue. It cultivates an efficient, yet extra-daily degree of
volume, colour and articulation in the voice and allows the use of this
vocal ability in concert with the execution of extra-daily movement.
This trait is a consequence of the vertical opposition created by the
abdominal trait.
Training the force/yield trait cultivates responsive movement be-
tween stage players, both when in actual contact and when interacting
at a distance. Responsive movement is economical and efficient, yet at
the same time striking in its appropriateness. It allows the creation of
relationships between performers that are nuanced and credible yet
stimulatingly unpredictable. In also develops the performer’s percep-
tion of negative space, i.e. the empty environment determined by the
positions of the players and objects, and the implications of movement
trajectories within it. Force/yield is a correlate of the principles of lux-
ury balance, opposition, extra-daily equivalency and consistent incon-
sistency. Appropriate response to a stage partner depends on the oppo-
sition that facilitates balanced poise and on movement that is immedi-
ate and has a light and powerful quality of animation such as is found
in young children and predatory animals. It also implies equivalency
and consistent inconsistency in the use of a trained vocabulary of
highly efficient movements that share a coherence of particular deci-
sions: how the opposition in the body is produced, how the ideal dis-
tribution of tone and repose is conceived of depending on the style and
system of a performer’s training, how one designs one’s movements in
response to one’s partner and so on.
Training the synchronous trait serves to produce responsive tim-
ing within individual players and between members of an ensemble as
a whole. This timing sense exists in a feedback loop with the spatial
sense cultivated by the previous trait. Like the force/yield trait, the
synchronous trait is derived from the coordination of the principles of
balance, opposition, equivalency and the internal coherence of the
consistent inconsistency. The synchronous trait also further refines the
pushing and pulling actions that characterize the force/yield trait by
training expansion and contraction within the torso rather than the lo-
comotion of individual limbs or even the whole body in space.
Due to practice of pre-arranged movement patterns that model
the five traits described, an increase in the level and integration of sen-
88 The Dancing Word

sory-motor perception occurs, allowing for a greater volume of infor-

mation to be absorbed and sorted. This is especially apparent in the
three senses most vital to movement reception and understanding: the
visual, proprioceptive and vestibular senses. Increased sophistication
and ability of the cognitive/intuitive trait in both conscious response
and intuitive prediction occurs as a result of the psycho-physiological
changes brought about in training.
The volitional trait, concerned as it is with both initiative and de-
termination, is increasingly manifested due to training in pre-arranged
movement patterns that incrementally challenge the student’s physical
and emotional attributes. The context of an incremental training cur-
riculum provides the opportunity for the tempering of will and deter-
mination as the emotional and physical stress placed on the student is
always in proportion to her level of current ability. As coordination
and confidence improve, the emotional arousal that saps determination
and blocks initiative is gradually reduced to a manageable minimum.
Over the course of a performance, initiative, or élan are key attributes
as both performers’ and audiences’ attentions wax and wane. A
strongly manifested volitional trait allows performers to hold to the
tasks required of them and to re-energize themselves, their fellow
players or their audience by renewing their initiative, should the over-
all energy of the piece be lagging.
The manifestation of the imperturbable-mind/steadfast-mind trait
is both a desired goal of training and a signpost whose arrival allows
for training to take on increasing intensity and sophistication. The ac-
tualization of this trait induces reduction of various autonomic re-
sponses from panic to defensive bracing to idiosyncratic and ineffi-
cient movement habits that inhibit total awareness and expression.
While outright panic is unusual in stage performers, habitual defensive
bracing routinely leads to an idiosyncratically inefficient use of the
body. The actualization of the imperturbable-mind/steadfast-mind trait
allows these tacit habits and the gaps they create in mental attention
and physical ability to be perceived more clearly due to the inhibition
of the stress response that produced them in the first place. Once per-
ceived, these tendencies can be de-conditioned through the training
process involving the five overt traits, supported by the increased cog-
nitive and intuitive ability and determination of the other two traits
outlined above.
 Chinese Martial Arts 89

Due to the empirical and structural nature of Barba’s research,

such felt and qualitative traits as the cognitive/intuitive trait, the voli-
tional trait and the imperturbable-mind/steadfast-mind trait are not as
easily paired with the principles and concepts of Theatre Anthropol-
ogy. Nevertheless, Pre-arranged Movement Patterns can be described
both as Outer Scores, as repeatable sequences of movement, and as
Inner Scores, as sequences of intentions that give rise to appropriate
martial movements. The cognitive/intuitive trait can be seen to facili-
tate the eventual articulation of such phenomenological experiences as
the use of force/yield, in terms of conceptual binaries such as the
Animus/Anima qualities and the sats/kraft or impulse/expression
phases of movement. The volitional trait is both manifested and rein-
forced by the composition, learning and maintenance of a system of
extra-daily equivalents, be they martial or performative and by the
demands of actual performances.
For the performer, the transcendent synergy of the manifest adap-
tive traits is experienced in the moment, an instantiation of seemingly
effortless presence and appropriate action. Over time, the recurring
experience of the ‘transcendent synergy’ and the habituation of the
expert level of performance it facilitates leads to the mature form of
artistic ability which Susan Melrose names performance mastery and
which occurs due to the fact that “…expert practitioners, working to
professional criteria, are differently ‘wired’ from those lacking exper-
tise” (Melrose 136). Melrose situates performance mastery as being a
highly developed synthesis of attributes uniting mature craft and pre-
vious experience with intuitive judgement (138).
90 The Dancing Word

Hoplology Combat Adaptive Pre-Expressive Principles &

Traits Concepts
Omni-Poise Trait Luxury Balance
Abdominal Trait Luxury Balance, Opposition
Respiratory/Vocal Trait Luxury Balance, Opposition
Force/Yeild Trait Luxury Balance, Opposition,
Equivalency, Consistent In-
consistency
Synchronous Trait Luxury Balance, Opposition,
Equivalency, Consistent In-
consistency
Volitional Trait Practice over time of Pre-
Expressive Training
Cognitive/Intuitive Trait Binary Concepts: Inner/Outer
Score, ‘sats/kraft’,
North/South Pole Performers,
Animus/Anima Energy
Imperturbable-Mind/Steadfast- Practice over time of Pre-
Mind Trait Expressive Training
Transcendent Synergy of the Performance Mastery (Mel-
Manifest Adaptive Traits rose)

Figure 20: Relationship between the Combat Adaptive Traits and the Pre-Expressive
Principles and Concepts.

This correlation between the principles of Theatre Anthropology

and Hoplology allow us to look systemically at wushu training and its
use as a basis for performer training and performance composition.

14. Conclusion

My approach to performance training and creation which is in-

spired by the ethic of Suzuki, the ethic, aesthetic and procedures of
Fowler and the procedures, philosophy, cosmology and ethic of tradi-
tional Chinese qigong and wushu, is supported by the similarities out-
lined above and synthesized below:
1. Ethically, subjects are selected to participate based on will-
ingness to commit to a practice which will confer skill,
rather than on a notion of innate talent,
 Chinese Martial Arts 91

2. Ethically that teachers teach students in a hierarchical and

developmental manner modeled on native language learn-
ing,
3. Ethically that students have a daily practice of simple ele-
ments that, when fitted together hierarchically, form a com-
plex aesthetic work,
4. Ontologically that the goal of practice, which may be real-
ized by various methods, is the actualization of a unitive ex-
perience,
5. Ontologically that of foremost importance in achieving this
goal is the actualization of shi or presence,
6. Ontologically that shi or presence is a function of what the
Chinese call qi, experienced as the force which mediates be-
tween matter and mind,
7. Ontologically that the long term cultivation of qi and shi, or
presence, should contribute positively to the subject’s
physical health and quality of life, and this is best accom-
plished using holistic, integrated psycho-physical training
practices such as qigong and wushu,
8. Aesthetically that performers should move, speak and sing,
and that performances thus integrate movement, text and
music, in such as fashion as to transcend normative aesthet-
ics,
9. Aesthetically that the signs created by the performers be de-
ployed to create the unity described above as a “thickening
of time”,
10. Ethically that the resulting performances be proposed and
interpreted in the spirit of positive change with respect to all
participants concerned.

In retracing my steps through Suzuki, Fowler, Wong and Chen

this chapter has introduced the personal, ethical, aesthetic, structural,
historical and theoretical antecedents of the working method I am de-
veloping. The following chapters will present this synthesis both in
theory and in practice.
 Chapter 3

Principles of Performer Preparation

1. Fruit, Flower, Path, Ground, View And Gate

Daoist and Buddhist initiate Liu Ming (Charles Belyea, b. 1947)

uses the structural terminology developed by dzogchen teacher Nam-
khai Norbu (b.1938) when teaching meditative and restorative physi-
cal practices (Phillips 169). The basic structure is that of View, Path
and Fruit. To futher nuance this pragmatic presentation I have added
the concepts of Flower, Ground and Gate. Although I present them in
reverse order below, conceptually, the gate is the minimum require-
ment needed to become acquainted with the view, the view is the out-
look that contextualizes the practices undertaken on the path, the
ground is the area of investigation upon which the path takes place,
the path is the actual practices, the flowers are the incidental develop-
ments that are the side-effect of practice and the fruit is the actual re-
sult of the entire operation.

a. Fruition

The fruition of the proposed approach to performer preparation is

the actualization of the qualities of personal presence, artistic longev-
ity and evolving creativity. These qualities are ephemeral, subjective
and enormously challenging to conceptualize. I will return to the no-
tion of fruition and its qualities both immediately below and in the
concluding chapter on the conceptualization of the performer’s con-
sciousness. The following definitions are pragmatic and approximate.
Presence begins as trained mastery of potential and kinetic en-
ergy in the body and is refined into an increasingly subtle way of be-
ing over time, characterized by an unusual awareness of the present
moment, unperturbed by the unconsidered responses of attraction,
aversion and indifference that usually characterize our experience.
94 The Dancing Word

Artistic longevity is the result of an examined and thorough embodied

practice. It assumes an approach based on sustained training. Unlike
musicians and dancers, the training of contemporary Western theatre
artists typically terminates with their graduation from acting school.
For performers who wish to devote themselves to aesthetic innovation
in the theatre unconstrained by industrial norms, terminating training
is insufficient. Sustained training becomes a means of developing a
signature performance style and an artistic practice of lasting depth.
Creativity comes as the result of consistently struggling with the
artist’s fundamental problem: how to express a single, inarticulate
core preoccupation which never changes, through a form that does
change, deepen and evolve over the course of a lifetime. These rather
grand sounding characteristics are supported by a concrete system of
embodied activity and a particular way of viewing, or interpreting the
work.

b. Flower

Sustained training results in the actualization of the visible quali-

ties Richard Fowler sought in his students and actors: simplicity of
form, visibility of action and clarity of intention1. Simplicity of form
means that the action on stage can be frozen at any moment and a
clear picture will emerge. The actors’ postures and the spaces between
them are dynamic. Visibility of action means that physical causality is
easily apparent on the stage. One actor’s movements have a clear re-
sult in the response of another actor. Clarity of intention means that
the performers undertake their actions seriously, with their whole bod-
ies and with full attention. It is not the content of the actor’s intention
that is clear, rather it is her total participation in her actions that makes
her intention a clear one.
The objective goal of performer preparation is the development
and fine-tuning of the performer’s physical, vocal and creative tools
through two approaches: the training of attributes and the practice of
skills. Attributes are an individual’s trained qualities, such as strength,
endurance or suppleness, while skills are learned patterns of special-

1
Fowler’s teaching always served to facilitate the development of these qualities,
even if in the studio he did not name them as such. He explained these goals as I have
listed them above to my colleague Olivier-Hugues Terreault (b. 1973) during the
long-term training intensive held in Winnipeg in 1997.
 Principles of Performer Preparation 95

ized behaviour, such as the ability to sing, play a musical instrument,

choreograph and repeat movement patterns in an extremely precise
manner, or credibly reproduce such symptoms of human behaviour as
tears or laughter. In my experience the crucial attributes for perform-
ers are the endurance of their explosive strength, the elasticity of their
muscles, the mobility of their joints, the sophistication of their coordi-
nation and their mental calm and detachment when exposed to random
stress. The key skill for a performer is the ability to consciously isolate
and repeat sequences of physical or vocal behaviour – in other words
the ability to master either received or personally invented pre-
arranged movement patterns – be these physical or vocal.
Visible qualities supported by skills and attributes can be re-
garded as a flower growing along the path of practice. They are not in
and of themselves the fruition of the practice, but appear nevertheless
as a result of it. If a performer stops along the path in order to pick the
flowers, they will have been distracted by an incidental occurrence
and will not be able to harvest the fruit of long-term work.

c. Path

The training of attributes and the practice of skills can be prag-

matically divided into four elements: work on physical structure, in-
teractive work with a partner, tempering work against resistance and
subtle skill refinement. These elements serve as filters that focus the
practice of Pre-Arranged and Spontaneous Movement Patterns for par-
ticular purposes.
I am expanding Armstrong’s concept of Pre-Arranged Movement
Pattern (PMP) to include not only the physical scores of traditional
and classical movement arts, but also the original physical scores cre-
ated by individual performers. I also include the practice of ‘embodied
singing’ as a PMP, where the form of the body while singing is con-
sidered to be a vital element of the song, as important as the melody,
words, dynamics etc. Furthermore I add to Armstrong’s category a
related term, Spontaneous Movement Patterns, distinct from their pre-
arranged cousins by virtue of their unplanned and immediate expres-
sion in the context of improvisation and free play. As with PMPs,
SMPs also include improvised embodied vocal expressions.
Pre-Arranged Movement Patterns in any given art serve to incul-
cate a view of how the body should move and how the different parts
96 The Dancing Word

of the body should relate to one another. The ideal structures of vari-
ous codified movement arts are all expressions of the pre-expressive
principles and result in important differences in the relative tension
between different parts of the body from art to art. The view of West-
ern classical ballet is markedly different from the view of the wushu
style of cailifoquan, which is in turn different, albeit less so, from the
ideal view of chen shi taijiquan. The particular view of structure
adopted in this approach is one taken from the chen taiji shiyong
quanfa.Thus the PMP of this art are vital in the performer’s appropria-
tion of the art’s approach to the optimal structure of the body.
The ritualized behavoir of the PMP permits one to incrementally
move towards total engagement with an action by limiting the physi-
cal path of intention in space and time. Constrained space and time
permit the differentiation of the subject from the act she performs and
allow her to study that act as an objectified phenomenon. As noted
above, PMPs in the martial and performing arts are not fighting or
acting or dancing per se, rather they are the study of fighting, acting
and dancing.
The ultimate goal of PMP practice is free, spontaneous and im-
provised expression of movement governed by the principles consid-
ered ideal by a given approach. PMP originate in three main ways:
they are quotidian, designed or functional. Quotidian PMPs are
composed of daily personal, idiosyncratic actions. Designed PMPs are
informed by training in a codified style. Functional PMPs follow the
design of the body and gravity. There is of course significant overlap
between these categories. The investigation of whether martial arts
PMPs are designed or functional would be the source of much debate,
as would the discussion of whether or not contemporary dance tech-
niques based ‘purely’ on the functional movement potential of the
skeletal system are in fact expressions of their founders’ idiosyncra-
sies.
Pre-Arranged Movement Patterns such as taijiquan taolu are de-
scribed by kinesiology as voluntary movement, or movement gov-
erned by learned motor programs. Motor programs are represented in
the brain as “an abstract plan (as opposed to a series of joint move-
ments and muscle contractions)” (Yang 111). Thus, in learning taolu,
the student adopts a motor program designed to maximize her move-
ment efficiency. The effects of this adoption are seen in several areas.
Increased endurance strength in the legs results in improved balance.
 Principles of Performer Preparation 97

The repeated practice of sophisticated movements yields improvement

in the attribute of coordination. Because of the coordination of the legs
with the movement of the torso, an apparent increase in absolute
strength is also an effect of training.
Sustained taijiquan taolu training also produces a phenomenon
known as relaxation response, wherein the activity of the sympathetic
nervous system is reduced and the activity of the parasympathetic
nervous system increases (Yang 68). The sympathetic nervous system
is dominant during perceived emergencies and “helps mediate vigi-
lance, arousal, activation and mobilization” while the parasympathetic
nervous system mediates “growth, energy storage and other optimistic
activities” (Sapolsky 22-3). What is especially significant about taolu
training is that it appears to balance the relationship between the two
systems, offering practitioners the ability to remain alert, responsive,
rational and relaxed without entering a static, motionless and vegeta-
tive state or a hyper-aroused one dominated by fear.
Training needs to include truly interactive work with a partner.
Tasks and games predicated on real actions and proportional responses
are vital to creating the ability to read, respond to and propose credible
actions on stage. Partner and group PMPs serve to provide an initial
series of codified responses to another’s action. The set choreography
of partner and group PMPs is gradually loosened over time and re-
placed by variation and improvisation cultivating the performer’s
spontaneous creative expression and her ability to recover from acci-
dent and error. Interactive training also serves as an important test of
credibility. In such exercises as tuishou, the results of an inappropriate
or disproportionate response are always tangible and the feedback re-
ceived by the performer is immediate.
Kinesiology describes posture and movement as being controlled
by the brain in two ways. In “feedback” the nervous system uses the
information derived from sensory signals to act directly on a limb. In
“feedforward,” the mind behaves proactively, activating the body in a
way that it anticipates will maintain balance during an imminent dis-
turbance (Yang 136).
The sustained practice of interactivity exercises such as tuishou
hones the efficiency of the feedforward and feedback functions of the
motor system. Thus, while the practice of taijiquan taolu can certainly
provide a certain amount of coordination, balance, calm and structure,
in order to fully enjoy the potential performance benefits of taijquan,
98 The Dancing Word

coordination, balance and psychophysical equilibrium need to be ac-

tively challenged. Actors need to work on the spontaneous and impro-
vised partner exercises of tuishou. Interaction brings a strong dose of
objectivity to training: testing and applying one’s movements with a
partner in tuishou allows one to check if the PMP practice is produc-
ing any verifiable concentration, control, balance and mental ease. In
the absence of partner-practice, the perceived benefits of individual
training remain subjective, fleeting and personal. Interactive work of-
fers the opportunity to correlate subjective impressions with reality in
order to create a repeatable change of skill level, rather than merely an
ephemeral change of state.
Tempering or xiulian is required to make the performer able to
resist the stressors of performance. Tasks that require physical, mental
and emotional calm despite their increasingly complex and fatiguing
nature are required. Tempering can be seen operating in the previous
examples. The practice of PMP challenges strength, endurance and
coordination. Likewise the incremental challenge of moving from set,
choreographed PMP to interactive and improvised SMP also tempers
the performer through the gradual increase of random stress. More
obvious tempering is achieved by adding the resistance of dead weight
to the codified movements of PMPs. The wearing of a weighted vest
and the ballistic manipulation of such tools and props as knives,
swords, sabres, poles and free-weights with an uneven distribution of
mass such as clubs, sledge-hammers and kettlebells all offer excellent
tempering value, training both coordination and the endurance of the
performer’s explosive strength.
Efficiency training, the other side of tempering, is work done
with limited resistance in order to create awareness, grace and flow.
Once the gross motor functions of the body have been mapped by
structuring exercises and once they have been put into a partner rela-
tionship and under stress, performers are sufficiently self aware to
work on subtle detail and to bring an increased efficiency to their
training. Many aspects of efficiency training are approached interac-
tively by choosing a single aspect of an interactive SMP and working
on it exclusively. Rather then freely challenging each other’s balance,
performers can choose to concentrate their attentions on maintaining
uninterrupted contact during tuishou, resting in and supporting each
other’s arms in order to create movement that is seamless, without
undue effort and that exactly responds to the structure of the two-
 Principles of Performer Preparation 99

person improvisation as it occurs. Likewise, singing close harmony a

capella at low volume while remaining in tune and while splitting
one’s attention between one’s own part and one’s partner’s will
greatly increase vocal efficiency.
The PMP, SMP and the four “filters” also serve as a microcosmic
representation of an actual performance. The meticulous structure in
space and time that individual PMPs represent is a correlate of the lar-
ger group structures of the performance event. Performances, due to
the attendance of a live audience, are interactive, the audience’s atten-
tion changing the subtle ‘temperature’ and atmosphere of the space.
The stress of actually performing with all of the unpredictable vari-
ables this implies is the most tempering event for a performer, allow-
ing him or her a very real appraisal of strengths, limitations and possi-
bilities. The effectiveness of any performance is also dependent upon
the collective efficiency and flow of its performers, which is the result
of the hundreds of refined actions each performer makes during the
course of the piece.
The original and classical taijiquan PMPs and SMPs used in the
Dancing Word break down into the following categories:

x Fundamental Solo PMPs for the integration of breath,

movement and posture and the development of strength, mo-
bility and endurance, including foundation exercises for the
voice,
x Single Movement Partner PMPs to train physical respon-
siveness at both touch and non-contact ranges,
x Multiple Movement Partner PMPs to train sophisticated
physical responsiveness at both touch and non-contact ranges,
x Extended Solo PMPs to learn a fundamental physical vo-
cabulary,
x Extended Solo SMPs to express a physical vocabulary in a
spontaneous, improvised fashion, including vocal improvisa-
tion,
x Partner SMPs to reincorporate partner responsiveness and
physical vocabulary in a spontaneous, improvised fashion,
x Individual Physical and Vocal Composition to teach the
generation of individual PMPs,
x PMPs for Group, Partner and Solo Singing,
100 The Dancing Word

x PMPs for Group, Partner and Solo Polyrhythmic Move-

ment to train the ability to produce several rhythms simulta-
neously.

The Dancing Word sources its PMPs and partner exercises from
taijiquan for many of the same reasons taijiquan is used in more tradi-
tional terminating training programs. Over time, actors training in tai-
jiquan can reduce their reaction time to sudden stressors in order to act
proactively and appropriately with increased sensory input (Yang
138). Tuishou is an incremental protocol for reducing the degree of the
stress-response, the nervous and hormonal activation that makes the
heart pound, shrinks the field of vision and inhibits fine motor control
(Sapolsky 6-8).
Much of actor training is directly concerned with de-conditioning
the stress-response. Actors’ lack of physical ease, vocal projection and
ability to respond creatively to their fellow players are all caused by
habituated over-reaction to actual or anticipated stressors. This in it-
self is enough to recommend traditional taijiquan to any performer-
training program.
Furthermore, taolu teaches stage actors to be able to repeat a pre-
cise choreography of actions that, due to their martial nature, contain
very clear force vectors. These not only render a body trained in their
execution more dynamic, but the specific breathing protocols used in
taijiquan allow the moving actor to support vocalization with move-
ment in a highly efficient manner. Having learned the classical chore-
ography of the taolu, actors can apply themselves to composing pos-
ture and movement when acting in self-consciously theatrical genres.
Actors creating devised physical theatre or interpreting classical, late-
modern and post-dramatic repertoire all have need of strong composi-
tional skills. For actors working in these forms, tuishou training con-
verts into the skill of being able to respond appropriately, composi-
tionally and without stress to other actors and to the performance envi-
ronment.

d. Ground

The ground upon which performer preparation takes place is the

human bodymind, the contents and structure of which are conceived
as being embodied in our organisms through common history, experi-
 Principles of Performer Preparation 101

ential activity and environment. While to a great extent the form of

our body/mind and the terrestrial environment we live in are pre-
given, behaviour and language appear to be learned and shaped
through experience and culture. This means that our sensory-motor
systems and our intuitive and cognitive functions are not set fast by
some pre-existing code. Rather they emerge based on our activities
and what we are exposed to and thus can be described as embodied.
They may tend in certain directions, but absolutes seem rare. As a re-
sult, the ground of performer preparation is somewhat paradoxical.
We all share a common embodiment and a common environment and
these allow us to make observations and produce reliable training pro-
cedures. At the same time, we are constantly confronted by our igno-
rance of the form and behaviour of our body/mind and by the lack of
correspondence between our interpretative structures and what is actu-
ally happening. The body/mind is thus, I believe, as objective a site
and tool for ontological research as we can find.

e. View

While the above explanations necessarily give the impression that

performer preparation is a linear process of transcending limitations
and acquiring greater expressive power, the view with which these
practices are undertaken is not quite as results-oriented and transcen-
dental. The flowers of training do include new abilities with respect to
previous ones and the transcending of personal limitations, but the
fruit of the practice is presence: awareness of the present moment
without preference for the past or the future. Much of what is impor-
tant in terms of the proposed path of training is not what appears or
flowers, but what disappears and is thus never noticed.
One of the first unnoticed occurrences in training is the recovery
of lost movement capabilities. We do not move as well as we could
due to two factors: sensory motor amnesia and residual muscle tension
(Hanna 39). Sensory-motor amnesia is a kind of atrophy. Through
lack of use and then fear of use, we lose or fail to develop voluntary
control of various muscles. Residual muscle tension occurs when the
chemicals that serve to signal our muscles to move are not fully
evacuated after their task is complete. Our muscles are full of residual
programs that hinder them. We are “stuck” and have insufficient space
to move both inside and outside our own bodies. Through constant
102 The Dancing Word

practice in which recovery, coordination and refinement of our physi-

cality is implicit, we can reduce these two major obstacles to our
physical expression.
This process of recovery is related to the disappearance of our
conditioned deep bracing reflex. All living creatures, animal and hu-
man alike, have three instinctual reactions to threats hardwired into
their physiology: fight, flight or freeze (Levine 16). In order to provide
the energy for flight or fight when we are confronted with a hostile
situation, our glands flood our bodies with hormones, a phenomenon
known as the alarm reaction or neuro-endocrine response (Ledoux
212-214). If we do not have the opportunity to flee or to fight, we
freeze and this powerful chemical cocktail remains in our systems.
Although the neuro-endocrine response facilitates intense activity in
the short term, the long-term presence of powerful catabolic hormones
is actually damaging to the body. Animals in the wild who play dead
after being pounced on by predators, who run, or who turn and fight
all exhibit interesting behaviour if they survive the encounter. They
shake, spasm and contort violently for a short while and then, sud-
denly, trot off as though nothing has happened.
Humans have lost this trauma management reflex that both
eliminates the hormones released by the encounter and serves to
minimize the impact of the injuries the animal may have sustained.
We store the hormones from the flight-or-fight chemical dump in our
musculature and our brains are imprinted by the fear we have experi-
enced and failed to physically evacuate. This results in an acquired
behaviour of reactive bracing.
Reactive bracing is my general term for regularly occurring
“static” in breathing, movement, or posture that has been conditioned
through fear, anxiety and trauma. These are defensive mechanisms
that make us involuntarily brace against a perceived threat. After years
of sustained bracing, these mechanisms become embedded patterns of
behaviour that limit us without our conscious knowledge.
Reactive bracing is very insidious and seeps into our every activ-
ity and encounter. We are all reactive in ways that are very subtle and
limiting. Such physical limitations as being unable to do the splits or a
backbend are minor problems compared to the unnecessary attitude of
defensiveness that we unwittingly bring to so many of our interper-
sonal relations. Reactive bracing is a conditioned response and can
only be de-conditioned by gently recovering strength, mobility, ease
 Principles of Performer Preparation 103

and grace through incrementally more sophisticated and challenging

training.
The martial artist who braces in the face of a potential blow shuts
down his or her ability to perceive and respond. Martial training is full
of exercises to de-condition the student’s perceived fears. These part-
ner exercises consist of first teaching the student how to absorb impel-
lent force from a training partner in order not to be afraid of it. Such
training de-conditions our habits of reactive bracing and allows us to
actually perceive the colleague with whom we are creating or per-
forming.
The simple, banal-seeming psycho-physiological de-conditioning
described above over the long-term results in the realization that the
training and practice of performer preparation is best viewed not as an
activity whose result will pay off in the future, but rather as a diagno-
sis in the present moment, of one’s actual state of being. The per-
former realizes her present state through direct experience of either
her skill or limitation as provided by the exercise or even performance
in question. Presence is the fundamental trait needed by those partici-
pating in a performance. I propose that performance in its mature form
is simply a means of actualizing presence.

f. Gate

In my experience, the gate one must pass through in order to par-

ticipate in this work is one of curiosity and availability. Anecdotally I
have seen clumsy, weak, heavy, naive and “tone-deaf” individuals
excel at this approach to performer preparation where cosmopolitan
students with previous physical training in dance, music and martial
arts have been sorely challenged. Enthusiasm for the puzzles pre-
sented by performer preparation in the here-and-now and the patience
and curiosity to stay with a long-term practice are the greatest asset a
student can bring to his or her work.

2. Levels and Phases of Performer Preparation

The process of performer preparation passes through incremental levels:

x Movement
x Voice
x Rhythm
104 The Dancing Word

x Song
x Speech
x Synthesis Composition

These levels unfold following their order of importance: a student

on her way to becoming a skilled mover is in a better position to then
learn more subtle skills such as voice, speech, singing and rhythm.
Breathing and voice work is a sub-set of movement work that contin-
ues the line of training into the specific minutia of the respiratory ap-
paratus. The same holds true of rhythm, the training of which has been
primed by prior attention to movement and breathing. All of the skills
that precede it facilitate the learning of singing which is in turn a valu-
able training for speech.
Fundamental training is an abstract exercise in the sense that it
seeks to cultivate in the student a separate awareness of each of the
aspects of expression. It is pre-idiomatic: despite its origin in the
worlds of Chinese martial arts and avant-garde theatre it is not explic-
itly designed to produce one aesthetic result or another. The fixing of
an aesthetic expression is postponed for as long as possible in order to
let the student’s training find its own form within the general devel-
opmental structure. This is in many ways a conceit; the training is for
performers and it has a readily identifiable aesthetic and history. How-
ever it is perhaps more fruitful to pretend that a pre- or non-idiomatic
expression is possible, in order to concentrate the students’ attentions
on the psychophysical impulses that characterize their creativity,
rather than on the aesthetic objects that are its final result.

a. Movement

Based on his experiences as an actor in the Odin Teatret and on

Eugenio Barba’s research into the construction of the performer’s
stage presence, Richard Fowler maintains that presence, the ability to
catch and hold an audience’s attention, can be learned. Considered
objectively, the actor and dancer’s credibility depends on her skill in
knowing how and when to retain potential energy and release kinetic
energy. Both wushu and qigong are fundamentally concerned with the
‘how’ and ‘when’ of energy control, and the principles that follow
 Principles of Performer Preparation 105

maintain Fowler’s goal within the framework of shi or presence as

developed in the Chinese martial and energetic arts.
Movement training teaches the student to align herself with grav-
ity through the use of her inherent body structure, minimizing the
muscular effort required to keep upright. Once students have begun to
actualize this skill, they are taught how to move while maintaining
their standing alignments with gravity, i.e. how to control their bal-
ance at all times. Thirdly the student learns how to adjust the position
of her body with the motion of fellow players and with the scenic en-
vironment, factors that will literally challenge her balance during
training, rehearsal and performance. These phases use simple, single
movement PMPs, more elaborate solo PMPs and finally partner PMPs
and SMPs. The ultimate goal of the movement training is the actuali-
zation of open and rooted plasticity – the actor makes use of her full
range of motion and can give the illusion of being out of balance while
being in fact in full control of her movements and open to instant ad-
justments based on changes in her partner’s actions and her environ-
ment – and the ability to perform an action rather than simply a move-
ment.
In the terminology used by Chen Zhonghua, a movement serves
to transport the structure of the body through space while an action is
a rotation accomplished by the body, without displacement in space,
that produces two opposite force vectors. These two forces stabilize
the practitioner with respect to the ground and project energy that
strikes, drops or flips her duifang (training partner or opponent). One
vector allows her to synchronize with the movement of her partner,
while the other allows her to lock and catch her partner’s energy, per-
turbing his balance by creating a sudden de-synchronization. Most
attempts at the performance of taijiquan result in an undifferentiated
blend of movement and action, leading Chen to frequently use the
term movement pejoratively to describe that part of an action that
wobbles or deviates from the ideal vector used to produce force. Thus
a movement is either a step or an error, while an action takes place
within the abdomen and torso due to the rotation or ‘gimble’ of the
hips and the timed changes of pressure of the feet on the ground. In-
deed, Chinese martial arts are globally characterized by a type of
movement called chan si jin or Silk Reeling Energy, meaning that
they follow the natural spirals of the bones and thus are curved, result-
106 The Dancing Word

ing in a twisting action on the surface of the body (Hsu, Sword Pol-
isher’s Record 31).

Figure 21: The author performing a Physical Score or PMP at the Fictive Realities
performance school in Winnipeg, Canada, 1997 while colleagues and teachers
look on; from the right, Donald Kitt, Varrick Grimes, Ruth Madoc-Jones, Jim
Dowling and Eileen Lamourie. (Photo by Laura Astwood)

For Chen Zhonghua, the standard of credibility for the execution

of PMPs is the presence of the intra- and inter-thoracic and abdominal
coordinated rotations that produce two opposite force vectors and in
doing so constitute an action.
Why is rotation within the core so compelling to the viewer?
Chilean researchers Bloch, Orthous and Santibanez-H refer to the ex-
pressive, externally readable aspects of human emotion as effector
patterns. Effector patterns are composed of breathing patterns, patterns
of muscular activation and facial expressions (199). The variations in
these patterns constitute the expressive aspects of basic human emo-
tions. I find this claim significant because it locates two-thirds of hu-
man expressivity in the abdomen and torso, the site of breath-related
movement and the conduit for all muscular activation.
 Principles of Performer Preparation 107

Examination of a landmark work of 20th century dance, Merce

Cunningham’s 1956 choreography Suite for Five reveals the impor-
tance of the mobilization of the torso in the evocation of meaning.
Significant in this work is consistent immobilization of dancers’ tor-
sos. The ‘square’ formed by connecting the points of the shoulders
and hips is not subject to any bow and flex and thus the major source
of the expression of emotional effector patterns is removed. Cunning-
ham’s work was unique and unsettling when it first premiered due to
the physical constraint that prevented viewers from attributing any
emotional effector pattern to the performers’ bodies, especially in con-
trast to the hyper-flexion and hyperextension of the torso that charac-
terized the aesthetic of the then popular Martha Graham dance tech-
nique. Suite for Five is perhaps one of the few truly abstract pieces of
performance ever created. While overt characters and narratives are
not always present in the theatre and dance arts of the late 20th cen-
tury, the movements of the performers’ bodies still manage to convey
changing emotional effector patterns that allow the audience to read
some sort of affective narrative onto the action. Cunningham’s re-
moval of a powerful and unacknowledged sign system that allows us
to read human states onto otherwise un-coded movement, highlights
the importance of thoracic and abdominal mobilization in the creation
and attribution of meaning.
In my own work I am not concerned with directly training the
performer’s ability to model particular effector patterns on demand.
However I do hold that performance credibility is the result of the af-
fective engagement perceived by audiences in the movement of per-
formers’ torsos. Further I propose that this seeming affective engage-
ment can be very thoroughly trained through the conscious use of mar-
tial rotation.
The pre- and co-requisite of martial rotation is a coherent view of
body usage referred to in Chinese as peng1. While later writings on
taijiquan associated with the Yang and Wu families elaborate twenty
or so ‘energies’ or body usages, Chen Zhonghua pragmatically teaches
peng as the fundamental body method of taijiquan from which all

1
The word is likely an onomatopoeia derived from the popping sound made by the
opening of a traditional Chinese archery quiver. The springy quivers were held on the
back between the shoulder blades and arching the back and pressing the shoulder
blades together compressed the quiver which in turn created expansive pressure to pop
off the lid, making the sound ‘pung!’ (Phillips personal communication 2008)
108 The Dancing Word

other operations follow. Peng itself is not inherently martial but facili-
tates the three major martial actions of taijiquan: ‘bouncing’ the dui-
fang away, ‘rubbing’ the duifang with such force as to cause local tis-
sue damage or a knock-down and finally ‘blending’ the duifang by
catching the body or a limb between two opposing force vectors,
which again can result in damage, dropping or flipping.
My own experience of training the body method of peng involves
a dialectic relationship between the characteristics of constant pro-
portional expansion and downward weight release. The power of
our action is usually limited by uncoordinated competition between
extension and flexion by opposite muscle groups. By creating constant
proportional expansion, or extension without flexion, the stability of
the body can be greatly augmented with a significant reduction of ef-
fort. The subjective experience of the exponent is that she is sending
‘reaching out’ signals to all of her limbs without actually displacing
them in space. Thus the signal is constant and even, proportionally
distributed over the whole structure, its intensity dependent upon the
relative distance of the terminal points of hands, feet and head from
the centre of the body at the abdominal dantien.
Downward weight release involves creating the subjective sensa-
tion of ‘seating’ or ‘centering’2 where the bones of the legs sit more
deeply into the hip sockets. An external and easy way to feel this seat-
ing can be acheived by standing with the feet parallel, shoulder width
apart. If one lightly and briskly bends the knees a little, one notices the
split second delay between the end of the action of flexion at the knees
and the downward dropping of the upper body. In this way, the intrin-
sic weight of the relaxed upper body can be brought to bear in the ex-
pression of an action. The same effect can be produced by standing on
one’s toes and dropping down onto the whole foot. The more sophisti-
cated, internal means of achieving this seating effect is to lower the

2
In my experience, the term ‘centering’ is unpacked in distinct ways in dance, theatre
and martial arts. In theatre the term is often a metaphor for credible, confident behav-
iour. In dance it typically refers to a single body’s relationship to the ground while in
martial arts it refers to a single body’s relationship to the ground when confronted by
an external perturbing force. Dance movement, broadly speaking, is akin to the action
of a spinning top, while martial movement resembles the constantly self-adjusting
action of a gyroscope. Put another way, if one were to swing a stone on a cord over-
head in a circle, the dancer’s experience of momentum is like that of the stone at the
extremity of the revolution while a martial artist’s experience is like that of the still
hand holding the string.
 Principles of Performer Preparation 109

hip girdle more firmly onto the heads of the femur joints. This results
in the femur pressing outward to the side of the upper leg where it
joins the body. The back is neither arched nor rounded and the hip is
fully mobile. While the effect is relatively easy to learn in isolation, it
is very challenging to reprogram all of one’s movements according to
this sophisticated constraint.
These two central concepts evolve over five consecutive phases
that inform standing, locomotion and interaction with a partner. These
phases, outlined by Chen Zhonghua, reflect a refinement both of skill
and of perception. Level 1 sees the students able to structure their bod-
ies according to the requirements of the taolu. Their recurring practice
of the taolu allows them to reproduce bodily shapes accurately and to
perceive the actions of people around them in terms of discrete shapes
or forms. At Level 2, the students are able to move in space while re-
taining fundamental structure. They begin to see the yin and yang as-
pects of position and motion, perceiving both the yang or positive
space occupied by the body and the yin or negative space around the
body created by the disposition of the limbs. Level 3 is characterized
by the ability to accomplish an action or martial rotation within the
body. At this level the student sees the actions made by other bodies in
terms of three-dimensional vectors or lines and also perceives how
these lines might be crossed, perturbed or broken. Level 4 introduces
the element of effective but still tacit timing with respect to a partner’s
movement. Here the student automatically perceives how the three-
dimensional lines of her own and another’s movement might be used
to project, drop or flip the other. The fifth level adds intentionality to
the skills and perception of the previous levels, making the martial
rotation an intended, timed rotation. Rather than being passively re-
sponsive, the student is able to assert her agency and is consciously
aware of all aspects of her interaction with her partner. This awareness
makes movement much more efficient and, ideally, no externally visi-
ble motion is required to effect change on the partner. As the students
evolve through these phases, they are better able to withstand random
stress and their movement quality progresses from static to fluid to
dynamic, culminating with the ability to produce sudden, violently
powerful ballistic movement.
110 The Dancing Word

Level Skill Perception Intensity

1 Position
2 Position, movement
3 Position, movement,
rotation
4 Position, movement,
timed rotation
5 Position, movement,
timed, intended rota
tion
See the positive space Static
occupied by another
See the negative space Static/Fluid
around another
See the three lines of Fluid
force keeping another
upright
See how to manipulate Dynamic
another’s three lines
See how to manipulate Ballistic
another’s three lines
without moving oneself

Figure 22: table of taijiquan tuishou skills and perceptions.

The partner work of taijiquan tuishou is based on what Randall

Goodwin refers to as the leverage system of the human body (Good-
win, personal communications). Goodwin characterizes the body as
functionally composed of multiple, interdependent, synchronous lev-
ers. The relational framework between two bodies attempting to sur-
prise each other into imbalance and recover from surprise functions in
terms of entry and avoidance. Entry occurs due to contact between
the limbs of both partners or contact between the limbs of one partner
and the torso of the other created by movement through that partner’s
negative space. Evasion engages with space by the transporting of en-
tire body structure out of range of physical contact.
The following principles governing posture, movement and inter-
activity are derived in part from the classical writings on taijiquan
(translated in Cohen, Way of Qigong 88), in part on movement princi-
ples elaborated by Chen Zhonghua and in part from my own experi-
ence.
They are as follows:

1. Physical Engagement:
“Whole body at ease” (quan shen fang song)
“Joints relax open” (guan jie song kai)
 Principles of Performer Preparation 111

Relaxation here is taken to mean pliable minimum tension. The

body is supple and ready to move, not slack or slumped.

2. Head and Neck:

“Empty the neck, let the energy reach the crown” (xu ling ding
jing)
“Suspend the head” (ding tou xuan)
“Tongue touches the roof of the mouth” (she ding shang e)

The neck is emptied by lightly tucking the chin, lengthening the

back of the neck and pointing the rear fontanel straight up. This posi-
tion is maintained by creating a feeling of suspension in the head as
placed – it is not pushed up from below, but held up from above.

3. Shoulders and Elbows:

“Sink the shoulders, drop the elbows” (chen jian zhui zhou)

The shoulders are lightly pulled down into their sockets but they
are neither drawn forward nor back. As a general rule, regardless of
the posture of the body if the arms are raised, the elbows are kept
lower than the wrists.

4. Back and Chest:

“Central and erect” (zhong zheng)
“Sink the chest, lift the back” (han xiong ba bei)

The spine is as straight as possible, given its natural tendency

towards an S-shaped curve and a plumb line can be drawn from the
rear fontanel to the tip of the tailbone. The chest is not thrust out,
rather the whole rib cage is suspended as though it were a bell. The
back is lifted from the top, i.e. each vertebra seeks the maximum dis-
tance from the one beneath it.

5. Hips:
“Release the kua “(song kua)

The kua refers to the inguinal fold where the legs join onto the
torso, which when engaged in bearing the centred weight of the body
must be kept as open and pliable as possible.
112 The Dancing Word

6. Buttocks:
“Draw in the buttocks”

The tip of the tailbone is lightly pointed at the ground. This ac-
tion flattens the lower back. The tailbone is not tucked due to the en-
gagement of the abdominal muscles, but rather, the girdle of the hips
settles onto the heads of the femurs due to the relaxation of the kua.

7. Knees:
“Bend the knees slightly”

Even if the legs are nominally straight, they must never be hyper-
extended or locked, hence a sensation of bending at the knees is im-
portant at all times.

8. Feet:
“The ten toes should bend slightly to grip the ground”

The toes and the flat of the foot should grip the ground like the
suction cups of an octopus. One can imagine three points of contact
with the ground: at the centre of the heel, the centre of the ball of the
foot and the centre of the pad below the smallest toe. Alternately, the
top of the arch at the middle of the foot can be viewed as the apex of
the dome of a suction cup.

9. Eyes:
“Level gaze” (ping shr)

The level gaze relies on peripheral vision and embraces the entire
visual field at once. No object is given priority of focus.

10. Breath:
“Qi sinks to the lower abdomen “ (qi chen dan tian)

The expansion and contraction of the lower abdomen governs

inhalation and exhalation, creating a subjective sensation of the breath
dropping to the dantien point.
 Principles of Performer Preparation 113

11. Mind:
“Use intent not force to keep erect” (yong yi, bu yong li)

To stand in balance requires little muscular effort. Constant mi-

cro-adjustments are required to maintain this balance and the smother-
ing of physical sensation by the use of excessive force make these im-
possible. Thus the mind must pay attention to the balance at all times
rather than parking the body in place and moving on to some other
subject of consideration.
Once the student begins to walk, i.e. to engage in any activity in
which she must transfer her weight, the following principles come into
play:

12. The Chain of Movement:

“Center – Support – Center – Terminus”

Once the body is centred, the force of a movement travels from

the support (which pushes off the ground) to the centre of the body
(which puts the momentum of the entire body into the movement) to
the terminus of expression particular to that movement (the hand, el-
bow, knee or hip for example).

13. Direction of Movement

“Load right, move left”

We are a predominantly right-handed species. Habituating left-

ward opening movements is a standard practice in numerous styles of
wushu, where the student is taught to react to the right-handed attacks
of most opponents by outflanking them. For performers, moving to the
left, rather than to the right as might be expected, gives their actions
an element of surprise to an audience unconsciously conditioned by
rightward movement. Leftward movement involves launching from
the right foot in an action reminiscent of the Yu Step.

14. The Quality of Movement:

“When moving use the body’s inherent binding qualities and
plasticity to create presence”
“Every line is a spiral, every spiral is a line”
114 The Dancing Word

The body’s soft tissues are elastic by nature. When moved with
momentum and minimal tension the organs, joints, muscles and skin
bounce. Likewise the skeletal structure permits the body a vast range
of motion. In order to actualize presence when moving, one must
dance with the exchange between the amassing of potential energy
and the release of kinetic energy. Positions where energy is stored as
potential are closed while positions where energy is released are open.
The opening and closing of the body can be achieved almost effort-
lessly by conscious exploitation of the body’s inherent structures and
characteristics. The most efficient type of opening and closing is spi-
raling or chan si jin where the entire surface of the body moves in re-
sponse to a single movement.

15. Speed
“Move at the Speed of Gravity”

The speed of motion of any given body part is always in relation-

ship to every other body part, and the whole body itself is subject to
the force of gravity. By keeping the center of the body constantly
moving at the speed of gravity, one can then generate relaxed and pre-
sent movement in any part of the body. Even when one is still, the
center is moving at the speed of gravity, away from the earth, due to
the action of the legs. When one is moving the center maintains this
speed, but the relative motion of the termini, the legs, occurs far faster,
making the body move across the ground. In the same way, a slow
rotation of the center can produce a rapid movement in the arms. What
is important is that the rhythm of the body’s action be in conscious,
rather than passive accord with gravitational pull.

16. Rhythm:
“Move rhythmically”

To the doer, moving should subjectively feel as though it were in

time with and carried by an internally arising tripartite rhythm that
makes it seem effortless.

17. The Experience of Movement:

“Stillness in Movement”
 Principles of Performer Preparation 115

This is usually interpreted as meaning that the mind is calm while

the body moves, which is a valuable trait to develop. However still-
ness in motion is better understood as the feeling that the whole body
is moving in a balanced way, without any wobbling, tossing or relative
motion. This coordination is often experienced as the stillness of the
eyes as the body moves, which gives the subjective impression that
the world is moving around the body, and not the body through the
environment. If the limbs and head are not moving independently of
the torso, but rather as a coherent whole, the sensation of stillness be-
comes possible.
The movement of two or more performers is governed by the follow-
ing principles:

18. Consonance of Action:

“Non-opposition of Force”

While the friction created by directly opposing lines of force (two

bodies advancing towards each other along the same line for example)
is important in performance, these opposite lines need to be trans-
formed creatively once they have caught onto each other. Moving to
the sides or below an incoming vector allows one performer to trans-
form a head-on collision into a negotiation of space.

19. Unity of Action:

“Connect and Join Centers”

Any physical action must have only one center of gravity, no

matter how many participants there are to that action and no matter if
they are joined by physical contact or by the extension of imaginary
lines of force into space.
The above listed principles are cumulative, and the students en-
gaged in interaction are constrained by the initial principles that gov-
ern standing and walking.
To enable the students to conceptualize the movements they
compose and execute, a series of analytical tools accompany these
principles:
116 The Dancing Word

1. “18 terminals”

There are 18 major points that can serve as a terminal for an ac-
tion, i.e. as the point from which potential energy leaves the body.
They are the hand, wrist, elbow, shoulder, hip, knee, ankle, and foot
on each side of the body and the points at the center of the chest and
between the shoulder blades respectively.

2. “9 gates and 27 compartments”

The body can be divided into three columns, left, middle, right,
and three levels, low, middle and high. It can also be considered in
terms of the distance from the lower abdomen to the far reach. Thus
the end of the extended leg is the far distance, the end of the arm the
middle distance and the distance of the elbows and knees the close
distance.
When these columns and ranges are combined a total of 9 gates
appears on the front, on each side and on the back of the body. When
viewed in 3 dimensions, a cube containing 27 compartments appears.

Figure 23: The vertical, horizontal and saggital gates (Hsu, Sword Polisher’s Record
159-161).
 Principles of Performer Preparation 117

Figure 24: The 27 compartments.

3. “6 Elements of Standing Posture”

x Extension, referring to the degree of separation of the feet,

x Distribution, referring to the percentage of the body’s weight
held by each leg,
x Concentration, referring to the area of each foot that is domi-
nant in weight-bearing:
o Left and right toes,
o Left and right heels,
o Left heel, right toe,
o Left toe, right heel,
x Rotation, referring to the twisting of the hips with respect to
the angle of the toes,
x Orientation, referring to the direction of the gaze and the face,
x Altitude, referring to the degree of flexion and extension of
the knees.

4. “Index of Complexity”

An interaction requiring performers’ arms to cross is considera-

bly more sophisticated than one where the limbs remain untangled.
Additionally, the number of discrete points of contact between two
118 The Dancing Word

training partners also determines complexity, a single point of contact

being far more easily negotiated then two or even three points. Partner
PMPs and SMPs in which the students respond to the challenge of
crossing and uncrossing limbs due to the rotation of multiple points of
connection between them represent a high order of complexity3.

5. “Measurment of Performance Awareness”

I developed the following equation to help my students to evalu-

ate their personal practice and training. The equation can be applied at
to single physical actions, to phrases of movement and to long com-
plex movement sequences.
The initial equation is the number of perceived physical opera-
tions divided by the number of perceived mental events during execu-
tion. Once the number of mental events had been reduced to one
through regular practice, the physical actions have to be re-
differentiated into more components in order to make the sequence
more physically and mentally challenging.
For example: five separate actions are associated with five sepa-
rate intentions. With training, the five actions become an integrated
sequence, governed by a single state of attention. Every time a series
of actions is integrated to a single experience of attention, that series
must be re-differentiated into more precise units. An initial integration
of five actions to one intention must be re-differentiated to ten actions,
disrupting the flow of attention and requiring a re-integration on a
higher level of precision and awareness.
Later, remembering a practice tool from my music lessons as a
child, I added the variable of the number of acceptable consecutive
repetitions. While learning to play classical violin and piano using the
Suzuki method, I was required to learn pieces by ear. Verification of
whether or not the piece had been memorized required me being able
to play it 10 times correctly in a row. Any error and I’d have to start
again from 0. The more developed version of the equation looks like
this:

3
Yet another idea I owe to kuntao and silat teacher Randall Goodwin who first sug-
gested that I look at the complexity of physical interactions in these terms.
 Principles of Performer Preparation 119

(number of physical operations / number of phases of mental atten-

tion) number of successful consecutive repetitions = current level of
performance awareness.

Or:

(a/b)c=d

where:

a= number of observed physical operations,

b= number of observed phases of mental attention,

c= number of successful repetitions executed consecutively,

d= level of self-awareness of psychophysical integration.

Starting at the level of individual physical actions we can subdi-

vide our actions into smaller units, made up of pre-movement and
movement fragments. As muscle action is triphasic (see section
3.1.5.3 Rhythm, below) a physical action is likely to break down into
three distinct fragments. So, in order to place a quantitative value on
our subjective experience of our execution of the single action, we
plug it into our equation and start practicing. After 10 or so tries we jot
down the following:

a= 3 fragments

b= 6 phases of mental attention

c= 4 satisfactory consecutive repetitions

Meaning, we have three tasks to accomplish, we felt like we had

two phases of mental attention per task and we did four in a row that
we judged to have acceptable form. According to the Performance
Integration Equation, our current level of performance awareness is
(3/6)4 = 2.
Now we can either move up a rung and begin to work with 3 ac-
120 The Dancing Word

tions to build a phrase, or we can break our original action into even
smaller parts. If we move up a rung, we accept our current level of
execution and decide to build upon it. More sophisticated movements
like our phrase will not be able to exceed the awareness level of their
component parts, even if a separate calculation yields a higher num-
ber. So here are the equations for our two options – moving up a rung
or re-differentiating:
Moving up to a phrase: a= 3 parts b= 9 mental phases c= 2 satis-
factory consecutive repetitions d= 0.66 level of self-awareness
Re-differentiating the individual action: a= 6 parts b= 6 mental phases
c= 10 satisfactory consecutive repetitions d= 10
Of course there is a fair amount of subjective, interpretive work
here. How many parts a given movement is divided into, how one
characterizes one’s phases of mental attention, and what criteria de-
termine a ‘successful’ execution – all of these things can differ from
one person to the next.
The relationship between the levels of awareness at different lev-
els of sophistication can be used to determine whether or not we move
on and add further multipliers, or keep on practicing what we’re cur-
rently working on.
If our awareness of the 3 actions that make up our phrase was 2,
3 and 4, that means we have an average of 3 going in to the combining
phase. So if our phrase awareness level is below 3, we know we have
a lot of work to do; if it is above 3, maybe we can consider putting our
phrase together with other phrases to create a longer sequence.
Given that the purpose of performer training is to cultivate effi-
ciency in the execution of physically sophisticated activities, I feel that
the intuition we use to rate our perception of our own progress can be
augmented by these small formulae that can help us further track our
growing experience of performance awareness.

b. Voice

Voice here refers to the universal ability of human beings to

make sounds. The voice is considered to be an effect created by the
resonance of the breath first within the organism and second in the
resonant space of the training room or performance space. The voice
is trained by first acquainting the student with the characteristics and
sensations of healthy breathing. Next the student learns to configure
 Principles of Performer Preparation 121

his or her body in order to produce sounds effortlessly. Finally stu-

dents work with their voices and use the echo of their training or per-
formance space and their attunement to its accoustic potential to make
it resonate. These three phases are referred to as breathing, calling and
sounding and the goal of this training is effortless, colorful projec-
tion.
The principles that guide voice training are as follows. Once
again they are taken from the classical writings on qigong (Cohen, The
Way of Qigong 116) and from my own experience.

3. Natural Breathing (shun hu xi)

Inhalation and exhalation should always be done through the

nose. The mouth opens only when the student vocalizes. The abdomen
should be soft like a leather bag at all times. The abdomen swells with
inhalation and shrinks with exhalation, as do the sides of the body and
the lower back.

4. Compression Breathing

As the abdominal muscles come under the student’s control, the

following light contractions can be added to create a chamber provid-
ing a constant stream of air for the voice. On inhalation the upper part
of the abdominal muscle retracts i.e. the solar plexus softens and the
lower abdomen is released outwards. On exhalation the lower abdo-
men is tightened but not compressed inwards and the upper abdomen,
immediately below the ribs, pushes outward. This second type of
breathing is a variation of ni hu xi or reverse breathing. In full reverse
respiration the abdomen contracts on inhalation and expands on exha-
lation. Full ni hu xi can be used to generate short, very loud sounds,
but is less generally useful than the chamber or compression breathing
for performers who have to vocalize constantly over a long period of
time. Compression breathing also includes the catch- or stop-breath,
where inhalation or exhalation is suspended in order to facilitate a
tricky physical maneuver.

5. Four Phases of the Breath

x inhalation
x turning from inhalation to exhalation
122 The Dancing Word

x exhalation
x natural pause before inhalation

While we all pass through these phases automatically, the student

must have sufficient internal awareness to be constantly aware of the
phases of his or her respiration during training and performance.

6. Six Qualities of the Breath

x Slow (man)
x Long (chang)
x Deep (shen)
x Fine (xi)
x Even (jun)
x Tranquil (jing)

Slow means an unhurried rate of respiration. Long means that the

inhaled and exhaled breath is a steady stream of air. Deep means that
the lungs fill completely and that the sensations of subtle energy fill
the lunar plexus. Fine means smooth and quiet not laboured and noisy.
Even means that inhalation and exhalation are both equally conscious
and relaxed and no part of the body is over-emphasized. Tranquil
means that the mind is quiet and focused on the present sensations, not
lost in thought-stories.
The six qualities are, like the postural guidelines given above, a
baseline. Certain aspects of training will require the student to tempo-
rarily disregard these indications, but an effort should be made at all
times to return to a subjective feeling of relaxation and awareness in
which all six are respected.

7. “Exhale smoothly when opening the body”

Vocalizing is one of the more subtle kinds of expression of ki-

netic energy. The movements of opening where kinetic energy is ex-
pressed should not involve so forceful an exhalation as to leave the
student gasping for breath. This is especially true of vocal actions
where the exhalation produces a sound. During sounding, the student
should resist the passage of the air just enough to keep it smooth and
under control.
 Principles of Performer Preparation 123

8. “Inhale at the speed of closing”

Closing the body is usually the best time for inhalation, as it pre-
pares the student for the next expression. If there is sufficient time to
close slowly, then a breath of corresponding length should be drawn
through the nose. If the closing is rapid and the next action is pressing,
the student should inhale rapidly and silently. If the rapid closing pre-
pares for a vocal action then the breath should be drawn through the
mouth rapidly, silently and with special attention that it not stop at the
chest, but instead drop all the way to the lower abdomen. While
breathing through the mouth encourages shallow thoracic breathing, it
is advantageous given the shorter path to the lungs it allows.

9. “Return to Contact Point”

Reactive bracing inevitably inhibits the voice. It does so in many

ways, but one symptom appears to be nearly universal: voice and
speech coach Steven Lecky refers to it as “abdominal thrust” (258).
Compression of the abdomen can greatly increase the air volume
flowing through the throat. Unfortunately, the combination of inexpe-
rience and stress usually results in the student using great blasts of
abdominal pressure in order to project his or her voice. The vocal
folds, the sound producing muscles in the throat, are placed under
tremendous stress. On the one hand they must work to form the ap-
propriate positions for the song or speech being performed and on the
other, they must resist the huge onslaught of air being forced out of
the lungs by the student’s vigorous abdominal contraction. The short-
term result of abdominal thrust is a tired voice that has to stop often to
re-load air. If abdominal thrust continues to be the student’s main
means of vocal support, the vocal cords will become both hypertro-
phied and less mobile or plastic, lowering the pitch of the student’s
voice and reducing its expressive range.
The closed throat leads to the collapse of the space in the mouth
and the lowering of the soft palate. This in turn reduces the per-
former’s volume and control which is compensated for by a strong
abdominal thrust, which in turn tires the vocal folds, causes the throat
to close down, the mouth position to collapse and volume and articula-
tion to suffer, resulting in still further thrust.
124 The Dancing Word

In order to release and apply vocal tension over time, the cords
must be reset to their “contact point” as often as possible. Contact
point is a term coined by Lecky (64) and refers to the ideal relative air
pressure beneath the vocal cords. The glottis is gently closed and the
cords rest against each other creating a light seal. A slight increase in
air pressure produces a gentle gravely sound rather like a cat’s purr
that speech pathologists refer to as glottal fry. When singing a song or
speaking a text, the novice student should return to contact point after
every word, releasing residual muscle tone from the vocal cords and
the abdomen and creating a vertical elasticity from high tension to low
and back.
In actual performance, stopping every word or so to reset to con-
tact point is not possible. The initial exercises described above differ-
entiate the act of singing or speaking into small simple components
that are trained individually.
The student should progress by maintaining the mental activity of
resetting to contact point while gradually removing the gravelly purr-
ing and physical vibrations. A tiny pause is substituted for these ac-
tions. A typical exercise has the student declaim a memorized text on
a single note, sounding rather like a Catholic priest in the days of the
Latin Mass. The student links several words together and returns to
contact point between fragments. She starts to walk slowly and evenly
through her training space, compressing and exhaling as her weight
arrives on one foot and opening and inhaling as she begins a new step.
This creates a horizontal link between all of the points touched by the
vertical bouncing of the voice. Horizontal control is vital in creating
the kind of poetical suspense that captures and keeps an audience’s
attention.
This exercise combines subtle vocal and overt physical elements:
the selective tension of vocalization and the pause of returning to con-
tact point are combined with a way of walking that integrates breath-
ing and movement. As residual tension subsides, abdominal thrust
becomes abdominal support and the performer’s movement, structure
and vocalization mutually create and sustain each other. The other
virtue of this drill is that it is continuous. The student becomes envel-
oped in a world of sound. While she creates the ebb and flow of her
actions she moves from a series of discreet intentions to a broader
state of intention that embraces all of the different elements of her
work. By sustaining her concentration on a sophisticated activity over
 Principles of Performer Preparation 125

time, she is training her attribute of stage presence on top of practicing

various vocal skills. Once these phases have been trained at length the
dynamic and creative act of composing an actual vocal performance
can be undertaken with far greater freedom and confidence.

Figure 25: Richard Fowler coaching Christine Irving’s vocal training

at the Fictive Realities performance school in Winnipeg, Canada, 1997.
(Photo by Laura Astwood)

There are two main tools of analysis for the voice, one that cate-
gorizes vocal actions and one that categorizes voice placement and
subsequently vocal color.

10. “Eight Vocal Effort Actions”

The variables involved here are muscular resistance at the abdo-

men, resistance in the pharynx and mouth, and time:
x Hard, concentrated, sudden: bark/shout
x Hard, concentrated, sustained: roar
x Hard, diffuse, sudden: hiss/spit
x Hard, diffuse, sustained: rasp
x Soft, concentrated, sudden: call
x Soft, concentrated, sustained: croon
126 The Dancing Word

x Soft, diffuse, sudden: shush

x Soft, diffuse, sustained: murmur

11. “Nine Voice Placements”

The voice can be placed in three fundamental positions. The

pharynx can be lowered, as in European Opera, it can be unadjusted as
in North American, English and Irish folk singing, and it can be raised
and slightly metallic sounding, as in such forms as Bulgarian singing
and jingju. In addition the ideal pitch can be set at the bottom, the
middle or the top of the human vocal range. For example, the ideal
pitch for both the Russian and Tibetan cultures is very low – these are
low tone cultures. For the Italian culture of the 19th century, the high
part of the range was considered ideal, while the karnatak music of
South India considers the middle of the range to be the most pleasing.
The combination of these ranges and positions yields the following
general possibilities:

x Pharynx up, high pitch

x Pharynx middle, high pitch
x Pharynx low, high pitch
x Pharynx up, middle pitch
x Pharynx middle, middle pitch
x Pharynx low, middle pitch
x Pharynx up, low pitch
x Pharynx middle, low pitch
x Pharynx low, low pitch

Students should begin their vocal training using the middle phar-
ynx position, to proceed to the low position and finally to work on the
raised position, which is potentially the most difficult and stressful for
the voice.
Research into the therapeutic use of sound has revealed that sonic
vibrations have objective effects on the nervous system. These effects
are of interest to both performers and directors as they reveal how
sound in the theatre, the primary source of which is the voice, affects
both the performers who create it and the audience that receives it.
 Principles of Performer Preparation 127

The pioneer of this research was the French ear, nose and throat
specialist Alfred Tomatis (1920-2001). Tomatis’ thesis can be summa-
rized as follows: sound is the principle source of nourishment to the
nervous system – high pitched sounds stimulate the nervous system
while low pitched ones relax it. His principal discovery was the Toma-
tis Effect: sounds that the ear cannot hear, the voice will be unable to
produce. Hence, for example, the difficulty experienced by Japanese
speakers in pronouncing the “r” sound in English – as they have not
grown up hearing it, their voices cannot easily reproduce it.
Tomatis used his discoveries to treat people with a wide range of
problems, from motor-skill difficulties to learning disabilities. Two of
the techniques he pioneered are of great interest to theatre practitio-
ners. These techniques seek to release and stimulate the tiny muscles
of the inner ear, the atrophy of which has been shown to have a nega-
tive effect on consciousness (Madaule 39). The first is called filtration.
The subject is made to listen to sounds in which specific frequencies
have been removed. The filtering out of low frequencies, for example,
results in greater alertness, creativity and listening capacity (Leeds
170). The second technique is gating, the creation of a random sonic
event to surprise the muscles of the inner ear into releasing habituated
tension. The immediate result of gating is a marked increase in con-
centration and awareness (170).
A significant number of qigong exercises use vocalized syllables
to stimulate the internal organs. The sounds used are vocal approxima-
tions of the sounds the internal organs themselves produce as heard in
meditation. J. Nigro Sansonese (114) refers to these syllables that ap-
proximate internal sounds as phons. Based on his research into both
the Indian raja yoga tradition and such antique practices as the pan-
Mediterranean Mysteries of Eleusis, Sansonese proposes 3 broad cate-
gories of phons. Phons approximate the sounds of internal perception
and cognition. According to Sansonese the internal organs seem to
roar, the external senses to crackle and the frontal cortex to whine
(128).
While his research does not touch on Chinese subjects per se,
Sanonese’s theory goes a long way towards explaining the otherwise
arbitrary seeming attribution of zhou yu (chanting) practiced in
qigong. For example, the phons used to stimulate the heart in zhi neng
qigong, the principle style I practice, are the sounds xing, xin and shi
yang. In Chinese medicine, the heart is a system governing the func-
128 The Dancing Word

tioning of mental awareness, the circulation of blood and the cleansing

power of the small intestine. The state of the heart is manifest to the
doctor of Chinese medicine in the radiance of the patient’s eyes (Bein-
feld and Korngold 111). Accordingly, following both Sansonese’s hy-
pothesis and Chinese medicine, the practitioner of zhi neng qigong
explicitly uses the phon xing to stimulate the frontal suture of the skull
between the eyebrows, the phon xin to stimulate the heart at the
breastbone and the phon shi yang to stimulate the small intestine at the
abdomen. The “i” sounds and the “ng” sounds whine, indicating a
connection to cognition, the “x” sounds crackles, indicating the senses
and the “ya” in shi yang roars as it stimulates the internal organs.
The applicability of Sansonese’s proposal to wushu and qigong is
further confirmed by the phons used in cailifoquan. Short, very loud
percussive cries called fa sheng (sound emissions) are used by cailifo-
quan martial artists to direct both their qi and their yi (subtle energy
and intention) in specific directions. For example, the cry hyet accom-
panies strikes that move from the inside line of the body outward and
upward, the cry whoa accompanies outward and downward strikes and
the cry tdik accompanies the rising force of certain kicks. The cry
whak which leads the qi downward to the abdomen can be said to roar
while the cry tdik that leads the qi straight up to the top of the head
can be said to whine. The sounds are thus used to produce an internal
sensation of energy movement analogous to the expression of force
that is supposed to take place outside of the practitioner’s body.
While therapeutic interventions using Tomatis’ techniques re-
quire subjects to sit in isolation wearing headphones, the results of
both his and Sansonese’s research can easily be appropriated for the
theatre. With the knowledge above performers are more equipped to
monitor their own training and to use their voices to wake themselves
up if their attention has drifted. They can also use their voices in train-
ing to maintain and improve the health and functioning of their inter-
nal organs. Likewise directors can structure their staging with a better
idea of how an audience will react to the pitches of and surprise
changes in the sonic ambience of the play.
 Principles of Performer Preparation 129

c. Rhythm

Embodied experience is characterized by a three-part rhythm.

Every action undertaken by a human being requires either eccentric or
concentric muscle activity. The shift from one phase to the next neces-
sitates an intervening static position or state of rest. The passage from
eccentric to concentric or from concentric to eccentric thus implies a
third moment of rest, no matter how brief (Siff 54). This tripartite
muscular action conditions our perception of events and goes a long
way towards explaining the division of theatrical action into threes,
found in numerous performing traditions.
Every aspect of performance from the tiniest action in training to
the structure of a finished work is composed of three beats. These
beats are the preparation, the delivery and the consequence of any
given action. This rhythm has been noted and exploited by theatre art-
ists from very different cultures and epochs. Traditional Japanese no
performance uses the terms jo, ha and kyu for the three beats of any
action, while the Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold referred to
them as otkaz, posil and tochka. The Japanese terms refer to the estab-
lishment of one action, its negation by another and the resulting con-
clusion (Barba, Paper Canoe 33-34). The Russian ones mean, liter-
ally, “preparation”, “action” and “end point” (Pitches 115).
Actors’ physical and vocal training serves in part to make them
aware of this rhythm. As training progresses they will discover where
they instinctively pause and breathe and which tempi they gravitate
towards during training. The training is constructed to augment and
condition this already inherent pattern. Their work on both physical
and vocal exercises, and on exercises that emphasize rhythm directly,
passes through three phases. In the first phase, dependent rhythm, the
student becomes aware of her instinctive training rhythm and learns to
count regular cycles of a single musical rhythm. The second phase,
that of interdependent rhythms, sees the student working in tandem
with a training partner and experiencing the integration of her instinc-
tive physical and vocal training rhythms with another’s. At the same
time the student learns to count a regular cycle composed of two dif-
ferent rhythms simultaneously. The third phase, or independent
rhythm, trains the student to work in one rhythm while remaining
aware of another completely different rhythm occurring at the same
time. The student cannot become involved in the other rhythms, but
130 The Dancing Word

must be aware of them nonetheless. As rhythmic training requires both

physical and vocal actions, the principles outlined above continue to
apply.
Movement, voice and rhythm form the foundation of an actor’s
training. While they are differentiated in training, in practice they are
experienced as a single skill and event.

d. Song

Singing in the Dancing Word is embodied. Songs are approached

as PMPs, where the form of the body while singing is vital to credible
expression. Singing is the logical development of work on movement,
voice and rhythm. The work on songs makes students viscerally aware
of the need for connection between breath, sound, movement and pos-
ture. The first level, choral singing, trains actors to create complicity.
They learn to split their attention between their own parts and their
places in the whole. The chorus also increases the performers’ self-
confidence – the group is a supportive, rather than a competitive one
and as his or her voice is but one among many the actor feels less ex-
posed. The next level, the duet, emphasizes the relationship between
partners and the exchange of leading and following inherent in any
partnership. The final level, solo singing, emphasizes the actor’s rela-
tionship to the performance space and to the audience. The lone
voice’s collaborators are the acoustic possibilities of the space and the
attention given to it by its audience.
While refining skills such as resonance, breath control and pos-
ture, singing also equips the actor with a very important cognitive tool
- the ability to consider sounds and words in terms of their form and
not their content. Tuning, inflection and phrasing are all as vital to
speech as they are to song. The work on singing prepares the student
for her eventual work on speech as sound in motion.

e. Speech

Speech is distinct from voice in that while the physical mecha-

nisms of the voice are universal, the speech patterns of languages and
their various idioms can differ greatly one from another. Like song,
speech is so idiomatically conditioned that it can be difficult to say
anything universal about it at all – much of a student’s development in
 Principles of Performer Preparation 131

this area depends on how she learns to recognize her own habits of
speech and how she transposes these into her performance.
Clearness, sense and intensity are the three characteristics sought
in speech training. Clearness refers to the need to articulate, resonate
and follow through with the same force as in song, but without the
exaggeration of pitch and syllable length found in singing. Sense re-
fers to the actor’s ability to consciously place inflections and pauses in
a coherent manner. While the speech may or may not be semantically
intelligible to the actor or her audience, it must be organized so that it
seems that way. Intensity is governed by the actor’s ability to resist the
final exhalation of her breath for as long as possible. The audience’s
subjective experience of power behind an actor’s words is quite literal.
The extroverted intensity cultivated in voice and singing training is
internalized and the same potential energy that could drive a rousing
chorus is sublimated to provide equal intensity to a single intimate
sentence.
Much training time must be spent at this level on analysis and
subsequent composition of how the words are to be said. This is not a
literary analysis of the meanings of the text, or a dramaturgical analy-
sis of how the texts of the performance function as a whole; rather it is
a sort of proto-dramaturgical analysis of how it might be said, of how
many subsections it can be broken into, of what inflections are most
appropriate.
For the actor, speech is best conceived of as very subtle song. For
the actor, text analysis is the assigning of changes of pitch, tempo and
rhythm to the words she is to speak. Given that the text is not sung,
pitch changes are more correctly referred to as changes in level as ex-
pressed by a rising, falling or open inflection. While much of this
work is achieved through trial-and-error collaboration between actor
and director, there are four general approaches that characterize work
on speech.

i. Speech: Imported Structure Approach

In this approach, the way in which the text is set is determined by

applying a preset external structure. For example, the changes in level,
the inflections and the tempo and rhythm of a song might be used to
set a completely unrelated text. First the words of the text are substi-
tuted for the words of the song and then the melody of the song is
132 The Dancing Word

drained, so that rather than changing notes, the speaker changes inflec-
tions. While the technique may seem arbitrary, the matching of a
given text with an appropriate song calls for no small amount of intui-
tion and creativity.

ii. Speech: Rational Approach

In this case the text is spoken in such a way as to communicate its

semantic meaning as fully as possible, thus a great deal of care is
taken dividing the text into units of sense. Certain guidelines apply:
nouns and verbs are emphasized over adjectives and inflections are
kept level or rising until they fall or close at the end of a given idea.
The rational approach is very well suited to the interpretation of clas-
sical repertoire, where the actor must communicate the literal meaning
of an archaic and often impenetrable language.

iii. Speech: Representational Approach

In this approach the text is spoken not to facilitate the audience’s

understanding of it per se, but rather to give the audience an impres-
sion of verisimilitude. Actors add idiosyncrasies to their delivery in
order to communicate the reality of a particular character who might
mumble or whisper certain lines, rendering their semantic content in-
accessible to the audience.

iv. Speech: Intuitive Approach

All of the above approaches are used according to where the ac-
tor feels they are most appropriate. The actor uses the techniques re-
quired by the other approaches, but is in no way constrained by them,
creating an internally coherent and credible idiom. The intuitive ap-
proach is present when the actor can actualize the three requirements
of speech: acoustic clearness, semantic sense and visceral intensity.

f. Role Playing, Associations, Memory and the Emotions

The work on speech is introduced last in order to preserve the

actors’ detachment and calm and to prevent them from role-playing
rather than composing their stage actions. Role-playing, composing
the performance based on what the actor might do in private life if
 Principles of Performer Preparation 133

confronted with the same situation as the one presented in the per-
formance, plays an important role in many acting methods and in such
interventions as drama therapy, but it is firmly discouraged as a pri-
mary creative tool in this approach. While from the point of view of
the audience a performance may appear to be a representation of life,
this is an effect and not a cause. The cause of the performance is the
intersection of the artistic intentions and techniques of the performers.
The use of role-playing in training or creation restricts the performers’
possibilities by limiting them to a tool that can only create representa-
tional performances.
Role-playing also endangers the quality of an actor’s expression.
An actor who, due to role-playing, identifies with the fictive situation
she inhabits will be far from the clear and alert mind state that acting
requires. By becoming involved with how she feels about the fictive
situation the actor becomes divided. Part of her is expressing the per-
formance while part of her expresss how she feels about the perform-
ance. It is as though a particularly extroverted member of the audience
has climbed on stage.
Role-playing can also cause performers to become lost in their
personal memories. In the long-term, actors whose habit it is to dwell
on their private past lives become more and more interested in them-
selves and less and less present and available to fellow players.
Many personal memories from private life are sources of unre-
solved pain. Regular encounters with this pain may or may not reduce
its effect on the performer’s quality of life. The stress of regularly re-
visiting painful memories creates the risk of inducing crises that will
interrupt the creative work of the given actor, his or her fellow players
and their teacher or director. More realistically, regular encounters
with stressful memories will simply habituate actors to the stressors
and eventually release any psychic energy that those stressors pro-
vided.
Role-playing is distinct from association. Actors should not pre-
vent themselves from associating images, feelings, sensations,
thoughts or memories with the formal compositions they create. Such
associations shape the inner experience of performing for actors. But
associations should be observed with detachment. For example, an
action with the hand can be associated to an image of opening a cur-
tain. This image might be an imaginary one or a remembered one. It
must be experienced consciously and clearly, but without the per-
134 The Dancing Word

former’s being diverted by her emotional engagement. The speed of

the action and the weight of the curtain are the important parts of the
association, not whether or not opening it made her sad or happy.
Eventually awareness of the sensation of the action itself is sufficient
and the image of the curtain can be abandoned. It is perfectly accept-
able for a performer to have no imaginary or remembered association
at all and to merely work on her sensation in the present moment as
compared to the sensation of last time she performed the action. The
movement of the hand might be experienced solely in terms of the
breath, the muscle tensions and the speed and rhythm of the abstract
movement. The formal elements of a performance - movements and
sounds - are primary and associations are secondary. If the associa-
tions become the primary focus, the composition process can quickly
degenerate into role-playing.
Even the most harmonious of acting studios is an emotionally
charged environment, full of the hopes, fears, loves and insecurities of
all who work there. Yet those who labour there do so in spite of the
personal turmoil that a creative collaborative situation implies. They
work hard to sublimate their emotions in order to create. In this sense,
they implicitly work with their emotions and do not need to resort to
role-playing or personal memories to be present in affect.
Working on an actor’s emotions directly, i.e. asking her to feel a
certain way while performing, or worse, behaving in such as way as to
manipulate her into feeling a certain way, is ineffective for the simple
reason that feelings cannot be reliably predicted or forced. Forced
emotions, on the rare occasions they arrive more than once, are like so
much alcohol or coffee – they can effect a temporary change of state
in performers, but have nothing whatsoever to do with changing their
level as actors. We all have vivid and powerful emotional lives, but
few of us have cultivated the skills needed to make art that appeals to
the emotional lives of others. Regular training composed of both con-
templative and extroverted elements will contribute far more to stu-
dent actors’ depth of character than will debasing their personal lives
and feelings by attempting to relive them in public.
In order to distinguish between working on emotions and associa-
tion, the concept of the objective and the subjective imaginations is
very helpful. Conceived by former Soviet sports psychologist Grigori
Raiport, it is a pragmatic notion that enables performers to visualize
themselves in action without initiating the stress response or introver-
 Principles of Performer Preparation 135

sion that emotional attachment to their performance creates. To ex-

plain, Raiport contrasts two different ways of imagining a forest: one
can see it from the outside in one’s mind’s eye or one can imagine
being in the forest, feeling the pine needles underfoot, smelling the
fresh air and responding affectively to the imagined environment
(Raiport, Red Gold 50-51). The first is an example of objective imagi-
nation while the second is an example of subjective imagination. In
the first example, the forest is considered from a distance as a series of
recognizable forms. In the second, the idea of the forest is a source of
subjective feelings and associations. In performance, it is better to
consider one’s place in the stage picture cooly, rather that attempting
to identify with and enact the emotions of the character one is portray-
ing. By using the objective imagination to construct and manipulate
bodily forms in the mind’s eye, performers expand their palate of
available responses while detaching this formal skill from introverted
emotions.
In my experience, the giant step sideways that role-playing and
emotional manipulation involve can be avoided by conceiving of the
actor’s work as being analogous to that of a classical musician or bal-
let dancer. Beyond the extraordinary clarity of focus that their voca-
tion requires of them, neither the musician nor the dancer need a
change of emotional state in order to perform, and would in fact be
rendered less effective by one. This, I suggest, is also true of the actor.

g. Synthesis Compositions

The culmination of performer preparation is the composition of

short, individual performances composed of a solo physical sequence,
a solo vocal song sequence and a solo text sequence. Students create
the primary elements of their compositions using elements taken from
training. The composition is begun by the creation and accumulation
of transposed behaviour, of physical actions specifically destined for
expressive purposes. These elements are then composed into a single
physical, vocal and creative act. Finally this synthesis is fine tuned by
applying the logic of oppositions. In order to prevent tautology, for
example, cruel words can be spoken with generosity and kindness and
tragic events greeted by enthusiastic song. Every care is taken to cre-
ate situations and images whose outcome is not immediately predict-
able to the audience. As the student’s first step towards actual per-
136 The Dancing Word

formance, the synthesis composition is governed by the principles of

performer preparation and the principles of performance composition,
both of which I shall describe next.
 Chapter 4

The Principles of Performance Composition

If the global aim of performers in preparation is to learn to make

compelling actions with the body and voice in space and time, then the
overall concern of the artist responsible for composition is the ability
to put actions performed by actors’ bodies and voices into a compel-
ling structure in space and time. The leader, whether her title is direc-
tor or choreographer, is the person who sets the rules for the use of the
body and voice in the space/time of the performance. These rules
serve to translate the director’s unarticulated preoccupations into the
fictive reality experienced by the audience.
The director’s task is to create an event that will permit all of the
participants, actors and spectators, the possibility of experiencing
meaning. The final meaning of any performance rests in the subjectiv-
ity of each individual involved and yet the director’s concerns and
intuitions are decisive in orienting the general form of those final
meanings. Personal preoccupations such as specific themes, images
and concepts mean that the director will orchestrate the raw material
provided by the actors in a signature style. The initial configuration of
director and actors is unique and is further modified by the unique
character of each individual audience.
The performer’s PMPs are dismantled and reassembled by the di-
rector as a group composition. A ‘struggle’ ensues between the indi-
vidual compositions’ original structure and the new larger whole into
which they have been integrated. The integration of the multiple PMPs
into a single series of group movements must fulfill two requirements.
Firstly, the composition must remain within the bounds of the princi-
ples that were used to create its component parts. In other words, the
performers’ PMPs have all been composed in a common ‘language’
established by their training and in order to properly orchestrate them
no ‘sudden translation’ into another language can be permitted. The
principles of movement and sound that govern the individual scores
138 The Dancing Word

cannot be altered once the actors’ solo actions are integrated. Sec-
ondly, however, the assembly of the group composition must go be-
yond the simple orchestration of a group ‘dance’ and establish a
dominant point of view that leads the audience towards the area of
meaning of ultimate interest to the director.
As the composition evolves, this process of locking together yet
going beyond is repeated over and over. A delicate balance must be
maintained between the orientation of the meaning of the piece in a
specific direction and the tendency to dictate simplistic meanings to
the audience, and the performers, by skipping layers of the composi-
tion process or by proceeding through them too quickly. This pains-
taking approach requires that before a scene can make sense as a rep-
resentation of human subjects interacting, it must make sense in terms
of the trained physics of movement, sound, rhythm and music.

Two Complimentary Systems

Composition is the actualization of the relationship between the

objective limitations and abilities inherent in the body and the fictive
acts read onto the performers’ activities by the audience. In order to
maximize one’s compositional abilities, experience of the body sys-
tem prior to working with the fictive system is strongly suggested.
Indeed, unless one’s perceptive abilities have been refined through
embodied training, there are important aspects to physical action
which one simply cannot apprehend with the detail needed for the
creation of expert level work. An important rule for the aspiring direc-
tor is “if you cannot do it, you probably cannot see it”.
Unlike the body system, which has an objective location in time
and space, the fictive system is an abstraction and has no simple loca-
tion. Mastery of the body system allows the prospective director to
differentiate clearly between the form and the fiction of her work,
where the form is comprised of the actual actions of the performers
and the fiction is the effect of those actions on audience imagination.
While form can always be discussed in quantitative terms – a body
takes 3 seconds to cross the stage on a diagonal with the head turned
at 90 degrees to the torso – fiction is qualitative. Two witnesses may
have divergent interpretations of the situation evoked by the body
crossing the stage. While there are a great many forms that reliably
produce consensus interpretations, it is prudent never to take these for
 The Principles of Performance Composition 139

granted. The act of composition is primarily concerned with causes,

that is form, and only contingently concerned with effects or fiction.
It is therefore important that the artist engaged in composition re-
alize that she is working to create credible rather than realistic actions
on stage. Credibility is not established in terms of how true to life per-
formers are, but rather in terms of the intentional truthfulness that
each performer brings to her work. The conscious acknowledgement
of the arbitrary, constructed and artificial nature of all performances,
regardless of their aesthetic, is vital to the pragmatic style of concep-
tual thinking needed for composition. Eugenio Barba offers directors a
simple tool to remind themselves of the objective perspective of form.
He suggests the they imagine the work they are watching from the
perspective of very young child: “if Hamlet recites “to be or not to
be,” the “literal child” sees a man who is speaking at length, alone
without doing anything interesting” (Barba, Four Spectators 99). The
director who allows the actor to simply stand and speak takes the fic-
tion of Hamlet for granted and leaves unexamined every formal aspect
of the composition except the semantic one, unwittingly removing the
kinetic, visual and aural fields of expression upon which discursive
communication rests.
Barba’s example also allows us to differentiate between an ap-
proach that may be sufficient to normative styles of production and
one that is efficient for original creation. For example, a director con-
strained by circumstances to produce a standard rendition of Hamlet in
a short period of time might well find it expedient to bracket every
aspect of her palette except the semantic and require of her actor only
what he can already do, despite the fact that her unexamined choices
limit her agency and the aesthetic diversity and innovation of her pro-
duction. Role-playing emotions, the élan produced by the uncertainty
of an under-rehearsed performance and relying on instinct over trained
skill and the intuition that is its fruit are all sufficient to getting a per-
formance on its feet in the short-term. An approach such as The Danc-
ing Word takes the view that aesthetic diversity and innovation are
most efficiently undertaken in the contexts of sustained training and
original performance creation due to the increased likelihood that per-
formers will cultivate deeper skills and attributes and the fact that
highly formalized, original performance requires by its very nature
that all directing choices, normative or otherwise, be examined.
140 The Dancing Word

Fields of Composition

The four major fields in which composition takes place are those
of body, image, sound and sense. Although they function as a syn-
ergy in actual performance, they are best conceived of as a pyramid of
concerns that the director must address from the bottom up. Body as a
field refers to the dynamic qualities of movement being performed.
This field determines if the audience members are sitting forward or
backwards in their chairs and whether they are holding their breath in
anticipation or breathing with calm detachment. The body field is con-
cerned with how performers move rather than with the meanings sug-
gested by the pictures their movements create, which is the field of
images. The visual meanings of both the details and the whole pre-
sented on stage are received more conceptually than viscerally by the
audience. The image field appeals both to abstract aesthetics – the
bodies on stage arranged as pure shapes – and to common cultural ref-
erences – the woman cradling the body of the man suggesting a pietà.
Sound, as discussed in the previous section, is responsible for the
physical state of the audience. Pitch governs the stimulation or be-
calming of the nervous system, while volume affects spatial percep-
tion. In addition to governing the perceived size of the playing space
with lights, the director can also use acoustic light to subjectively alter
the size of the space. Low volume creates intimacy and high volume
creates size, while different timbres of sound can offer a variety of
physical sensations or acoustic touch.
The last of the compositional fields is the semantic field of lin-
guistic communication. Unlike the three previous fields, semantic
communication does not lend itself as easily to the creation of theme
and variation through the establishment and varying of patterns. The
notes of a musical phrase can be moved and varied and meaning is
created in the relationship between the original phrase and the varia-
tion. The words of a literary or dramatic text do not offer the same
flexibility and directors are much constrained by conventional usage
when attempting to create formal variations in using text. Thus they
should reward themselves with the use of language only after having
examined all of the other levels of meaning. Because of its powerful
normative functions, language can be a great source of unexamined
stage action. An attitude of questioning and scepticism should accom-
pany the director at this level, forcing her to make decisions that high-
 The Principles of Performance Composition 141

light the particular and the unknown rather than the general consensus
and the known.
The division of the composition into discrete fields permits the
avoidance of redundant signs and allows the creation of nuanced, am-
biguous meanings. If an actor’s physical score is dynamic and force-
ful, it may be redundant to have her also deliver text in a forceful and
dynamic way. Thus either the physical score must be altered to make
it gentle or the vocal score must be created using complimentary
qualities, i.e. it should be discreet and muted. If no effort is made to
create opposition between fields, the detail and singularity of the per-
formance suffers. In the above example, the audience, unsurprised by
the violent speech of a character who also moves in a violent manner,
sees her only in general and moves further away from active participa-
tion in the world of the piece. Redundancies of this sort mean that no
matter how skilled or committed the performers, the very structure
they interpret works against them. Where opposition is used skillfully,
the contrast between the different levels of the performance serves as a
lure for the audience’s attention, disconnecting the piece from norma-
tive signs and conventions. That said, generating an arbitrary dialecti-
cal tension between levels is insufficient in and of itself. While it will
create appropriate formal qualities, it is not sufficiently flexible a prin-
ciple to allow the director enough room to orient the final meaning of
the performance. The notion that opposites are in fact tendencies in a
continuum is a vital one, permitting the director to view her creation in
its entirety, rather than from the perspective of individual oppositions
between two given fields.

Elements of Composition: Tasks, Stunts and Constraints

The basic building blocks used by the director to construct a per-

formance are PMPs. While the quality of the PMPs can be increas-
ingly assured by individual performers as their training progresses, the
integration of many PMPs into a common matrix is typically the sole
responsibility of the director, not because of her genius or virtue, but
because of her position outside of the action as the “first spectator” of
the work in creation. The liaisons and joinery between PMPs and the
means by which they are constructed can be looked at in terms of
tasks, stunts and constraints.
142 The Dancing Word

Tasks are means of accomplishing composition and are the main

source of actual performance material. For example, I often assign my
acting students the task of learning to perform postures taken from
images of classical sculptures. They then have to build actions to link
these poses to render the series of static images into a dynamic se-
quence of physical actions. In order to make the resulting sequences
more sophisticated, I ask each participant to add locomotion, trajec-
tory and timing changes, as well as repetition. After each task is inte-
grated, I determine the next one based on a combination of the emerg-
ing theme, the movement idiosyncrasies and my storehouse of previ-
ous composition experiences.
I also assign writing tasks based on my response to the physical
sequence and my understanding of the theme of each participant’s
eventual performance. In a past workshop, I asked one participant to
write a text describing as factually and unsentimentally as possible her
earliest memory of going on a trip. My eventual goal was to have her
speak the text while executing her choreographic sequence that re-
vealed a woman washing her hair in the shower, only to be distracted
by what appears to be a bee. As more and more of her attention is
taken up by the insect she gradually lowers herself to a seated position
and gazes out in slow alarm. My hope was that the resulting montage
would present the world of a character as her daily life is taken over
by the preoccupations of her memories. As her shower is increasingly
interrupted our perspective shifts from a scene representing a woman
in a shower to one presenting the inner life of a character in the grip of
a powerful memory. As a counterpoint to the events presented by the
choreography, her unsentimental narration of a childhood memory
would serve to add suspense and depth to the eventual performance.
Stunts are elements of performer virtuosity that are developed in
training. Stunts include everything from obvious acrobatic movement
skill and singing ability to more subtle attributes such as partner re-
sponsiveness, awareness and complicity. These last examples are
clearly very advanced stunts and cannot be reduced to a single instan-
tiation in the way an acrobatic or musical feat can. I include them in
the category of stunts nevertheless because they are the principal de-
fining feature of ensemble theatre and grow directly out of group prac-
tice over time. In order to use a stunt in a performance, the director
must have performers who are trained and already capable of virtuosic
action.
 The Principles of Performance Composition 143

Constraints are often the glue that holds the material created by
tasks and stunts together. A constraint is a simple limit that has a
global effect on the performer. A constraint such as keeping their
heads level at a constant distance from the ground or taking strides the
length of which increases by one inch per step can create fascinating
levels of engagement and intention in performers’ work by the appli-
cation of a relatively simple injunction. When working with actors
whom one does not have the luxury of training and when there is little
time for extended task-based composition work, constraints are excel-
lent ways of giving presence, shape and intensity to a performance.

Elements of Composition: Geometry and Trajectories

All performance spaces, regardless of the geometric figure

formed by their peripheries can be graphed in terms of the cardinal
and diagonal lines that proceed from their centres. Strictly regulating
movement in terms of these directions gives a coherent and meticu-
lous quality to stage action. The relative importance of the cardinal
cross-shaped lines depends on the placement of the audience, while
the power of the diagonal x-shaped lines is, in my experience, univer-
sal to every kind of audience configuration.
With a frontal audience, the north-south cardinal line becomes
very strong as it regulates the proximity of the actors to the spectators
and the relationship between fore- mid- and background. The east-
west cardinal is less powerful, due to the uniform distance between the
audience and an actor’s progress along it. In the case of an alley-
shaped performance space, the east-west line becomes very important
due to its length and the oblique relationship between a point along it
and the two banks of the audience, while the north-south line becomes
challenging due to its comparative shortness.
144 The Dancing Word

Figures 26 a, b & c: frontal, alley and arena configurations.

The diagonal represents the strongest line in the performance

space because it always combines movement in the coronal (back-and-
forth) and sagittal (side-to-side) planes. Rather than ‘spiking’ the posi-
tions of furniture or platforms as is done in normative practice, I sug-
gest that directors empower their stage-grid by taping down the cardi-
nal and diagonal lines of their rehearsal spaces from the first day of
work. Diagonals should never be permanently blocked and respecting
them has important consequences on set design and on the selection of
the objects used on stage. Mobility of stage objects is vital to the pres-
ervation of the diagonals, as is the uniform elevation of the perform-
ance space. Minimalist approaches to stage design are not an end in
and of themselves, rather it is rare that the sacrifice of the endless ex-
pressive possibilities of the diagonals is worth the short-term advan-
tages offered by cutting them with an immovable piece of furniture or
a platform. There are sophisticated solutions to the challenge pre-
sented by the principle of the clear diagonal that involve the body us-
age of the performers and the trajectories they employ.
When working with the audience on more than one side, the per-
former can create a secondary face for the audience members to whom
she is showing her back. A hand held out behind with intention, or in
the case of a very skilled performer the panels created by either shoul-
der blade or either side of the lower back, can all serve to make the
body read both backwards and forwards. Likewise the use of the
“dragon body” or lung xing from the Chinese martial art of baguaz-
hang, where the eyes, shoulders, hips and feet all point in slightly dif-
 The Principles of Performance Composition 145

ferent directions in a vertical spiral, creates a powerfully dynamic

form surrounded by interestingly shaped negative space regardless of
the audience’s position. It is to the performer’s advantage to work
with the audience on more than one side. In the alley or the arena, the
viewpoint of any given performer is likely to be coincident with that
of an audience member, allowing the performer to see more of the
image field of the performance. This results in a heightened composi-
tional sense and ability in the performer that does not manifest as
readily in frontal presentations where the audience point of view is
never available to individual players.

Figure 27: The jiugong Nine Palace Trajectory.

Creating performer trajectories based on the diagonal and cardi-

nal points is another means of ‘solving’ the clear diagonal require-
ment. The jiugong or Nine Palace trajectory used in Daoist ritual and
adopted by the martial art of baguazhang as a training tool is a very
strong composition. The Nine Palace trajectory cleverly approaches
the diagonal, postponing its use while citing and acknowledging its
presence by using shorter diagonals. The Nine Palace trajectory can be
used with a variety of audience placements, including the alley, the
arena, frontal proscenium and thrust. In addition, it may be reduced
and performed using a smaller square within the playing space, allow-
146 The Dancing Word

ing the possibility for members of an ensemble to perform on the same

large trajectory or each on a smaller quarter or sixteenth sized chess-
board.
Finally, over time I have noticed that trained and experienced
performers have the ability to drag the grid, meaning that they can
subjectively create the impression that the center of the stage is wher-
ever they are positioned. In this case an important aspect of the com-
position becomes the management of the juxtaposition between indi-
vidual performers’ power and the objective dimensions and geometry
of the performance.

Operations of Composition

The fundamental choice faced by the author of a composition at

any moment in its creation is to either repeat the last action or change
to a different one. The change/repeat binary is abstract, general and
reductive in the extreme but these very features make it an important
operation to recall when confronting the complex, minute details of
which a performance is composed. This binary breaks down into five
objective operations of montage, which include repetition and four
specific types of change of form and behaviour in space/time. Repeti-
tion can be applied to patterns of physical shape, to trajectories in
space, to text and to music. Distortion can be applied to the execution
of movement and sound by varying, for example resistance and level.
Discontinuity is created by the rapid juxtaposition of different ele-
ments. For example two texts offering different perspectives on a sin-
gle event can be performed in alternation by several different per-
formers. If the texts are not spoken consistently by the same performer
the discontinuity produced solicits increased attention and interpreta-
tion on the part of the audience. Fragmentation is created by empha-
sizing gaps between actions, gaps that are inherent in the constructed
nature of the performance’s PMPs. Emphasizing the moments be-
tween the fundamental building blocks of the work in a self-conscious
manner is akin to pointing out the leaded joinery in a stained glass
window. Fragmentation offers the possibility of a fruitful feedback
loop between the form of a piece and our collective experience of the
complexity of contemporary life. Recombination is a form of soft
change wherein elements from different PMPs are brought together to
 The Principles of Performance Composition 147

produce an effect of variety and novelty that preserves the coherence

of the tone of the entire piece.
The five objective manipulations of the PMPs of a performance
are correlates of five fictive operations used by the director to evoke
meanings specific to the theme and content of the performance. These
are the actions of creating, destroying, concealing, revealing and
sustaining. Whereas the objects upon which the first five operations
act are the PMPs of the performers, this second series of operations
acts upon the more ambiguous possible meaning of those PMPs.
Theatricality is the art of transformation and the five fictive opera-
tions facilitate coherent yet fantastical change. Take for example the
staging of the following story, invented to illustrate this aspect of
composition: A family, a husband, wife and two children, sits around
a table eating a meal. They must undertake a journey by sea. Their
boat is destroyed in a storm. They all survive, except for the mother.
They gather for her funeral. Her spirit takes leave of them as they are
gathered around her and heads towards a door suggesting the next life,
however, she is seen to return and support them as they continue their
lives without her.
x Fragment 1: The four performers sit around a rectangular
wooden table on four wooden chairs. They each have an
enamelled cup and plate, and there is an enamelled bowl and
jug on the table as well. The jug is full of water. The
conversation reveals their imminent journey by sea. The
director’s action is to ‘create’ and ‘sustain.’
x Fragment 2a: The performers transform the table into a boat
by flipping it so that its legs stick straight up. They arrange the
chairs to suggest the decks, prow and stern. The director’s ac-
tion is to ‘destroy’ and ‘create,’ with the emphasis on the crea-
tion of the new configuration.
x Fragment 2b: The performers enact the wreck of the ship, us-
ing the water from the jug and the various enamelled dishes as
percussion instruments. The director’s action again is to ‘de-
stroy’ and ‘create’ with the emphasis on the destruction of the
ship image.
x Fragment 3: The performers flip the table back onto its legs
this time in a different orientation. One performer lies upon
the table and the others gather on one side. Chairs have been
placed to suggest rows. The text suggests a funeral. The direc-
148 The Dancing Word

tor’s action is to ‘destroy’ and ‘create,’ with the emphasis on

the creation of the funeral image.
x Fragment 4: The performer playing the corpse rises during the
conversation or singing of the others and sets the table up so
that the short side is resting on the ground and the flat rectan-
gular surface of it suggests a door. The other performers,
while seemingly oblivious to the change, rearrange them-
selves as though to see her off as she passes through the door.
The director’s action is to ‘sustain’ the funeral image while
simultaneously ‘concealing the performer playing the de-
ceased mother.
x Fragment 5: The three remaining performers sit once again at
the table, repeating the ‘meal’ behaviour of fragment 1, with-
out the ‘mother.’ The director’s action is to ‘create’ the recog-
nizable original image of the meal, while ‘sustaining’ the dis-
appearance of the mother.
x Fragment 5a: The ‘mother’ reappears, standing behind each of
the other performers in turn, literally supporting and doubling
their actions, an unseen benign presence. The director’s action
is to ‘sustain’ the meal image while ‘revealing’ the performer
playing the mother.

While major scenic transformations are usually in the class of cre-

ate or destroy, the degree of finality of the transformation really de-
termines the nuance between destruction and concealment. An image,
performer, or idea re-introduced, much as it may have been distorted
or recombined with other elements, is a revelation, whereas an ele-
ment completely transformed by fragmentation and discontinuity can
be seen as either destruction or concealing, depending on the context.
While the above example illustrates the use of these operations in the
creation of staging, creating the dynamics of the interpersonal rela-
tions of the characters evoked by the performers will also use the same
fundamental tools on a more intimate and subtle level. The act of sus-
taining is often facilitated by repetition, either within a single frag-
ment, or by the reappearance of an image. In the above example, the
reappearance of the ‘meal’ at the end, with both the empty chair and
the ghostly mother, serves to establish the work’s preoccupation with
the dynamics of family relationships over such possible themes as
nautical disasters, funerals or after-life experiences.
 The Principles of Performance Composition 149

The staging also maintains the centrality of the performers. The

four performers create every change physically, using a minimum
number of transformable, portable objects. The underlying nature of
the stage as a clear vortex of transformation where images, objects,
characters, bodies and stories appear, vanish and change is never sac-
rificed to illustrative, literal furnishings, true-to-life demeanours and
slow clumsy transitions that inhibit the audience’s imagination by
providing them with a surfeit of predictable information.

Spatiotemporal Relationships

The objective and fictive operations serve to facilitate four major

spatiotemporal relationships: the relationship between two per-
formers, the relationship between two fragments, the relationship
between the beginning, middle and end of the performance and the
relationship between the audience’s experience of arrival and depar-
ture at the site of the performance.
These spatiotemporal relationships are the places where the po-
tential energy, the suspense and power of the performance, can leak
away. By viewing these relationships as moments in which the per-
formance can be reinvested with potential energy, these links that are
possible sources of weakness can be transformed into strengths.
The bulk of the work on the relationship between performers is
done in their training and preparation. The ability to respond credibly
and proportionally to one-another’s actions at touch, cultivated in the
martial PMPs and SMPs is gradually refined into the ability to respond
credibly across space, as though being touched despite distance.
The director’s role here is to redirect the vectors of the performers’
intentions so that they point at each other consistently. The tendency
to disengage from one’s partner and succumb to the solipsistic fiction
of role-playing is the most pervasive aspect of our reactive bracing
tendency. The dictum, attributed to Grotowski and Stanislavsky, that
an action is always for or against someone applies, not in a simplistic
and representational sense, but as a pragmatic guideline for ensuring
the conservation of potential, interest and suspense on stage.
The relationship between the various fragments of a performance
is an area of potential weakness. Unexamined, normative transitions
can result in the dispersal of the audience’s attention. For example, the
normative theatre convention of turning off the lights in order to move
150 The Dancing Word

the furniture around inserts a spacer into the audience’s experience of

the performance. A blackout is a conventional cue that their attention
is not required and the director must then fight to restore the level of
interest she created in the previous fragment. Every transition between
fragments should be treated as a fragment in and of itself, regardless
of its length or sophistication. This means that existing PMPs and
partner relationships must be redeployed in a novel fashion to create a
transition that annotates the performance by preserving and recom-
bining its fundamental vocabulary.
Beginnings, middles and ends, like transitions, serve to intro-
duce, recapitulate, and synthesize the images, concepts, music and
movement of the performance. These compositions serve to establish,
periodically review, and consolidate the fundamental rules coined by
the director for the bodies and voices of the performers. They are
points of initiation and orientation for the audience and are a living
lexicon of the production’s scenic writing. Beginnings, middles and
ends are major transitions and are composed of PMPs. Where they
differ from less pivotal transitions is in the requirement that they fully
engage with all of the kinetic, visual and aural vocabulary of the per-
formance in an engaging but also tacitly didactic manner. The pres-
ence of fully articulated beginnings, middles and ends is what differ-
entiates an examined performance from a skit or an anecdote which is
characterized by an incompletely articulated middle bereft of introduc-
tory and concluding actions.
The arrival and departure of the audience from the performance
venue must also be examined. While in institutional theatres governed
by public safety policies and union regulations there is little room for
manoeuvre, it is important to recognize how much of a performance’s
dynamism can be limited by such normative routines as lining up,
purchasing a ticket, finding a numbered seat and being asked to turn
off one’s cellular telephone. Modifying how audience members enter
a space, how they are greeted and how they leave (we often pay to get
into a theatre – perhaps one could have the audience pay to get out!)
are means by which the performance can differentiate itself from pre-
vious experiences and demand more of the spectators’ attention and
imagination.
 The Principles of Performance Composition 151

Nine Traps of Composition

Philosopher Robert E. Horn suggests that there are numerous

problems that can occur when our awareness of the interconnected
nature of lived experience is diminished or absent (32). I have used
Horn’s ideas to identify 9 possible traps that will impede a director’s
awareness of the continuum or system that is the nascent performance:

x ‘Reification Trap’: thinking in terms of fixed objects, rather

than in terms of fluid processes. E.g.: a table onstage that
represents only a table is ‘dead’, while a table that also be-
comes a boat, a marriage bed or an undertaker’s slab ‘lives’.
x ‘Forever Changeless Trap’: failing to account for change as
the inevitable result of the passage of time. E.g.: change, such
as the transformation of a table mentioned above, is the de-
termining fictive characteristic of performance. A perform-
ance in which change is not consciously framed or highlighted
is ‘dead’.
x ‘Independent Self Trap’: failing to note the interconnectedness
of all subjects in any given system. E.g.: Characters as such
do not exist outside of the continuum of the performance.
Thinking in terms of discreet characters is useless in the pro-
duction of meaning, as characters have no meaning independ-
ent of their context.
x ‘Isolated Problem Trap’: failing to note the global effects of a
local problem. E.g.: A single problem of composition in one
field impacts on the entire composition of that field and
through the relationships of opposition on all of the other
fields and thus on the whole of the performance.
x ‘Single Effect Trap’: failing to perceive that a single action
has multiple effects in any given system. E.g.: The adjustment
of a single element of the composition of any given level not
only affects all of the other elements of that level, but it also
affects all of the oppositions between that level and the others
that are related to it.
x ‘Inevitable Antagonism Trap’: believing that conflict, tension
and opposition are inherent features of any given system. E.g.:
Conflict exists only where it is named as such. The tension be-
tween the personal associations that drive actors’ individual
152 The Dancing Word

scores and the context in which the director sets them ulti-
mately disappear over time as the performance is integrated.
The idea that structural antagonisms are necessary can rapidly
degenerate into the notion that personal antagonisms are ap-
propriate or even useful in the creative process.
x ‘Force Can Do It Trap’: imagining that problems can be
solved by intensity rather than by clarity. E.g.: Viewing the
actors’ individual training and performances as a competition
or a trial by ordeal with a single powerful outcome rather than
acknowledging the entirety of the process over time.
x ‘No Limits Trap’: imagining that the performance structure is
not limited by material, human or conceptual constraints. E.g.:
Attempting to wrest performances from actors which do not
conform to their experience and abilities, wasting material re-
sources on the creation of new physical objects (sets, props,
lights) rather than transforming ones that are already present,
and importing new structural principles when the creation is
already in progress, is to ignore the limits inherent in the sys-
tem. In doing so one compromises the quality of the actors’
performances, the resources of the group and ultimately the
meaning of the performance.
x ‘More is Better Trap’: believing that quality can be improved
by increasing quantity. E.g.: More intense training and re-
hearsals and more luxurious and complicated sets and lights
will not improve a project that is not working according to a
clearly articulated process and using a proven series of proce-
dures.

Expertise

The flower of an engaged, observant directing practice is the cul-

tivation of the expert gaze. The attribute aspect of the expert gaze is
the capacity to receive a performance as a complex assemblage of dif-
ferentiated kinetic, imagistic, aural and semantic patterns while retain-
ing one’s experience of it as an embodied, aesthetic and emotional
experience. The skill aspect is the ability to articulate one’s heightened
perceptions and unique judgments to one’s collaborators.
A means of cultivating these traits is to watch performances with
sophisticated styles of scenic writing many, many times each, in tan-
 The Principles of Performance Composition 153

dem with pursuing an embodied performance practice based on PMPs.

My personal experience was that my practical training in Chinese
martial arts and Western classical music allowed me the possibility of
perceiving the stages and structures of the theatre and dance perform-
ances I saw during my apprenticeship. As my martial arts and musical
practices matured, so did my ability to differentiate and describe the
forms I saw on stage.
The expert gaze can also be looked at in terms of a director’s
ability to facilitate wit and depth in her collaborators.
Wit refers to the finished performance’s contextual relevance and
has everything to do with the immediate milieu in which the perform-
ance takes place. An example of wit is Jerzy Grotowski’s use of reli-
gious texts, Polish Romantic literature and Communist tracts in his
1964 production Akropolis. While the texts all seemingly praised the
fundaments of Polish culture, Grotowski’s actors delivered them in an
ironic and brutal fashion. In the paranoid and alienated environment of
communist Poland in the 1960’s this directorial choice was a way of
criticizing the dominant regime and of taking a stand.
In music and the visual arts one finds works that are entirely de-
pendent on wit. Sculptor Marcel Duchamp’s Ready Made (1916), an
industrially produced toilet exhibited in a high-art museum, was a sig-
nificant comment on the way in which the art-world functioned and on
the relationship between the artist, the work, the presenter and the
public. John Cage’s “4’33’’ (1952), which is four minutes and thirty-
three seconds of silence ‘performed’ by an immobile pianist, was a
similar case in the field of music. The meaning of both works is se-
verely compromised without an understanding of the context in which
they were created. They remain their authors’ most historically sig-
nificant works, if not their most expressive ones. Context coupled with
content determines wit.
Depth refers to a performance’s mature treatment of the constant
presence of death in human experience. The play of creation, destruc-
tion, concealing and revealing stimulate to varying degrees our anxi-
ety in the face of change. It will perhaps be greeted with post-modern
scepticism, but my experience is that the liminal character of a per-
formance of actualized depth can confront us with the inevitability of
our own change and decline in a manner that, instead of reinforcing
our reactive bracing, subverts it into a more steady and open stance.
Attributions of depth are deeply personal and their subjective charac-
154 The Dancing Word

ter limits the possibility of concrete examples. Works that stand out
for me include Thomas Leabhart’s A Simple Thing (Montréal, 1999),
Kazuo Ohno’s performance Kachofugestsu (Québec City, 1996) and
the Odin Teatret’s Kaosmos (Montréal, 1995). In all of these works I
felt that the reality of mortality and change was addressed with clarity
that held to a rare middle ground between optimistic fantasy and pes-
simistic nihilism.
A final vital element of expertise is the ability to solicit and ex-
ploit the counsel of wise colleagues and collaborators. The attribution
of the role of expert counsel requires care. While much is made of
soliciting audience responses following work-in-progress presenta-
tions, my experience is that until an observer has had the opportunity
to see a work several times, his comments will only reflect his own
preoccupations and tell the director about the commentator rather than
the performance. An expert counsellor is someone who has pre-
existing sympathy for the project and the director’s work, who can
attend multiple rehearsals and who ideally has a wide experience as a
spectator. The challenge of the expert counsel is one of transparency;
while he must be articulate and observant, he must also refrain from
bringing his own artistic agenda to his commentary and suggestions.
The selected advisor should be in possession of an expert gaze that is
filtered by an attitude of equanimity when compared to the excitement
and decisive commitment of the director. Employing an expert coun-
sel is a means of taking advantage of the strengths of another point of
view by concentrating all external input in a single collaborator who
can speak from a position of having deeply considered the work.
While the director has much to gain from a dialogue with an ap-
pointed expert, the comments of other colleagues can be very useful.
When a critical comment about my directing elicits no reactive brac-
ing response in me, I am quite confident it reflects the critic’s own
preoccupations rather than an unexamined aspect of my work. When a
comment makes me wince, I realize I’d better have a look at my di-
recting! It seems that comments are more useful when they touch on
form rather than fiction: while working on a recent performance, I in-
vited a fellow director to observe a partial run-through. He commented
on what he felt was a dramaturgical problem that prevented the crea-
tion of sufficient sexual tension between two characters who were
brother and sister. I simply acknowledged to myself that I am not as
preoccupied with the dynamics of taboo sexual relationships as my
 The Principles of Performance Composition 155

colleague is and moved on. He also observed that the execution of the
PMPs by the performers did not look effortless and credible and that
there was a self-consciously mannerist flavour to the performance.
This comment elicited a little defensive ‘tug’ in my stomach and I re-
alized that we still needed to consciously address the performers’ un-
derstanding of where their PMPs fit into the whole and simply re-
hearse their actions more intensively.

Summary

x Fundamental Systems:
o Body System (objective)
o Fictive System (subjective)
x Binaries:
o Form/Fiction
o Real/Credible
o Truth/Truthfulness
o Efficient/Sufficient
x Fields of Composition:
o Body (kinaesthetic)
o Image (visual)
o Sound (aural)
o Sense (semantic)
x Elements of Composition:
o Tasks
o Stunts
o Constraints
o Geometry
o Trajectory
x Fundamental Actions of Composition:
o Repeat
o Change
x Objective Operations (montage):
o Repetition
o Distortion
o Discontinuity
o Fragmentation
o Recombination
x Fictive Operations:
156 The Dancing Word

o Create
o Destroy
o Conceal
o Reveal
o Sustain
x Spatiotemporal Relationships:
o Between performers
o Between fragments of the performance (annotation)
o Between beginning, middle and end of the perform-
ance (introduce, recapitulate, synthesize)
o Between arrival and departure of audience
x Nine Traps of Composition:
o ‘Reification Trap’
o ‘Forever Changeless Trap’
o ‘Independent Self Trap’
o ‘Isolated Problem Trap’
o ‘Single Effect Trap’
o ‘Inevitable Antagonism Trap’
o ‘Force Can Do It Trap’
o ‘No Limits Trap’
o ‘More is Better Trap’
x Expertise:
o Expert Gaze
o Wit and Depth
o Expert Counsel

Conclusion

In this section I have introduced the fundamental principles that

structure the work of composition. While this pragmatic list is quite
short, the combination of the principles presented offers the director
both the advantage of precision analysis and the challenge of sophisti-
cation and complexity. The combination of such binaries as space/
time and change/repeat and the correlate objective/fictive operations
can yield exponentially large descriptors that directors can use either
to generate compositional tasks for themselves or to analyze work that
they have already created. To compliment the structural descriptions
of both performer preparation and performance composition, in the
 The Principles of Performance Composition 157

next section I will offer a more phenomenological discussion of indi-

vidual PMPs in training and creation.
 Chapter 5

The Practice of Performer Preparation

and Performance Composition

In this section I will describe and comment on the use of PMPs

and SMPs in performer preparation and performance creation. The
examples are drawn from the codified and traditional PMPs of tradi-
tional Chinese martial arts, from SMPs used in martial arts partner
training and from an original, contemporary PMP created with per-
formance training in mind.

Classical PMP

The PMP that formed the core of my personal training from

2003-2005 is the wudang taiyi wuxing quan. This long name indicates
both the literal and metaphorical origins of the form. It comes from a
school of martial arts that once existed on Mount Wudang in the prov-
ince of Hubei, China. Wudang was formerly a major centre of Daoist
religion. Taiyi is the Chinese name for the brightest star in the constel-
lation of Draco, which is the home of numerous Daoist deities. Wux-
ing denotes the five phases of metal, wood, water, fire and earth,
which were held by Daoists to be the principle states of matter and
energy in the universe (An 4). The full name of the form is thus “the
five phase manifestation of the deity who lives in the constellation of
Draco form of Wudang mountain martial arts!” (4). Historically, Dao-
ists were highly educated religious specialists whose every creation
bore the stamp of their erudition. It is as though expert and intellectual
western boxers, wrestlers and fencers were to name their practices
after such cosmological principles as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity
or Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity.
The movements of this form are inspired by the turtle and the
snake, which are the totemic animals of Zhen Wu, a Daoist deity and
patron of martial arts. The description of movement through the use of
animal imagery is very common in traditional Chinese martial arts.
160 The Dancing Word

Here the turtle stands for strength, steady advance and longevity and
the snake for suppleness, mobility and circular movement. The form
was created at the end of 15th century by a man named Zhang Shoux-
ing. To my knowledge it is the oldest taolu I practice and while I have
a partial list of the people involved in its transmission, I do not know
the exact dates of their births and deaths.
 The Practice of Preparation and Composition 161

Figures 28 a-p: The wudang taiyi wuxing quan performed by the author.
(Photos by Laura Astwood).

This PMP is a series of empty energy vectors, meaning that its

movements do not have a preset or absolute meaning. They can be
viewed creatively, in terms of a global approach and technically, as
solutions for specific situations.
From a technical viewpoint, this form is a series of self-defence
methods placed one after another for easy memorization. Each styl-
ized move has been created in response to a hypothetical situation:
against a hook punch to the torso do this; against a shoot or grab to the
legs do that; against multiple assailants do these. This “martial-arts-
form-as-multi-head-screwdriver” approach is ultimately limiting be-
cause it makes one differentiate in a situation that calls for integration
– “hook punch, use uh … flat head – no wait the Phillips head! Ouch!”
Forms are great repositories of techniques but not in a simple way
characterized by one-to-one-correspondence. When practicing free
fighting with a partner, I don’t choose my response based on a typo-
logical analysis of the attack and a subsequent selection of the appro-
priate response; that’s simply too slow. The technical fighting applica-
tions of this form are not central to our discussion today, but its crea-
tive role in training is.
The global approach of form training is similar to that of tradi-
tional Chinese medicine. It doesn’t treat the surface symptoms but
rather it addresses the underlying causes of the illness. This form has
been a key part of my training because it has habituated me to moving
in a certain way. Rather than simply providing me with series of fight-
ing tactics, it initiates me into the experience of a flow of rhythm and
162 The Dancing Word

momentum. It uses very specific rules to ensure a general effect: when

I encounter forward pressure I will gain a superior position by riding
it, turning and reversing it, either directly or by outflanking my oppo-
nent. The practice of moving in this way has served to teach me to be
creative in the moment and allowed me to make up an ‘answer’ to my
situation while improvising. The skill trained by this form is the abil-
ity to demonstrate continuous, creative movement in the face of in-
creasingly powerful random stress.

Transmission of
wudang taiyi wuxing
quan
1. Zhang Shouxing
(founder)
16. Li Helin
17. Jin Zitao
18. Zhao Jiang Ying
19. Gabrielle
Boudreau
20. Wong Sui Meing

When playing the various games of tuishou with a partner, two

factors are the source of my losing control of my balance and my men-
tal equilibrium: my own error in positioning and an unexpected pro-
posal from my duifang or training partner. If I know, in an experiential
way, how to recover from these two problems and not become dis-
tracted, I’ll at least know what’s happening to me. I might be losing
the training game of tuishou, but the more conscious I remain the
more likely I am to recover my equilibrium. Subjectively, my experi-
ence of success in manifesting continuous, creative movement in
tuishou is directly proportional to the quality of attention I can bring to
the work.
Traditionally, attention is cultivated in three broad phases that are
described using a formula that has its origins in Daoist religious medi-
tative practice. The practice of forms takes the student through three
phases: “lian jing hua qi, lian qi hua shen, lian shen huan xu”
(Despeux 64-76). Essentially this means “refining the life force by
training the physical body, then refining the mind by training the life
force. The refined mind then becomes one with the universe.” This is
 The Practice of Preparation and Composition 163

very terse language loaded with religious and cultural references. In

working on the wudang taiyi wuxing quan I applied my own interpre-
tation to the traditional phrase.
The first phase of training is concerned with biomechanical1 effi-
ciency through the integration of movement, breathing and alignment.
Integration can be described using the example of a simple weight
transfer that uses alternating leg pressure to move the hips from side to
side. If, as I increase the force of the movement in order to be able to
move about, I synchronize my exhalation with my release of force, the
closing of my body squeezes the air out and the bounce of opening
creates a vacuum that sucks air in all on its own. My movement cre-
ates a loaded position: I can bounce into action and I have enough air
to do so, even if that action involves moving and vocalizing. Further,
I’ve done so with a posture that is sustainable, that encourages me to
bounce and will not work against the inherent structure of my body. I
can stop and I still have all the potential energy I need to resume my
movement. The integration of movement, breathing and alignment
makes me more interesting to watch. It creates the beginning of pres-
ence or shi. Our sensitivity to presence or shi and the increase in our
ability to project it is refined at the next level of training.
The second phase of training in Chinese martial arts has to do
with becoming consciously aware of the life-force or qi. In the context
of my work, I looked at qi as a mode of perception, specifically the
felt, or kinesthetic sense (Siff 70). This sense is in fact the combina-
tion of a whole series of senses and their underlying physical mecha-
nisms that provide information about balance, temperature, internal
pressure, bioelectrical fields, our own position and our reaction to all
of these. The physical structures that support the felt sense include the
vestibular system of the inner ear, which governs balance (Madaule 49
and Siff 70) and the Golgi tendons, found where muscles join tendons
to bone, that allow us to know the relative positions of our limbs in

1
Readers may be familiar with the “biomechanical” actor training exercises devel-
oped by Vsevolod Meyerhold in Communist Russia in the early 1920s. The names
“biomechanical” and “biomechanics” are a part of the fundamental vocabulary of
exercise science, where they refer to “the leverage characteristics of the body, the
relative strengths of the different muscle groups controlling the movement of each
limb and the neuromuscular efficiency which orchestrates all movement patterns in
the body” (Siff 12). Meyerhold borrowed these technical sounding names to cater to
the materialist philosophy of his times (Gordon 89-92).
164 The Dancing Word

space without having to look at them (Siff 70). The subtle awareness
provided by the felt sense compliments the knowledge of efficient
biomechanics acquired at the previous level. This extended and inter-
nal mode of perception is a very personal phenomenological correlate
of biomechanical efficiency, an internal perspective that permits
greater nuance, faster articulation and deeper understanding of the per-
former’s own lived body-mind.
The third phase of training is concerned with awareness of the
relationship between the body and consciousness. The stop, or more
accurately, the pause in movement is the gateway to this third phase.
Returning to our example of the side-to-side weight transfer, we see
that several things happen during the pause. First, I exhale into my
weight transfer, then I throw on the brakes and let my tissues store
elastic energy by sinking into my hip joint. A few microseconds later I
stop breathing. I finish exhaling and I don’t inhale right away. My
body becomes very still as does my mind. For another few microsec-
onds I notice only awareness of awareness. No thought content at all.
Suddenly my next action appears. Regardless of whether I’m impro-
vising or executing a known action, the utter newness of this feeling of
arrival is the same. Then, stimulated by the vacuum in my lungs, my
body automatically inhales and I move towards the new action that has
just arrived.
I propose that this pause is the beginning of a unitive experience.
In the sudden quiet, the contents of consciousness seem to reorganize
themselves spontaneously and reveal a creative and appropriate action.
The phrase “lian shen huan xu” that describes the third phase of train-
ing in classical Chinese can be literally translated as “returning the
spirit to the void.” I would like to suggest that this expression refers to
the creativity experienced in the quiet of the pause, wherein one be-
comes aware of one’s own awareness.

Partner SMP

The following is a demonstration of an improvised flowing game

from the Chinese martial arts called roushou, or soft hands. Moving
slowly and with little momentum, each partner tries to strike, immobi-
lize or throw the other. The players move slowly and tease each other
with combative improvisations. Roushou is a collaborative training
exercise and is neither competitive sparring nor actual fighting. Rou-
 The Practice of Preparation and Composition 165

shou players seek to drop each other to the floor, to project the other
away or to flip the other completely off her feet. Over time, force and
speed can be increased incrementally while keeping the players safely
below their threshold of reactive bracing. Next to the classically pre-
cise taolu, which seek to acquaint the practitioner with ideal and pre-
cise body alignments, the movements of roushou seem freeform and
almost sloppy. This is because they are done with minimum tension
and because each participant’s ideal response is modified by the feed-
back he receives from his partner, creating an improvised sequence of
idiosyncratic partner movement. The purpose of roushou is to condi-
tion its players to have a continuous, direct experience of their present
situation. As such it is a vital part of performer preparation, as the
credibility of onstage relationships depends on each performer’s abil-
ity to make tiny spatiotemporal adjustments to her set stage action,
based on her feedback and feedforward reading of her fellow players.
166 The Dancing Word

Figures 29 a-h: the author playing roushou with fellow taijiquan exponent Randall
Lightbown (Photos by Laura Astwood).

Original PMP

In the spring of 2002 I began to direct my partner Laura Astwood

in a solo performance. The rough version of the piece was composed
of a PMP that she had created herself and a text that I had written for
her. The text, entitled A Landfall is as follows:

A man has washed up in the lagoon. Mud covered and tangled

in weeds, he lies in a fever. The wild boars have trampled him but
leave him alone now, smelling the malaria. She must drag him,
raving, upland, to her home. There is a spring there and the air on
the lower slopes of the mountain is clean.
She has never nursed a stranger. People from the nearby village
come to her for remedies. She sets broken bones, binds cuts and
scrapes. Once she had to amputate an infected forearm. She is
more comfortable with wounds than diseases.
As she carries him, he raves, saying that his men have been
turned into pigs by some strange sorcery. She assumes that he has
The Practice of Preparation and Composition 167

been shipwrecked. She knows that no one else has washed up in

the marshes along the shore.
She makes him a bed after cleaning him of the sea mud, and
goes to make tea. He tries to attack her. He says he will kill her
unless she restores his companions to human shape. He is too
weak to stand, and collapses into fevered sleep.
As the fevers flow through him, she sees him change. One mo-
ment he is withered, the next he burns with youth. When the fever
peaks it is as though he contains too much life, his skin is insuffi-
cient to contain the heat. When his temperature drops, his glow
fades – he is dry and beige without its upward surge. She watches
the sickness carve two beings from one body.
She soon discovers that he wanders in his sleep. She finds him
at the window, in the vegetable garden, once even as far as the
rocky pool of the spring. She cannot be with him all the time, and
the fear is always with her that he will wander into the swamp, or
chill and drown in the spring.
She is strangely indifferent to that first violence from him. It
was the disease, not the man that cursed and scratched at her. She
will not hold this against him.
Every month she goes down to the village to exchange her herbs
for items she cannot make herself. She returns with a kettle or a
knife. She must make one of these trips soon after his arrival.
He is, of course, not in bed when she returns. He is not in the
garden, not by the spring. She runs along the wooded paths, call-
ing out to him. It is already growing dark.
She has not entered the swamp since he arrived. Then, his
strangeness to the place, his fever, his presence so near death, had
protected her. Carrying him, she had felt immune to his illness.
Alone, the swamp is once again dangerous. All she can think of
are the hidden mud holes and the mosquitoes. There are lights in
the swamp at night. Globes of flickering marsh gas heralded by a
buzzing chorus of frogs.
168 The Dancing Word

The text was excerpted from a larger writing task I set myself. I
re-told the story of Odysseus and Circe from her perspective; I re-
moved all the supernatural and overtly mythological elements and I
forbade myself from naming any of the characters in the story. I did
this because I wanted to stress the immediate impact of the facts of the
tale and not lead my audience off into their individual associations to
the theme of The Odyssey. In following these rules, I found myself
moving further and further away from Homer’s tale and closer to feel-
ings and images and events from my own life and from other stories I
knew. The fantasy of fiction began to merge with the fantasy of mem-
ory. The migration of ideas between stories and memories and memo-
ries of stories meant that the elements of the story began to float and
enter into new relationships.
This floating meant that elements of a classic and easily recog-
nizable story became enigmatic. While the Circe story and this new
one had in common a man who arrives and who leaves and a woman
who welcomes and who is left, the floating allowed the new story to
diverge from the older one while continuing to quietly evoke it. When
I realized that this was happening, I strove to bump up the enigma side
of the meaning/enigma equation. This meant introducing the elements
of a story just as one would place rocks in a brook in order to ford it.
Too many rocks placed one next to another will block the brook. Too
few and one will not be able to cross. When each rock is separate from
the next one, the flowing brook touches and holds each rock com-
pletely as a single unit. And yet there are enough of them for one to
step on, one at a time, in order to cross. The flow of facts, of events in
the story, is the same. Each one is a separate entity in the flow of the
audience’s awareness, and yet together they become a sufficient, if
simple, bridge across the water.
In creating our performance fragment we developed three kinds
of relationship between the text and the movement. There is the
causal relationship; that is, a statement is followed by an action or an
action provokes a statement. There is the simultaneous relationship
where the text and the action occur in tandem, and there is the over-
lapping relationship where the endings and beginnings of physical
and vocal actions are sewn together.
I used these three compositional relationships to create two kinds
of theatricality: transposition and open evocation. Theatrical trans-
position allows any given sign on the stage to represent something
 The Practice of Preparation and Composition 169

without literally illustrating it. As we saw in the previous section an

actor can, through her actions, transform a wooden kitchen table into a
tomb; turned upside-down the table can become a boat, and when
turned on its edge, it becomes a door. These transpositions create signs
whose meaning is largely closed. Each member of the audience who
witnesses the table transformed into a boat will agree that the scene in
question concerns a boat. The actors’ action with the table and the di-
rector’s staging of those actions are theatrical, in that they do not em-
ploy an actual boat, but they are representational in the sense that eve-
ryone present interprets those actions along the same lines.
170 The Dancing Word

Figures 30 a-j: Images from Laura Astwood’s Performance of A Landfall.

(Photos by Daniel Mroz)

In contrast, open evocation provides the audience with signs that

are ambiguous and that can be interpreted by audience members in
individual and idiosyncratic ways. As a category of expressive acts,
open evocation exists in tension or counterpoint to acts that are illu-
sionist or representational. The a postiori explanation of the genesis of
such signs is problematic. The words that I might choose to describe
them do not necessarily shed light on what is fundamentally an expe-
riential phenomenon. A desire to create the ambiguous and the evoca-
tive and to seat its meaning principally in its interpretation by each
individual audience member is hard to unpack and explain in greater
detail. In order to shed light on the practical genesis of open evoca-
 The Practice of Preparation and Composition 171

tion, I shall describe the process through which the actions of Laura’s
PMP were directed.
The actions in Laura’s performance that appear in the pictures
above have been put together to be suggestive and evocative rather
than directly illustrative. In order to accomplish this we worked
mainly with the sewing together or overlapping procedure described in
Chapter 4. We replaced stops where kinetic energy is used up with
pauses where it can be refreshed. The causal and the simultaneous ap-
proaches could then be used as punctuation, to provide variety and a
framework for semantic meaning.
My decisions about what constitutes a good director’s edit were
governed by tacit or felt sensitivity to Laura’s experience in perform-
ance. Laura and I have in common the Pre-Expressive Training that
we learned from Richard Fowler. We also worked to adapt some of
the partner sensitivity exercises of Chinese martial arts to our own
purposes. Because of the common embodied language, we have come
to share through our sustained training, I was able to use my kines-
thetic interpretation of Laura’s actions to choose where I put the
stones.
To elaborate on the earlier metaphor of stones placed in a flowing
brook, there are two primary kinds of stones. There are stones that are
pauses in Laura’s physical actions: these snapshots are still, but the
internal tensions in Laura’s body have stored elastic energy. They al-
low me as director, and eventually the audience, to read her action and
to understand that it will continue shortly. There are also stones that
are pauses in Laura’s delivery of her text. Just as the pauses in Laura’s
movements must remain full of potential energy so must the vocal
pauses retain their élan. How much physical energy is expressed and
how much of a conclusion we hear in Laura’s voice with every pause
is determined not only by the complex and intuitive negotiations be-
tween her actions and interpretations of the meaning of the text, but by
my response to her actions and my interpretations of the meaning of
the text.
172 The Dancing Word

Summary

x Composition – relationships between text and movement:

o Causal
o Simultaneous
o Overlapping
x Composition – strategies for creating meaning:
o Transposition
o Open Evocation

Conclusion

In this section I have sought to personalize and nuance the prin-

ciples of composition and performer preparation using concrete exam-
ples from my own practice. In the next section I will present the use of
The Dancing Word in directly pedagogical contexts in order to pro-
vide concrete examples of how its embodied approach to sustained
training has been applied.
 Chapter 6

Performance Pedagogy in Practice

Since I began to use Chinese martial arts in my theatrical per-

formance work in the mid 1990s, I have noticed a pattern of ebb and
flow in the stability of the approach I am calling the Dancing Word.
Both the preparation of performers and the subsequent creation of per-
formances alternate between convergent and divergent ways of
working1. The divergent phase is triggered by diversity on the part of
my collaborators in terms of their previous training and their aesthetic
preferences and by a resulting heterogeneity of material. The experi-
ence of creating in the divergent phase is both exciting and harrowing
due to the lack of precedent and procedures and due to the potentially
opposite aesthetic preferences of the participants. One Reed Theatre
Ensemble’s performance Nor The Cavaliers Who Come With Us2,
which I co-created and directed in 2005-6, is an example of this. The
performers created a very diverse body of material inspired by the
subject of the conquest of Mexico. The eventual performance em-
braced 16th century sea-shanties, Mexica (Aztec) myth, historical
characters, physical comedy, original music performed on found in-
struments and contemporary autobiographical writings by one of the
actors. The styles of performance included heightened and evocative
physicality, send ups of Anglo-Saxon ‘classical’ acting, illusionist re-
alism and direct address. Due to the divergence of each of these lines
of aesthetic possibility, I was challenged as a director to exploit the
essential life offered by each of the proposals. My efforts went into

1
I owe this particular usage of these terms to my friend Menez Chapleau.
2
Nor The Cavaliers Who Come With Us, devised by One Reed Theatre Ensemble,
performed by Frank Cox-O’Connell, Megan Flynn, Marc Tellez and Evan Webber
and directed by Daniel Mroz, had its Canadian Premiere at the 2006 Summerworks
Festival in Toronto. The performance was remounted in April of 2007 at the Studio
Theatre of The Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama of the University of Toronto,
where it ran for three weeks. The performance took 736 hours to create and approxi-
mately 1600 spectators have seen the performance’s 33 showings.
174 The Dancing Word

creating credible juxtapositions that preserved the integrity of the

fragments but also created a larger coherence in the work.
I’ve come to look on the convergent phase as a moment of
knowledge consolidation. Procedures are known, training follows es-
tablished paths and while the aesthetic innovation is less blatant than
in the divergent phase, the challenges I experience as a preparation
leader and director are felt more in the small details than in the over-
view of the project. In the convergent phase I feel confident describing
my work in terms of clear principles and discrete procedures, teaching
the fundamentals of composition and performance to my collaborators
and offering workshops to students and fellow practitioners. In the
divergent phase, I rarely feel like I know anything at all as the need to
innovate aesthetically and to avoid repeating my previous work makes
familiar and cherished approaches seems dull and suspiciously norma-
tive.
While the idea of refining and facilitating practical craft under-
pins both phases, the divergent phase strikes me as a ‘research and
development’ phase compared to the ‘consolidate and master’ ten-
dency of the convergent phase. Due to its more systematized nature,
the convergent phase is usually also the more pedagogical one and the
experiences of divergence and seeking are followed by ones of sharing
of discovered procedures. In the fall of 2007 I directed a production
for the Department of Theatre of the University of Ottawa where I am
a professor. The piece was called Ariadne, a retelling of the story of
the Labyrinth of Knossos written by American playwright Michael
Geither at my request. For this production I was able to select a small
group of dedicated students whom I had already worked with in both
workshop and classroom contexts. Given the recent experiences of
creating Nor the Cavaliers, I was able to lead and direct in a very or-
ganized and pedagogically clear fashion, consolidating principles and
procedures for myself and introducing the students to the complete
process of craft, from performer preparation to a full run of eleven
performances, a rarity in student theatre3.

3
Ariadne by Michael Geither was conceived and directed by Daniel Mroz with light-
ing designed by Margaret Coderre-Williams and costumes designed by Angela Haché.
Ariadne was premiered by the Drama Guild of the Department of Theatre of the Uni-
versity of Ottawa in the Academic Hall Theatre running from October 24th until No-
vember 3rd 2007 for a total of 11 performances. It was seen by approximately 600
people.
 Performance Pedagogy in Practice 175

Looking back over a decade of projects and performances, the

fundamental dyad of ‘change or repeat’ seems to apply, with some
productions establishing stronger foundations and others reaching out
into less certain territories.
In order to offer concrete examples of the different aspects of
performer preparation and performance composition I propose to de-
scribe the process of preparation and creation, borrowing examples
from different projects along the way. I will thus be able to offer de-
scriptions from a wide variety of contexts both divergent and conver-
gent that include professional and student training workshops, work
with my company One Reed Theatre Ensemble and teaching with my
undergraduate students at the University of Ottawa.

Solo Training in Performer Preparation and Pedagogy

From the late 1990s until the winter of 2007 the cornerstone of
my approach to performer preparation was a PMP drawn from the
training syllabus of cailifoquan. The form is called wulunma4 or the
series of the five wheel stances. The set is part of the jibengong or
foundation training of cailifoquan and is named due to the five circu-
lar movements of the dantien its performance implies: back and forth,
up and down, side to side and the two diagonal oblique angles.
As a foundation exercise, the wulunma concentrates on training
the coherence of the lower body with the torso and does not contain
any movements for the hands, which remain at the waist throughout. I
use this PMP for many technical reasons that I will elaborate below.
Mainly however, I teach it because it was the first martial exercise I
learned, I have practiced it literally thousands of times and it is a se-
ries that I have at my fingertips and one I feel totally confident about
leading5.
Wulunma is a PMP that traditionally begins cailifoquan training.
In the system I studied there are three such sets that serve to acquaint
the student with the fundamental postures and weight transfers of the

4
For the sake of standardization, I am using Mandarin terms to describe this exercise,
which in Cantonese is called nglunma.
5
I’ve mostly ‘retired’ the wulunma from my theatre work as of 2008 and have begun
to use the jibengong exercises of chen taijiquan in its place. Although I’ve practiced
chen taijiquan for three years, it is only now that I feel experienced enough to begin to
teach it.
176 The Dancing Word

art. A thorough practice of wulunma involves approximately forty

minutes of uninterrupted training and is far more demanding than the
accompanying illustrations would lead one to imagine. Wulunma is a
series of transitions between five fundamental positions that include
two overt kicking movements. Several of the positions are passed
through more than once and the set is initially differentiated into eight
phases:
x mabu (horse riding stance)
x hengdangbu (side bow stance)
x mabu (horse riding stance)
x xubu (empty stance)
x chabu (cross behind step)
x goutitui (low hook kick)
x dulibu (one legged stance)
x tantui (spring kick)6

Prior to the practice of this linked form, each transition is ab-

stracted and trained with multiple repetitions. The transition from
mabu to hengdangbu is practiced one hundred times in each direction,
left and right. This transition is the fundamental weight transfer
movement of cailifoquan and is accorded pride of place in training.
The transition from xubu to chabu is then practiced for three sets of
ten repetitions on each side. The movement from chabu to the low
hook kick goutitui is practiced for two sets of ten on each side and
then further practiced as a series of three movements that include the
one-legged position of dulibu. This is done both as three separate
movements and as two movements where the hook and the raising of
the knee flow together. Finally, the tantui, the spring kick or snap kick
is practiced first as a slow leg extension and then as a very rapid flick-
ing motion. Tantui is referred to as a shadowless kick because its ex-
tension does not cause any telltale shifting in the exponent’s upper
body. In the system of cailifoquan I learned, the kick is also called
fusing tektao, or moon-shadow kicking method in Cantonese. The tan-
tui is accompanied by the martial cry or fa sheng of “tdik” that vi-
brates along the same ninety-degree upward vector as the kick itself,
causing a light vibration at the top of the exponent’s head, the place

6
The Cantonese names are, in order: seipingma, dingjima, seipingma, diuma, taoma,
nautui, duplukma and fusing tektao.
 Performance Pedagogy in Practice 177

where the force vector created would terminate in an opponent. Ab-

dominal breathing through the nose is used throughout the form.

Figures 31a-h: Wulunma a - mabu, b - hengdangbu, c -mabu, d- xubu, e - chabu, f -

goutitui,g - dulibu, h – mabu. (Photos by Laura Astwood)
178 The Dancing Word

Once the individual transitions have been drilled, the entire wu-
lunma form is practiced sequentially. The form is practiced in eight
parts and is executed ten times on each side. It is then practiced in
three parts with all of the movements from the first mabu to the chabu
being the first part, the hook and the spring kick being the second and
the return to the initial mabu being the third. Finally, the entire form is
practiced as a single flowing sequence. At each phase ten repetitions
are performed on each side. At the end of the last dynamic sequence,
the students return to the mabu posture and remain there for three to
five minutes. The number of repetitions can of course be varied as the
instructor sees fit. The form is usually led by the instructor who, in
addition to participating, counts the various movements and sets the
tempo and rhythm of training. I have also experimented with using
Chinese gongs, drums and woodblocks, substituting musical cues for
verbal ones.
Wulunma is a PMP that synergistically covers many of the needs
of performer preparation. The practice of wulunma trains the attributes
of enduring explosive leg strength, lower body coordination, lower
limb muscle flexibility, hip and ankle mobility and cardiovascular en-
durance. While challenging at first, the requirement of breathing
through the nose results in the ability to work calmly and precisely
under significant physical strain. Wulunma also teaches the skill of
efficient weight transfer that substantially augments the exponent’s
perceived momentum through the use of precise motions of the pow-
erful muscles of the thighs.
Considered in terms of the four filters, the wulunma set offers the
following advantages. The two most obvious filters addressed are
structure and resistance. The very clear postural demands of the set
inculcate habits of movement and repose that actualize the ability to
remain in omni-poise while hardwiring the body for the control of po-
tential energy. The demands the form places on strength, endurance,
coordination, concentration and breath integration are both challeng-
ing and mutually supportive. Less apparent but equally present is the
set’s utility in terms of interactivity and refinement. Practiced in uni-
son by a group of performers, the form serves to consolidate the
group’s resolve and focus, providing a concrete way of galvanizing
morale. It is difficult for the individual neuroses and preoccupations
that often limit performers’ abilities to connect with each other to sur-
vive the intensity of the wulunma. Likewise, the felt presence of one’s
 Performance Pedagogy in Practice 179

training partners is an asset – the more tired and mentally fragmented

performers are supported by their more alert and energized colleagues
and the entire group rides on the wave of the exercise’s rhythm and
precise demands.
Once the fundamental structures of wulunma have been mastered
and can be performed without an excess of sweat and strain, the set
becomes an opportunity for refinement. The practitioners can concen-
trate on the proprioceptive details of the form, re-differentiating their
experience of it into smaller, more internally experienced units. Barely
perceptible losses of alignment, catches in breathing and other small
ticks of movement that appear under stress can be isolated and gradu-
ally eliminated. The form thus serves as a diagnostic tool for the prac-
titioners’ actual state of psychosomatic awareness and integration,
moving from a goal-oriented perspective that privileges self-mastery
to an in-the-moment view of internal awareness.
Beginning in the winter of 2006, the wulunma served as an in-
cremental approach to the work on Ariadne. In December of 2006,
Joël Beddows the artistic director of the Ottawa-based Franco-
Ontarian theatre company Théâtre La Catapulte, invited me to give a
professional master-class as part of his ongoing series of professional
development opportunities for local French-speaking theatre artists.
The workshop, entitled “La Parole qui danse” (The Dancing Word)
was an opportunity for local performers to engage in rigorous techni-
cal training while learning an embodied approach to performance
creation. The workshop lasted for a week and ran from 9:00am to
5:00pm every day. Following a period of quiet in the studio during
which each participant could warm up as she saw fit, each day began
with the group practice of wulunma, which was followed by various
partner exercises. The afternoons were devoted to work on voice, song
and the composition of individual PMPs.
While most of the participants were local professionals, a small
number of Francophone students from the Department of Theatre of
the University of Ottawa also took part. One of these, Danielle Le-
saux-Farmer, subsequently took my advanced acting course ‘Physical
Theatre/Théâtre Corporelle’ at the Department in the winter of 2007; I
then asked her to take part in the production of Ariadne, in which she
eventually played the title role. The Physical Theatre/Théâtre Cor-
porelle course was structured very much along the same lines as the
180 The Dancing Word

Parole qui danse workshop and involved solo training, partner inter-
action, song and composition.
When the time came to begin to work on Ariadne, the preceding
workshop and the course had allowed a number of students to become
acquainted with my working methods. Of the five performers, Dan-
ielle Lesaux-Farmer had taken both the workshop and the class (85
hours), Gabrielle Lalonde had taken the workshop (40 hours) and Col-
leen Durham had taken the class (45 hours). This had allowed me to
observe their aptitude for physically challenging work, their ability to
sing in multi-part harmonies a cappella and their overall openness to
working in a manner that was both unusual and extremely demanding
when compared to the normative theatre work typically experienced
by undergraduate students. The remaining cast members, Artem Barry
and Brandon Groves, were selected for their engaged attitude, physical
aptitude and vocal ability.
Rehearsals of Ariadne took place four nights a week, from
6:00pm until 9:30pm, for approximately seven weeks, or 120 hours of
preparation for a 45-minute final performance. The first hour of each
session was devoted to wunlunma and interactive exercises. We then
worked on individual compositions that eventually became scenes,
and on the songs to be used in the performance. We finished with fo-
cused work on the text. All performers, apprentice director Stephanie
Demas, and stage manager Mallorie Casey were present at all rehears-
als. I also booked extra time outside of the evening hours on an ad hoc
basis to work individually with the performers to refine certain textual
and acting choices. The nightly schedule changed over time, but work
always began with the wulunma and the interactive exercises, which
offered the best possible approximation of sustained training in the
university context and galvanized and focused the performers for the
subsequent rehearsal. Wulunma and the interactive exercises then be-
came the nightly pre-show warm up for the performers giving them a
strong élan for the each evening’s two performances of the piece.

Interactive Training in Performer Preparation and Pedagogy

Following the wulunma, the next anchor of performer preparation

is a series of interactive exercises that are derived from taijiquan
tuishou training. The larger goal of the exercises is to facilitate per-
formers’ abilities to move at a distance from each other with the same
 Performance Pedagogy in Practice 181

credibility as when they are responding to the touch of their partners.

Each individual interactive exercise is practiced in isolation in order to
build fluency. Once a number of such exercises have been learned, the
training partners can improvise by randomly switching from one to
another. To further add complexity, the exercises are done while mov-
ing around the training space and eventually, spontaneous switching
of partners can be added.
The following exercises represent an example of training pro-
gressions from static touch to moving responses across space, and
from isolated pairs of partners to a constantly shifting and interacting
ensemble of performers.
The yield/restore exercise is taken from the introductory tui shou
of tang peng taijiquan. Partners take turns pushing on each other’s
shoulders, hips, chest and belly. The recipient of a push moulds her
body in such a way as to diffuse the incoming force and then restores
her structure to its original position. The yield/restore exercise can
eventually be performed blindfolded or with the eyes closed, with the
receiver being pushed from behind as well as from the front and with
the receiver electing to take one or two steps in response to large
amounts of pressure.
182 The Dancing Word

Figures 32a-d: Performers Danielle LeSaux-Farmer (left) and Colleen Durham

(right) practicing the contact version of the yield/restore exercise.
(Photos by Laura Astwood)

The non-contact version of the yield/restore exercise omits the

use of the arms. If one partner leans forwards, the other leans back as
though in direct contact with her partner’s torso. If one twists, the
other follows simultaneously and exactly. Of vital importance is the
total synchronization of the partners. The response should be as pro-
portional as possible, creating the illusion that both performers had the
impulse to move simultaneously. Stepping, both in a circle and in and
out, can then be added. Gradually the distance between the partners
can be increased from about a hand-span to several body-lengths. The
partners can challenge each other by spontaneously switching who is
leading the exercise without breaking the illusion of continuity and
simultaneity.
 Performance Pedagogy in Practice 183

Figure 33a-d: Colleen Durham and the author demonstrate the non-contact version of
the yield/restore exercise. (Photos by Laura Astwood)

The moulding/contouring exercise builds on the yield/restore drill

and adds further variables and complexity. Unlike the yield/restore, is
it not a formal part of any tuishou curriculum, but teachers frequently
use less formal exercises of this nature to introduce standing grappling
and sparring. The first partner provides an open frame for the other,
standing with legs and arms spread wide enough to provide ample
amounts of negative space around her body. The second partner
moves deep into the negative space, grabbing on with her hands and
positioning herself in such a way that with one movement she could
project, flip or strike her partner. She then pauses and her partner is
allowed one step to reposition herself advantageously as if to project,
flip or strike back. The exercise is practiced slowly and with pausing
184 The Dancing Word

in order to allow the two partners to become used to each other and to
learn how to navigate around each other’s bodies. As they become
more familiar with each other they can flow more smoothly by remov-
ing the pause and eventually behave more proactively by anticipating
the incoming movement of their partners.

Figures 34a-e: Colleen Durham and the author practicing the mold-
ing/contouring exercise. (Photos by Laura Astwood)

In the non-contact version, the partners make a frame as before,

but they enter each other’s negative space from a few hand-spans
away. The initial pause becomes crucial in order that each partner be
able to read the other and move into position as though still in direct
contact with the other. As fluency increases, the distance is widened
and with it the implied size of the negative space.
 Performance Pedagogy in Practice 185

Figures 35a-b: The author and Danielle LeSaux-Farmer work on the non-contact
version of the molding/contouring exercise while Colleen Durham looks on.
(photos by Laura Astwood)

Once an acceptable level of fluency is achieved in these exer-

cises, they can be brought together in the gates and bridges exercise.
All of the performers in the ensemble walk briskly and silently around
their rehearsal space. They strive to keep their gaits light and their
heads level. The head tends to bounce when one walks inattentively
and Chen Zhonghua often admonishes students to ”lock the head”
while in motion. The performers’ task is to pass through the constantly
moving gates created by the negative space between any two other
bodies. The performers are always aiming to cross the imaginary lines
that link their other colleagues. Once fluency at moving through the
gates is established, the performers create bridges between each other
when they pass close enough to each other to touch, allowing them to
initiate any of the touch response exercises. They may continue for a
time together, disengage on impulse or be compelled to change part-
ners by the presence of a new bridge. Eventually, bridging can be ac-
complished without touch and can rely solely on visual cues and non-
contact responses across space. Given the constantly spiralling move-
ment of the other performers, this exercise quickly challenges training
partners to maintain their communication while being distracted by the
bodies passing between them.
The gates and bridges exercise is a template to which many vari-
ables can be added. In addition to the response exercises described
186 The Dancing Word

above, performers can use their performance PMPs and their texts to
interact with each other. Other variables such as level changes, en-
trances and exits or changes in speed can be added spontaneously by
the training leader in order to stimulate the ensemble.
The exercises just described were used during the creation and
performance of Ariadne. During both the Parole qui danse workshop
and the undergraduate acting course, a greater variety of touch re-
sponse drills were practiced. In addition to the methods described
above, I also took the time to teach rudimentary pai da or ‘slapping
and stricking’ techniques. These exercises allow exponents to use the
natural elasticity and mobility of the body to take increasingly strong
punches and kicks to the torso without bracing reactively. Thus in ad-
dition to moulding the body using leverage as described above, the
students also learned to mould the body through the use of impellent
force. Given the time constraints, the actual amount of force used by
the group was very small; nevertheless the drills gave the participants
access to a concrete physical vocabulary with actions whose validity
was immediately and viscerally established.
Pai da was revisited during the work on Ariadne in the composi-
tion of the first intimate scene between Theseus and Ariadne. The pai
da drill that had been used as part of training was used to create a stunt
where Theseus stood upon the prone body of Ariadne, seemingly
crushing and dominating her. Due to the pai da training however,
Danielle Lesaux-Farmer, playing Ariadne, was able to speak clearly
and assertively despite her seeming vulnerability. The feat of a smaller
woman taking the full weight of a larger woman on her stomach while
continuing to speak calmly created a multi-layered opposition.
 Performance Pedagogy in Practice 187

Figures 36 and 37: On the right, the author helping Gabrielle Lalonde (Theseus) to
train Danielle Lesaux-Farmer (Ariadne) in pai da. On the left, Theseus stands
on Ariadne as they speak of their imminent marriage.
(Photos by Stephanie Demas and Laura Astwood)
188 The Dancing Word

Duet Composition in Nor The Cavaliers Who Come With Us

One Reed Theatre Ensemble is a group that I co-founded with

four graduating students of the English Acting Section of the National
Theatre School of Canada. I met the four future actors of One Reed,
Frank Cox-O’Connell, Megan Flynn, Marc Tellez and Evan Webber,
when they were students of former Primus Theatre members Ker
Wells and Karin Randoja in the fall of 2003 at the National Theatre
School. Upon their graduation in 2005, we began to work together and
created what would become One Reed Theatre (named after the year
in the Mexica calendar when the Europeans arrived in North Amer-
ica), and our first performance, Nor The Cavaliers Who Come With
Us.
I will describe the creation of a particular duet scene with refer-
ence to the four fields of composition I outlined earlier. I will begin
with the semantic field7, as this was where the first pieces of material
for this performance were created. The One Reed performers had been
inspired by the conquest of Mexico before we even sat down to plan a
possible collaboration. One of the many fruits of their long-term pre-
occupation was that when we began to work, the actors had already
written a substantial number of texts. One text in particular, written by
actor Marc Tellez who would eventually play Hernan Cortes, became
a focal point for me. The original text was a fragment of poetry
wherein Cortes experiences his Conquistador’s ambition as a radiant
and beautiful thing. The original text went as follows:

Now in this dream I am standing on a beach beyond the world.

I am holding a pair of scales and I am weighing the world.
And in this dream the rosy-fingered dawn wakes me.
The jealous one. The future.
I will hunt her with my mouth,
And I will force my dream to meet the world.
And my dream will say:
‘Hola. Soy un marinero bravo, el mitad-barco, el mitad-huracán,

7
This is perhaps an appropriate moment to share my misgivings about having to call
the theatre I make ‘devised’, ‘physical’ or ‘movement’ theatre in order to situate it
within my immediate professional ecology. Normative practice in English Canada
divides work into ‘text-based’ and ‘movement pieces,’ designations that do not prop-
erly account for a full spectrum approach to contemporary theatre such as the one
described here that is every bit as conscious and careful with text as more the main-
stream approaches claim to be.
 Performance Pedagogy in Practice 189

silencioso como una mariposa, impaciente como un halcón’

And I will say:
You are not a riddle that scares away my love.
You are not a solution that puts to sleep my wisdom.
You are for my taking, and I want you no matter what.

I asked Marc to add some of the lines, in translation, of an origi-

nal song in Spanish that I had composed for the production. The sec-
tion we added was:

If any king opens his wings over me, I, without obligation or ne-
cessity—
I will open my wings and my petals, not quite in bloom—
To unveil this love8.

With this text I hoped to nuance the popular image of the driven
and rapacious Conquistadors with a warmly and deeply felt, if tragi-
cally misguided, sense of sacred fatality and mission. Parts of this text
also appear at the end of the production, sung in Spanish, as Cortes
realizes the endlessness of the appetite for power and then as the last
lines of the performance where it suggests that enthusiasm for both
conquest and emancipation might stem from the same impulse. Added
to Cortes’ text, it produced the following:

Now in this dream I am standing on a beach beyond the world. I

am
holding a pair of scales
and I am weighing the world.
And in this dream the rosy-fingered dawn wakes me. The jealous
one. The
future. I will hunt her with my mouth—
And I will force my dream to meet the world.
And my dream will say—
Hola. Soy un marinero bravo, el mitad-barco, el mitad-huracán,
silencioso como una mariposa, impaciente como un halcón.
And the world, she will say—
If any king opens his wings over me, I, without obligation or ne-
cessity—
I will open my wings and my petals, not quite in bloom—
To unveil this love.

8
In Spanish: ‘Si un rey en exilio abriera sus alas sobre el mundo, el mundo, sin estar
obligado y sin tener necesidad, se abriría por sí mismo, alas y pétalos aún no
florecidos, revelando lo que es el amor.’
190 The Dancing Word

And I will say—

Ssshhhhh…
You are not a riddle that scares away my love.
You are not a solution that puts to sleep my wisdom.
You are for my taking, and I want you no matter what.

Pleased that we had a fragment of text that gave inner depth and
an unconventional perspective to the otherwise two-dimensional and
archetypal role of Cortes, I sought for a way to include this in a larger
semantic unit that would advance the story of the conquest. I asked
performer Megan Flynn, who would eventually play Malintzin, a slave
given to Cortes on his arrival in Mexico who became both his lover
and his translator, to write a text describing the couples’ first night
together. I hoped that this would provide depth and perspective to her
character and establish their relationship in the story. However, this
time I asked that the new text be inter-cut with the existing one to cre-
ate a kind of dialogue between Cortes and Malintzin. The text is as
follows:

Malintzin: Tonight, long night ended, he finally shut his eyes. The glow of
the city burning behind us put out at last—

Cortes: Now in this dream I am standing on a beach beyond the world. I

am holding a pair of scales and I am weighing the world.

Malintzin: The fire burns on. His eyes finally quiet. Cool to my lips.

Cortes: And in this dream the rosy-fingered dawn wakes me. The jealous
one. The future. I will hunt her with my mouth—

Malintzin: He sleeps like the dead—

Cortes: And I will force my dream to meet the world.

Malintzin: I’ll tell you a secret.

Cortes: And my dream will say—

Malintzin: Every night he whispers the same dreamy Spanish—

Cortes: Hola. Soy un marinero bravo, el mitad-barco, el mitad-huracán,

silencioso como una mariposa, impaciente como un halcón.

Malintzin: Hello. I am a bold sailor, half-ship, half-hurricane, silent as a but-

terfly, impatient as a falcon.
 Performance Pedagogy in Practice 191

Cortes: And the world, she will say—

Malintzin: And when I touch him, I can hardly feel him—

Cortes: If any king opens his wings over me, I, without obligation or ne-
cessity—

Malintzin: He is already a ghost.

Cortes: I will open my wings and my petals, not quite in bloom—

Malintzin: But there is a map of his body on my fingertips—

Cortes: To unveil this love. And I will say—

Malintzin: I press them to my lips to taste the oceans he has traveled across.

Cortes: Ssshhhhh…

Malintzin: Sand that smells of breadcrumbs.

Cortes: You are not a riddle that scares away my love.

Malintzin: Salt and wood-smoke.

Cortes: You are not a solution that puts to sleep my wisdom.

Malintzin: And what am I to you?

Cortes: You are for my taking, and I want you no matter what.

Malintzin: This I can hold onto. But tomorrow when we break camp, I will
walk among the slaves.

From here I moved to working on the kinetic and imagistic fields.

I asked both performers to create original PMPs using as their inspira-
tion for each action a card from the Mexican game la loteria, which
can be described as combination of bingo and charades, and which
was apparently used to pass subversive communications during the
revolutionary period between 1910 and 1920. Each performer was
randomly dealt a hand of cards from a loteria deck that performer
Evan Webber had brought back from Mexico and, based on their ten
cards, they each created a set, repeatable PMP.
192 The Dancing Word

Figures 38a-e: Some examples of loteria cards. (Photos by Daniel Mroz)

As both Megan Flynn and Marc Tellez brought strong composi-

tional skills to the process, my contribution to the initial creation of
their individual PMPs was limited to creating clear pauses and force
vectors as well as making sure that any extreme movements were sus-
tainable and did not risk damaging the actors’ joints. Once they had
completed their compositions, I asked them to prepare an étude in
which they would first combine their choreographies into a duet and
then speak their texts while performing that duet. Once combined, I
worked with the performers to create causality and suspense in their
actions. In the moment where Cortes says “you are for my taking and I
want you no matter what,” we created a stunt where Marc swept his
arm powerfully through the air, passing through the spot where
Megan’s torso had been moments before. The partner sensitivity exer-
cises and much rehearsal made this a beautiful, frightening moment.
 Performance Pedagogy in Practice 193

Figure 39: One Reed in rehearsal, summer 2005. Marc Tellez (Cortes) looks towards
the future like the prow of a galleon, while Megan Flynn (Malintzin) avoids his
powerful blow. An alert Frank Cox-O’Connell improvises music in the back-
ground. (Photo by Laura Astwood)

Further adjustments came as we integrated this fragment into the

larger structure of the performance. I helped the performers re-
choreograph the duet to exploit the diagonal of the square, arena-style
playing space and I was delighted by the music that multi-
instrumentalist actor Frank Cox-O’Connell spontaneously proposed to
create a candlelit, intimate atmosphere in the room. The straightfor-
ward “just the facts” style of delivery adopted by Flynn contrasted
with the tone of rapture adopted by Tellez. The final piece was a dense
but clear scene that presented the fact of Cortes and Malintzin’s union,
the ambiguity of her role as both slave and lover, Cortes’ ease with
that ambiguity, and ultimately couched the entire presentation in a
poetic scene that brought the story of the conquest from the coast of
the gulf of Mexico towards the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlán.
194 The Dancing Word

Figure 40: One Reed dress rehearsal, Léonard Beaulne Studio, University of Ottawa,
September 2006. Marc Tellez as an ecstatic Cortes and Megan Flynn as the lu-
cid and pragmatic Malintzin. (Photo by Laura Astwood)

Integrated into the rest of the performance and including the text
describing the staging, the final scene read as follows:

Cortes and Malintzin, who, along with the rest of the ensemble, have
been playing a crew of dancing, drunken sailors, freeze. Cortes moves
quickly toward her. She backs away as far as she can. He approaches
her slowly. He extends a hand as if to touch her, but his hand sweeps
over her. He sleeps. She breathes deeply.

Malintzin: Tonight, long night ended, he finally shut his eyes. The glow of
the city burning behind us put out at last—

Cortes: Now in this dream I am standing on a beach beyond the world. I

am holding a pair of scales and I am weighing the world.
Malintzin: The fire burns on. His eyes finally quiet. Cool to my lips.
Cortes: And in this dream the rosy-fingered dawn wakes me. The jealous
one. The future. I will hunt her with my mouth—
 Performance Pedagogy in Practice 195

They begin to dance together again.

Malintzin: He sleeps like the dead—

Cortes: And I will force my dream to meet the world.

Malintzin: I’ll tell you a secret.

Cortes: And my dream will say—

Malintzin: Every night he whispers the same dreamy Spanish—

Cortes: Hola. Soy un marinero bravo, el mitad-barco, el mitad-huracán,

silencioso como una mariposa, impaciente como un halcón.

Malintzin: Hello. I am a bold sailor, half-ship, half-hurricane, silent as a but-

terfly, impatient as a falcon.

Cortes: And the world, she will say—

Malintzin: And when I touch him, I can hardly feel him—

Cortes: If any king opens his wings over me, I, without obligation or ne-
cessity—

Malintzin: He is already a ghost.

Cortes: I will open my wings and my petals, not quite in bloom—

Malintzin: But there is a map of his body on my fingertips—

Cortes: To unveil this love. And I will say—

Malintzin: I press them to my lips to taste the oceans he has traveled across.

Cortes: Ssshhhhh…

Malintzin: Sand that smells of breadcrumbs.

Cortes: You are not a riddle that scares away my love.

Malintzin: Salt and wood-smoke.

Cortes: You are not a solution that puts to sleep my wisdom.

Malintzin: And what am I to you?

Cortes: You are for my taking, and I want you no matter what.
196 The Dancing Word

Malintzin: This I can hold onto. But tomorrow when we break camp, I will
walk among the slaves.

He sees her differently for a moment. He seizes the bottle that has been waiting off. He
uncorks it and pushes it into her hands. He walks slowly, crossing the stage while he
speaks. She follows with her eyes lowered, leaving a thin trail of sand that spills from
the mouth of the bottle as they cross.

Cortes: Five leagues or more in from the coast, there is a great line of
mountains, one of which is so enormous that its peak cannot be
seen through the clouds. And beyond, the Indians say, is the
greatest city in the world, and more gold than even you, your most
divine majesty, have ever dreamt of.

As they finish their cross, they turn suddenly and hold as if in a family portrait: Cor-
tes, stern faced; Malintzin holding the empty bottle like a baby in her arms. A moment.
Cortes marches off as the Tourist enters. He carries a new suitcase. And he bumps
into Malintzin.

Malintzin: Señor.

She exits.

Group Composition in Ariadne

Ariadne was staged in an alley configuration with a central

square playing area and secondary zones at each short end of the cor-
ridor. There were three rows of audience seating on each side of the
alley and the entire performance space fit on the stage of the Aca-
demic Hall Theatre, a cavernous and baroque chamber, formerly a
natural history museum, to which bleachers, seats and a red carpet
have been added. Approximately forty audience members could watch
the play at any time, although in the second week of the run we con-
sistently allowed additional audience members to sit in the first row of
the theatre seats proper. Because the performance was quite short, we
did it twice each evening.
One of my main preoccupations with this project was the interro-
gation of received wisdom. From a very early age I recall being as-
sured by adults of the powerful importance of mythology, of classical
stories and of literary forms. As a young adult I was inspired by the
work of Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell who posit a
universal mythic substrate shared by all humans. I later became ex-
tremely disillusioned by their circular argumentation, tautological
 Performance Pedagogy in Practice 197

proposals and lack of contextual rigor. As a professor who is occa-

sionally responsible for teaching introductory undergraduate courses,
publishers routinely send me sample copies of theatre textbooks that
describe theatre’s origins in myth, ritual and religion, theories that
seem to rest on the same sort of self-confirming theses as those of-
fered up by Eliade and company. By retelling the myth of Knossos, I
hoped to offer my students a practical example of questioning re-
ceived wisdom, not by rejecting the material per se, but by imagining
other possibilities than the ones normalized by centuries of Western
high culture and education.
In addition, I have noticed that theatrical projects, especially
when unmoored from normative aesthetics, tend to be artistic transfer-
ences of the actual situation of those who make them. In order to ac-
knowledge that the current situation of the students was the socially
schizophrenic smothering-yet-alienating experience that studying in a
small university theatre department is, I created a framing device for
Ariadne that set the performance in an old-fashioned private school.
At the beginning of the performance, as the audience enters, it is “re-
cess”: four of the performers, dressed in outfits that suggest school
uniforms, are playing an over-sized game of cat’s cradle, squealing
enthusiastically through success and failure. Artem Barry, the actor
who later plays both the Minotaur and Daedalus, the architect of the
labyrinth, appears dressed as a schoolmaster and, freezing the boister-
ous pre-show game with a snap of his fingers, begins the performance
by telling the story of the Labyrinth of Knossos in excruciating and
pedantic detail. The rest of the performance is presented as the stu-
dents’ subversion of their lesson, an alternate vision of events freed
from the weight of archetypical and monolithic assumptions.
One of the central premises of Geither’s Ariadne is that the mon-
strous Minotaur is in fact a gentle, rather ethereal young man. Much of
the tension in the play is created by the impossible conversations be-
tween Ariadne and the Minotaur, the half-brother she has never met. A
crucial moment in the production is the meeting of Theseus and the
Minotaur in the labyrinth. The Minotaur determines that the only way
to prevent the violent and nihilistic Theseus from leaving the laby-
rinth, destroying Knossos and forcing himself on Ariadne is to allow
himself to be killed. Outside, Ariadne has cut the string and with the
Minotaur’s death, Theseus himself becomes the monster in the laby-
rinth.
198 The Dancing Word

On the first day of rehearsals I assigned Danielle LeSaux-Farmer

and Brandon Groves the task of composing a series of actions to-
gether, holding a long loop of twine. By holding it with both hands
and by keeping it taught at all times, the performers were able to cre-
ate the illusion of a floating rectangular plane. This device created a
highly mobile architectural volume that suggested the endlessly re-
peating and shifting corridors of the labyrinth. Initially the two per-
formers worked on simply figuring out how to move around the cardi-
nal and diagonal points of the performance square while keeping the
twine/rectangle alive and taught. As they became more fluid, I re-
quested that they add level changes to their displacements, and rota-
tions to their arm positions, which made the rectangle warp and twist
creating a wide variety of negative spaces.

Figure 41: Ariadne in rehearsal. Brandon Groves, the author, Gabrielle Lalonde,
Artem Barry and Danielle LeSaux-Farmer coordinate the labyrinth scene. Note
the cardinal and diagonal lines and the sub-grid of the playing space have been
clearly marked. (Photo by Stephanie Demas)

While the rectangle PMP was being elaborated, I also taught the
entire ensemble the Nine Palace stepping pattern, which we practiced
daily on the grid of the performance square. I asked performers Artem
Barry (Minotaur) and Gabrielle Lalonde (Theseus) to play the laby-
 Performance Pedagogy in Practice 199

rinth scene while walking the pattern, starting from opposite corners,
with Theseus one step behind the Minotaur. This created an effect of
pursuit and evasion as well as suggesting a life-sized game of chess.
We then combined this with the manipulation of the twine/rectangle;
while the Minotaur and Theseus wandered through the labyrinth like
human chess pieces, LeSaux-Farmer and Groves, who played Ariadne
and her father Minos, manipulated the form of that labyrinth from the
edges of the playing space. I added to their work the task of always
keeping Theseus within the rectangle of the thread while allowing the
Minotaur to move about it freely.
With the image field of this scene established by the staging, we
began to concentrate on the other fields. Kinetically, I sought to keep
the vectors between Theseus and the Minotaur taught and pointed,
despite the fact that the staging called for relatively quotidian body
positions and simple walking. Semantically I focused on the clarity of
the text, feeling that the argumentation and debate it represented ought
to be articulated without any ornamentation. As a result we spent
much time working on open inflection, pitch-level change and vowel
position in order that the point, counter-point and the Minotaur’s even-
tual decision emerge in a pristine, measured and inevitable fashion.
Aurally the scene was ‘book-ended’ by a sad and beautiful song in the
nearly extinct language of Ladino, a Spanish/Hebrew hybrid spoken in
medieval times by Sephardi Jews. Playing the ghost of Ariadne’s
mother Passiphae, performer Colleen Durham stood on a table at one
end of the performance alley, looking out over the action. With the
addition of lights, her small, veiled face was made to float in mid-air
as she sang. While I am quite certain that none of my audience spoke
Ladino, the morbid text of the song, the lament of a child cooked and
consumed by his starving mother, offered Durham a compelling oppo-
sition to play as she watched her character’s child, the Minotaur, killed
by Theseus.
200 The Dancing Word

Figure 42: Ariadne in performance, from left to right: Brandon Groves (Minos), Col-
leen Durham (Passiphae), Gabrielle Lalonde (Theseus), Artem Barry (Mino-
taur) and Danielle LeSaux-Farmer (Ariadne). (Photo by Laura Astwood)

The text and staging of the resulting performance is as follows:

Theseus and the Minotaur are walking inside the labyrinth. The labyrinth is a moving
rectangle of twine manipulated by Minos and Ariadne. Theseus is constrained by it
but the Minotaur is not. The Minotaur is showing Theseus an open amulet that con-
tains a picture of his human father. Passiphae is singing a very sad song in Ladino
about a mother who has killed and eaten her child.

Theseus: This is your father?

Minotaur: It’s true. And I have a sister.

Theseus: Ariadne.

Minotaur: You know her?

Theseus: She’s going to marry me.

Minotaur: ...

Theseus: The labyrinth hasn’t yet seen a man like me.

 Performance Pedagogy in Practice 201

Minotaur: The labyrinth has seen hundreds.

Theseus: It hasn’t seen me.

Minotaur: … Tell me about Ariadne.

Theseus: There’s not much to say.

Minotaur: You’re going to marry her.

Theseus: What do you know?

Minotaur: Almost nothing. I was young when I was sent here. I remember
she was kind.

Theseus: Do you trust your memory?

Minotaur: Yes and no. I’m sure she was kind but she couldn’t be what I
imagine now.

Theseus: What’s that?

Minotaur: A god that keeps me living.

Theseus: She’s no god.

Minotaur: I’ll have to take your word, won’t I?

Theseus: She is in fact why you’ll die. She’s holding the other end of this
thread in her hands.

Pause.

Minotaur: You’re lying.

Theseus: No.

Minotaur: Then go back.

Theseus: What?

Minotaur: Go and tell her that I’m dead.

Theseus: How is that you have no desire to leave this place?

Minotaur: I’ve lived here a long time. I’ve grown attached to wandering, to
the walls. Once, at night, I happened upon the entrance. I walked a
little of the road to Cnossus but turned and came back.
202 The Dancing Word

Theseus: Why?

Minotaur: I don’t understand Cnossus.

Theseus: What’s to be understood?

Minotaur: What sort of place would have Minos for its king? What sort of
man is Minos who sends a boy into this labyrinth?

Theseus: A terrible place and a terrible man.

Minotaur: Terrible isn’t half of what they are. Minos is a monster and Cnos-
sus a labyrinth.

Theseus: When I leave here I’m going to kill him.

Minotaur: Kill Minos?

Theseus: And marry Ariadne.

Minotaur: My sister would have you?

Theseus: She won’t have a choice.

Minotaur: Then Ariadne will have her monster.

Theseus brings out the straight razor.

Minotaur: You’re going to kill me?

Theseus: Yes.

Minotaur: And that’s how your story grows.

Theseus: It’s the story of all heroes.

Minotaur: But only if they can return home.

Theseus: I have my way marked.

Minotaur: Theseus, you put a lot of trust in a thread.

Theseus: Yes.

Minotaur: And in the hands of someone you don’t know.

Theseus: Heroes can trust in that kind of thing.

 Performance Pedagogy in Practice 203

Minotaur: If that’s true then, please, kill me.

Theseus slowly cuts the air with the straight razor. The Minotaur exposes then
touches damply at his throat. Passiphae begins to sing. There is a choreographic
section here with the Minotaur slowly collapsing as Theseus unfolds and finally eats
9
the paper bull (Geither, unpublished playscript).

Conclusion

While the basic unit of the PMP as transformed and refined

through various principles and procedures may appear abstract, con-
straining and overly fastidious, I hope that the examples offered above
demonstrate just how productive such demanding abstractions, con-
straints and fastidiousness can be. In both the convergent and diver-
gent phases of this work, I have observed that remaining conscious of
the fundamental principles of composition – the differentiation be-
tween form and fiction, between real and credible acting, between
long-term efficiency and corner-cutting sufficiency – is what permits
the entire experience to become a pedagogically valid one for the par-
ticipants. When so much is unknown and a commitment to open ques-
tioning is a fundamental value, the rigor of self-examination provides
a strong pole of orientation that ultimately facilitates all of the collabo-
rators’ agency and independence. The ideas of open questioning and
rigorous self-examination open onto the question of the performer’s
consciousness, which is the subject of the next and final chapter.

9
A small bright red origami bull has been a part of the staging since the first scene
where the myth of the Minotaur’s conception - his father was allegedly a bull - is pre-
sented. A constraint that further suggested intrigue, manipulation and chess games, the
paper bull was moved to a different focal point on the stage every scene. The actors
had to be careful not to tread on it or knock it over. At the end of the performance,
Theseus now stranded in the labyrinth takes a new red origami bull from a pocket and
places it on the stage. Theseus leaves the stage and the bull is briefly caught in a cor-
ridor of fading light. The play concludes in darkness.
 Chapter 7

Martial Movement Training and Consciousness

Beyond the foundation laid by my early studies of the Suzuki

Method, an appetite for two things drew me to Richard Fowler’s ap-
proach to theatre and to the martial arts: I saw in both the real possibil-
ity of surpassing myself and of acquiring extraordinary abilities. These
initially selfish and transcendent goals began to mellow and change as
I spent more and more time at work. My appetite for the power of vir-
tuosity was reduced by the regular occurrence of ecstatic experiences
that were euphoric in the moment and also left me calmer, more per-
ceptive and more tolerant of both my own and my colleagues’ short-
comings. The reduction of appetite was neither unidirectional nor in-
cremental; sometimes the clarity of perception I experienced would
make me intolerant of the imperfections I saw around me and some-
times the calm I felt during and after training would make me slug-
gish, like a cat lazing in the sun, passive and content with its situation.
Over the last decade and a half of work I have passed through phases
characterized by transcendent goals and intolerance and ones in which
the present moment felt sufficient unto itself. I still feel this flux today
in a much more subtle form characterized by the blending of the ec-
stasy of the heightened moment of performance with its after effects in
everyday life. The high produced by training and practice contrasts
less sharply with the rest of life, and I feel its energy is spread out over
time and is available to me in a variety of circumstances and behav-
iours. The actual definitive nature of the consciousness, self or selves
that instigates and observes this flux is in my present experience inef-
fable. Language seems adequate only for anecdotal description or sys-
temic and typological categorizations.
Staying with my own experience, the change in consciousness
that I have observed as a result of my training is an increase in the
breadth, depth and sustained length of awareness, where awareness
refers to a diffuse and peripheral ability to sense multiple elements in
the field surrounding me, as both single objects and as a synergy of
206 The Dancing Word

complementary parts, and to suspend my subjective judgments about

them indefinitely. Awareness as I have experienced it and described it
is problematic both in that it resists direct measurement and because it
is the oblique result of an activity – martial movement training –
rather than its object. Typological analysis is useful here in order to
begin to articulate the ephemeral phenomenon of awareness.

Affective Combative Behaviour and Pseudo-Predatory Combative

Behaviour

Armstrong divides his general definition of human combative

behaviour into two sub-categories, Affective Combative Behaviour
and Pseudo-Predatory Combative Behaviour. The distinction between
the two is arrived at through the contrast between intra-specific and
inter-specific combat in the animal kingdom. Affective Combative
Behaviour is rooted in the aggression displayed between members of
the same species when negotiating territorial disputes, establishing
hierarchy within the group, selecting mates and so on. It is a condition
of high emotional arousal but one with little chance of actually pro-
ducing a lethal result. By contrast, Pseudo-Predatory Combative Be-
haviour is predatory behaviour observed between different species and
in the stalking, chasing and attacking of its prey by a predator. It is a
condition that displays little overt emotional arousal and yet has a very
high chance of producing a lethal outcome (Armstrong 3). Both styles
of behaviour are apparent in the intra-specific conflicts of humans.
Affective and Pseudo-Predatory Combative Behavior manifest in
distinct ways. Affective Combative Behaviour is characterized by the
presence of hormones that occasion intense activation of the autono-
mous system leading to a non-cognitive state wherein emotional re-
sponses fluctuate widely. Pseudo-Predatory Combative Behaviour is
characterized by little or no arousal and is only slightly influenced by
hormone release. It occasions only slight activation of the autonomous
system and is a primarily cognitive and intuitive non-emotional state
that remains steady over time (12).
These two types of behaviour also differ in their external expres-
sions. Affective Combative Behaviour strives to intimidate through
threatening positions, language and sounds. Intimidation is followed
by an angry attack emotionally provoked by the opponent’s insults or
flight. Such fights start and stop quickly and spontaneously and only
 Martial Movement Training and Consciousness 207

rarely result in serious injury. Pseudo-Predatory Combative Behaviour

is imperturbable, cool and decided. It uses a ready, even luring posture
to subdue the opponent. Unlike the bravado of Affective Combative
Behaviour, it demonstrates highly controlled respiratory and vocal
activity. The attack in this case is disciplined, not provoked and is ini-
tiated and carried through to conclusion with typically lethal result
(12).

Typology of Consciousness Along the Martial/Play Continuum

A four-quadrant mapping combining the poles of fighting and

performance with Affective and Pseudo-Predatory combative behav-
iour permits a comprehensive account of the diverse relationships be-
tween various aspects of martial and performance behaviour:

Affective Combative Behaviour (Hot)

Aroused Fighting Aroused Performance

Fighting Performance

Aware Fighting Aware Performance

Pseudo-Predatory Combative Behaviour (Cool)

Figure 43: The Four Quadrants of Expression of Combative Behaviour.

Using this model it becomes possible to generate four broad cate-

gories of expression:

x Aroused Fighting: an agonistic or antagonistic expres-

sion of affective combative behaviour is a case of real
aggression expressed in terms of the signs of demon-
strative aggression that characterize affective combative
behaviour.
208 The Dancing Word

x Aroused Performance: ludic expression of affective

combative behaviour is non-aggressive but is neverthe-
less expressed in terms of aggressive display.
x Aware Fighting: an agonistic or antagonistic expression
of pseudo-predatory combative behaviour is a case of
real aggression expressed in controlled and restrained
fashion.
x Aware Performance: ludic expression of pseudo-
predatory combative behaviour lacks real aggression
and is expressed in controlled and restrained fashion.

The two sub-types of performance that result from the two types
of combative behaviour are thus identified with respectively high and
low levels of emotional arousal on the parts of the players. For those
artists whose practice is a process of ontological research, I would
suggest that becoming conscious of the aware aspect of performance
and striving to differentiate it from the aroused aspect is of primary
importance.

Differentiation and Integration

My own experience of the processes of performer preparation,

martial training, teaching and directing has been characterized by a
movement from a basic state of emotional arousal and engagement to
a more observant and less emotionally volatile state. I am not saying
my experiences are now devoid of emotion, rather they are character-
ized by emotions that have been differentiated from my sense of self
to the extent that they no longer dominate it.
I would suggest that the major preoccupation of my work until
now has been with differentiation. I have become able to differentiate
awareness from arousal in terms of my own physical and mental train-
ing, in terms of various types of martial arts free-fighting practices and
in terms of the component elements of the theatrical performances I
create. I have come to believe that the performer and director’s crea-
tivity, independence and maturity stem from her ability to differentiate
the various aspects of her self and work into discrete elements whose
interaction and interdependency can then be perceived from a dis-
tance.
 Martial Movement Training and Consciousness 209

The preoccupation that I believe will determine my future work is

the process of moving from differentiation to integration. I conceive of
the process of moving from differentiation to integration as being con-
cerned with integration of control with participation. For example, I
am ultimately responsible for my own taijiquan training. While my
teacher Chen Zhonghua provides the fundamental exercises and ex-
planations, it is up to me to create a training plan and execute it. My
control of myself determines which exercises I practice, whom I ap-
proach to be my training partners and even if I choose to practice at
all. In my current, differentiated state, I have a predetermined plan and
schedule that covers all aspects from movement refinement to resis-
tance training to partner practice to meditation and qigong. This plan
is in place to allow me to remember a very large syllabus of training
exercises and choreographies and also to help me to maintain and im-
prove the level of personal preparedness required for their execution.
What I see emerging from this engagement with differentiation and
discipline is a relationship with my own process that is participatory
rather than dictatorial. Intuitive, subjective impressions that occur to
me during both training and recovery create feedback that positively
modifies my training. I also feel that the two differentiated aspects of
myself - the trainer and trainee - are being integrated into a single, lar-
ger self-impression that directs the process of taijiquan training from
within while simultaneously experiencing it in the present moment.
While this sort of intuitive (as opposed to pre-programmed) training
may sound like a minor variation or a simple excuse of laxity and dil-
letantism, the subjective experience of it is significant and decisive.
In terms of directing, the process of integrating control with par-
ticipation fascinates and puzzles me. The approach to directing that I
practice is based on impeccable preparation, on the use of montage
both planned and in the moment, and on the exacting control of the
stage action by the director. While I do not immediately see how to
alter the montage aspect of my directorial practice without compro-
mising the quality of the eventual performance, I am curious as to how
to productively resist the director’s impulse to fix and edit the actions
proposed by the performers. Certainly it seems possible to go far
deeper into the performers’ work by treating the creation of the per-
formance in the same way as one treats a practice of sustained train-
ing. Mario Biagini, Associate Director of the Workcenter of Jerzy
Grotowski and Thomas Richards, describes this process:
210 The Dancing Word

If you work in a conscious way for five years on a fragment that last four
minutes, among other things, your structure should become more detailed
each day. The structure is there so you can repeat what you have done, ap-
proach again and again a certain experience, not in order to reproduce it but
to live it anew, each day. Through repetition, the limits of the known dis-
solve and recompose themselves one step further in a territory that is un-
known to you. […] You approach it each day trying to reawaken in yourself
the awareness in action of the fact that you don’t know (164).

Biagini’s description could be used as an ideal account of a mature

relationship to martial arts practice. I believe it also recasts the theatre
director in a far more observational role, one whose leadership is
likely far subtler than the compositional responsibilities I have de-
scribed in this book. It also implies a different relationship to how
time is used. As a director, I already spend far longer than is usual de-
veloping performances. I imagine, however, that the 736 hours my
collaborators and I worked together on Nor The Cavaliers would have
yielded a very different result had my emphasis been more focussed
on ontological research through the performance itself, as Biagini de-
scribes above.
An increasing number of scholarly and popular sources present
evidence that expert-level functioning in any discipline is the result of
10,000 hours of incrementally more challenging, supervised practice
(Levitin 197). While there are surely many variables that mitigate this
quantitative assessment, I find it confirmed in my own experiences.
As I look towards my next 10,000 hours of practice, I wonder what
strategies and what perspectives might permit the integration of con-
trol and participation, for the martial artist, for the director and for the
performer?
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Chen, Z. (2005-2008).
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