Group Coins

Everyone puts the coin on the hand behind their back. The object is then to creep round the room
and steal coins from the other players. When your coin is stolen then you are out.

There are, nevertheless, times when you come into confrontation with someone else. You want to
steal, they want to steal. But we are making it more in terms of personality now, instead of material
games of stealing and taking. So, as you move in relationship with people it is an attempt to
dominate. In the way that either I make her laugh or I make her feel small, less than me, or I make
her jump, or I make her withdraw from the relationship, or, if not lose control, at least lose a sense of
her own centre. So we say: no talking, no words because words then get in the way of the action at
this point. No touch - you can't push people. Normal rules apply. In a rehearsal room I can do what I
want. I have licence to do quite a range of things to someone else's body which I can't do in the street
outside.

The interesting stage comes when there are only four left, and it intensifies even further when there
are only three. At this point you can't attack anyone and have to make alliances with each other
against the third, so that you can trap them in a position where the coin can be stolen. This takes us
out from a game into the realm of theatre science, into proxemics, and into the relationship between
movement and relationships, and action on the stage through the action of the different bodies. If you
make one step to the right it may be that you find yourself in league with another against the third
player. This is a good training for feeling how relationships change in space when you move the
relationship between one body and two other bodies. The art of proxemics is something that we
hardly have on our stage at all - we are deficient. I would define proxemics as the science of bodies
moving in space and the expressive relationship between them. It is the choreography of the action.
In dance it is quite clear that if you move a dancer that or this way, or two dancers together, then you
are making an expressive statement from the relationship between these bodies in space. The same
is true of theatre but in a more subtle way.