‘caring activities are associated with important neurochemical rewards. The feelings of calm and contentment that accompany nurture have benefits for giver and receiver alike and there are obvious evolutionary reasons why this should be so’ The Well Gardened Mind by Sue Stuart-Smith page 35
You can’t movement direct Romeo and Juliet without really immersing yourself in love; in what it feels like in our bodies, what is the fall of falling in love - the wide-armed dropping abandonment of falling forward into the unknown, or the breath fuelled dizziness of careering forward, or your sight blurring to gently wash away others and only see/hear/remember your beloved. Our physiological states as humans in love are turbo charged with a flood of hormones. Oxytocin fuels bonding and 20 different kinds of endorphins, flood our beings with feelings of euphoria, dampening stress and pain, we synchronise our breath, on a cellular level our heart cells yearn towards mutuality, and achieve it, our brains repattern, our temperature changes - I mean humans are really built to love and care and consummate… but that is the beauty of bodies in Shakespeare is that he shows us love in action and then allows us to fill in the space of a night of love and discovery…The bodily - ness of love we all know that and we also all know the heart and gut wrenching ness of it’s absence….and you can’t movement direct Romeo and Juliet without immersing yourself in violence….the cycles of invasion and hurt and damage meted out between clans, from leaders to their people, from parents to children, from husbands to wives, from young person to young person.
The action and understanding of hormones, that is so effortlessly present in the language and metaphors of the language of the play offer a route to the body as a site of passionate experience. So the movement director does a hop, step, jump. From the language (especially if you can do a humoral reading) hop to the actuality of the body in all its corporeality and physiological changes, step into translating that into action or doing or verbs, and jump into feeding that into ‘concrete doable things’ (my own mantra) for actors in rooms as they move, accumulating vocabularies and experiences that feed the vitality of their performance work.
I set out to write about an idea that left me dazzled. I have to go sideways to go forwards. I love my little garden, and was wondering why ….so I attended a lock down lecture on gardening where the speaker suggested that any act of caring - for a garden, a child, pets, chums, neighbours, parents, oneself, seedlings had hormonal rewards - specifically beta endorphins. And movement directors have intuited for a very long time that warming up and bonding as a company was a pretext to soak us all in oxytocin from day one of rehearsal. A slow thought - that complicity -that is so so important in creating a healthy, playful and free rehearsal environment- might actually be endorphin-fuelled care for each other in our vivid but temporary theatre communities.
So next time a movement director says ….’let me run a little warm up session to get us going’….say ‘yes’ in the full knowledge that s/he/they has done her/his/their homework on the biological and movement basis of her/his/their offer. And they might have read a fair amount of neuroscientific theory that helps to build a bridge towards feeling and behaviour and imagination. And that her/his/their little warm up might be a light disguise and actually be the seed of the driving dynamics of love and violence for example, but also essential to the caring ensemble in which performers can relish being a body with other bodies relishing being bodies.
The Well Gardened Mind by Sue Stuart-Smith in a Lecture hosted by Brockwell Part Community Greenhouses
https://www.brockwellgreenhouses.org.uk
Photo from a movement session during rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet with brilliant actors moving and laughing, fantastic MD and AD and ASM supporting the room and photo credit to a wonderful photographer with a brilliant eye for process ( see theatre page for full credits)