 I'm going to pop it, I'm going to pop it into speaker view here, everybody. Hello, hello, hello, hello, everybody. And welcome to the first ever digital non-binary acting methods workshop. My name is Joe Michael Rezes, pronouns they, them, theirs, and I will be facilitating this evening. I am a PhD candidate in theater and performance studies at Tufts University and a working actor and acting instructor with experience teaching students from elementary school through adulthood. The workshop today is sponsored in part by a grant from the city of Boston mayor's office of arts and culture opportunity fund with sponsorship and hopeful future collaboration with the education department at company one theater. Today, based on a book project I have in progress, we will be exploring gender in actor training and character development. Through a few exercises, we will cultivate queer energies, discuss returning agency to the actor's body in rehearsal and performance spaces, and explore how sensation, memory, and failure can offer new vocabularies in the actor's craft with special attention to queer and trans artists in the space today. For those of you tuning in from home, welcome. Today this stream is being live captioned and we encourage you to participate in today's activities and conversations from the comfort of your own space into whatever capacity you feel best and most supported. So I'm just going to screen share one more time. Oh, dear. Even after so many years, everybody, I feel like Zoom still is Zoom. Here we go. Screen share this here. Some organizations take a look at here. While this workshop is not held in physical space, I would like to acknowledge that this evening of work is being conceptualized, created, and now viewed on the ancestral land seized from indigenous peoples across the world. I hope we recognize the necessity of honoring and understanding the histories of the indigenous land we occupy. Through this acknowledgement, I hope to pay respect to those communities, families, and their elders, regardless of time. I recognize that this acknowledgement alone is fully insufficient and in no way can undo the legacies of violence and displacement of indigenous people. Through this ongoing practice in our ever more digitized world, I ask you at home and in the workshop today as well to also uncover truths on the path towards decolonization and reconciliation. While we stream through the airways, the land is still occupied. This evening in particular, we honor our queer, trans, and two-spirit indigenous siblings holding space for the complex intersections that indigenous people face as gender non-conforming individuals enduring the violences of settler colonialism. Tonight, in active practice of reparation, I ask everyone to join me in donating to the Native Justice Coalition's Two-Spirit program listed here, which engages in decolonizing gender roles and identities within Native First Nation communities, and more information can be found at www.nativejustice.org slash Two-Spirit. Moreover, as this is a workshop sponsored in part by the Boston Mayor's Office of Arts and Culture, I ask that anyone with the means to do so match my $25 donation in support of a local organization here in Boston, the Theater Offensive True Colors Out Youth Theater Program, and out-of-school community-based theater program to train queer youth leaders with special attention to Two-Spirit, queer, trans, black, indigenous, and other artists of color. Thank you so much, and I know with the screen share that things get a little bit weird with other things blocking it, and I have my notes in front of it, so here is this. If you haven't gotten a chance to look at it here at the links, we're going to wait a little bit so you can take that in. Take a photo, take a screenshot if you're watching this after the workshop later, and here we go. All right, stopping the share. Okay, so can I ask all of the participants who feel comfortable to turn their cameras on, to turn your cameras on? Hello. Hello, everybody. I am also joined today, not just with you all here in the workshop, but by my lovely assistant facilitator Tatiana Emery, who is a theater maker graduating from Tufts University in spring 2022 with a major in theater and performance studies and education. I'm passionate about education and its intersections with the arts. Tatiana looks forward to continuing a journey as a working artist and teacher. Tatiana, can you introduce yourself today? Yes, absolutely. Hello, everybody. I'm so happy to be joining you. My name is Tatiana, you see the pronouns, and I am really excited to be a part of this workshop and to help bring Joe's wonderful theory to this Zoom space today. So we're going to go around and introduce ourselves, name pronouns, if you would like them used in this space, if you feel comfortable sharing them, and answering our introduction question, however you see fit. Our question for today is, how did you arrive at this workshop? What was your journey here? This can be a how or a why or a what answer, however you see fit. So we'll go around, we'll say names, pronouns, if you're comfortable and like to share and answering the question, how you got here today. So I will start by answering the question and then I'll popcorn to someone and we can just pass it around. Sound good? Awesome. All right, Tatiana, see the pronouns, and I got here today by climbing a rickety set of stairs, and I would love to pass the mic to Josiah. Hello, everyone. I'm Josiah. My pronouns are he and they, and I got here today by taking many different subway trains, and so glad that I can be here literally right into my apartment like two minutes ago. I'll pass it off to TJ. Hi, my name is TJ. I use they, them pronouns, and I got here today, finishing my nap at 445 and walking into this room and sitting on this chair. And I will pass it to Kit. Hello, everybody. My name is Kit and Ray. My pronouns are they and or she, and I was invited to this to attend this workshop by Joe, and I was curious and exploring acting and seeing other queer non binary faces. And I'm so excited to be here and share with you all. And I'll pass it on to Vee. Hi, I'm Vee. My pronouns are they, them, and I got here by just like putting a blanket on the ground so I could kneel on it. I'm going to pass it to Connor. Hi, my name is Connor. I use he and they pronouns. I got here through a long week of work that I am very glad is behind me. And I'm very happy to be here. I'm going to pass it on to Abby and Margaret. Do you want to go first? Yeah. Hi, I'm Margaret. I use she I got here because I'm such a huge fan of Joe and Tatiana. Hi, I'm Abby. I use she her pronouns. I am also a huge fan of Joe and Tatiana. Hi, I'm Caitlin. I use she her pronouns and I have the same reason as the two before me. Oh, and we will pass it to who hasn't gone. Yeah, go ahead. Hi, everybody. My name is Gelfana. And I go by they and them. And I'm here because my dream um project is to see like queer woman in like a old martial arts type of um project and yeah. Amazing. Thank you so much. Is there anyone who hasn't had a chance to introduce themselves? Cool. Awesome. We are so happy to have you in this space today. We're so excited. So we have a larger group. So we will move through the workshop with volunteers as needed. But just keep in mind since we have a couple of folks here today, be mindful of the space you're taking up and stepping up in and stepping back as needed. And we want to encourage everyone in this process to ask questions and ask for clarifications as they come up. So if you have a question about the theory about the process about the activity, if you want something repeated or just have any general questions for Joe and myself, please feel free to private message them to me in the zoom chat. So I will pop up underneath Tatiana and you can select who you will be sending it to just be mindful that you're not dropping it in the group chat as it were. But if that happens, it's totally fine. I will just be keeping track of all of our questions for us for this session. And for those of you watching the live stream, if you want to drop any questions in the comment section, we will be happy to answer them after our stream ends. Amazing. Thank you, Tatiana. Thank you all for being here. I know that like 5 p.m. on a Friday on the East Coast is like not the most successful time for literally any of us. And I'm barely able to be here right now too. Schedules. So I'm just so grateful to all of you for being here today. And for those of you watching either after this has happened live or happening live right now, just thank you so much. It means the world. Just wanted to talk a little bit more about the project and the project outline and where this was born out of and why it's happening a little bit. So beginning in around 2018, I began thinking with trans artists in greater Boston via stage sources, gender explosion initiative. Gender equity was being fought for, developed and really, really investigated by gender explosion when I first arrived in Boston in 2018. Specifically for safer rehearsal spaces and accommodations with special focus on terminology, gender neutral bathrooms and representation rehearsal rooms. I also began noticing in my classrooms, though, from universities to the public school systems within New England, that non-binary and trans students were not seeing themselves necessarily reflected in the histories of actor training within the Stanislavsky system and its derivatives. And this continued when I worked with a lovely team of teaching artists with the Yale Dramatic Association for students at New Haven High School as well, just students not seeing themselves reflected in that lineage of work whatsoever. So the scope of this project is really to address the Western colonial binary conceptions of gender I feel are deeply embedded into the character development, gender bending and play I see in acting classrooms. I find that ideas of presence and power in rehearsal spaces lean towards the masculine which creates sometimes violent and oftentimes hostile environments for actors looking to play with gender or embody queer and trans characters within theater as an institution. I'm curious though, because I have you all here today as well, what your experiences are with how you have navigated being either queer, transgender, not conforming in rehearsal or performances, and more specifically, have you ever felt that your training or learning as an actor has been able to account for gender expansion at all? Open question to the group. I know that's a big question, but these are big topics, but anything come to mind. It could be an instance, one little moment. It could be a good thing as well, it could be a joyful moment of being affirmed in a rehearsal space, but really anything, how have you felt about gender and performance? I think gender performance has been something that I've always wanted to explore, but growing up, socialize as a masculine person, through having a trans feminine experience and not being equipped to embody that as a child, is being able to start to look for spaces or carve out spaces that can affirm me and can see more Black trans folks and Black trans women out on different shows. I think that visibility in increasing that's really important, so it's a part of the reason why I also came here to explore and expand and radically envision different avenues for myself and other people. So great question, I love this. Yeah, Josiah, go for it. Oh, I actually did have something to say, but I was applauding. And playing off of that, I think I really valued what you said around creating your own space. I think that's really such a big thing because I think when I first heard the question, all I could think of was all the violent spaces that I've been in, especially in higher education. I mean, I know a lot of us have went through our in Tufts University, so I had my own experiences there with these ideas of not necessarily feeling like there is a space to be non-binary, that there is a space to be trans, that there is a space to explore experiences beyond the limited experiences of the writers, of the theatrical makers, of whoever, whoever, especially in historical pieces, and especially as someone who studied musical theater. So I think that's really kind of where I've always been, is how can I carve out that space? How can I make that space for myself? And a lot of times it comes to stepping back and realizing that sometimes that the the work or the emotional labor into it isn't worth trying to create this rehearsal room, trying to teach professors or masters in their field. So that's kind of what first comes to mind when I hear that question, Joe. Okay, great, great. Okay, I'm gonna, I'm holding on to that, holding on to that. Okay, anybody else? I want to try to synthesize this. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Anybody else? Please, please share thoughts. I'm gonna write mine in the chat just for time, but yeah, but I have a lot of thoughts about this because I come from a devising background where we use the body and as like the first impulse, and I'm just gonna say it now, never mind. I'll be quick though. Like we start with the body and like you would think that that's such a freeing space because it's like, this is my body. But then you think about how people see your body and then it's like, and then they say, well, is this character that you're portraying a man or a woman? And it's like, I don't have the, I'm not equipped. Right now, I'm trying to just play a tomato. Like that's, that's what's in my head. I'm just trying to play a tomato. So, so like, you know, the idea of like what's going on here, what's happening here, and then how is that being read by the audience? I mean, there's like already kind of, there's like a dynamic that like you, you can't always escape. And it's, it's really frustrating. Because even when you're doing something that you feel like it's fully embodied to you, sometimes people, they just don't, they don't see it. Okay. All right. Thank you all so much. Okay. Sometimes I was talking to Tatiana about this in an in-person workshop. Sometimes the ideas just feel like they're sitting in the head and being in community like this is just, wow. Okay. Thank you all. Thank you so much. Thinking about carving out spaces, thinking about imagining elsewhere's and thinking about representation and also thinking about questions of embodiment and valid, invalidating embodiment within a space. I'm hearing, I'm hearing all of this. I just want to move quickly, very, very quickly into this manifesto that kind of started this whole project off. Tatiana and I are going to read back and forth this little manifesto. And then we're going to move into some graphics that hopefully will become starting points within this project. They are by no means set in stone and they are not done by any means, but definitely something that I think will be the basis of a lot of the exercises that I've been developing for this, for this book project about returning that agency in a space to the actor, the individual. And I think you'll see why. But I'll get to reading and I'll just stop talking in a tangent. Great. I believe that the individual on stage has the capacity through imagination, collective creation, memory, sensation to embody not just character within tension and motivation on stage, readable to fellow cast members and the audience, but within genealogies and histories of queer kinship. The body is a vehicle to locate the self within the context of these histories in the context of the stage world and to experiment with how the body is perceived, questioned and liberated from the confines of spectatorship. In this way, non-binary acting methods prioritizes failures of legibility on stage and off, working through the joy and messiness of the aesthetic in all character creation practices. This is a devising of the self. In collaboration with a playwright's script design, the work of a director and an ensemble of actors, fractals, or the name of the exercises embedded into this text, fractals are deployed in and out of rehearsal to craft character from the ground up, linking the self to the past, the past to the present and the aesthetic with the future. These acting methods are less about queer and trans actors learning ways to embody gender realness for audiences on stage. This work is not a practice in passing, nor is it a practice in transcending the need for gender. We dedicate ourselves instead to the ideas that gender is a full joyful mutable and on a spectrum, as liquid, as ink in a bottle, as dry as ink on a page. Gender was historically and is presently policed, colonized, and manipulated by the violences of white supremacy. Gender expansion has been performed and lived by generations to undo, refuse, and refute the colonizing, anti-queer, anti-black, and anti-indigenous forces of white supremacy. We honor those whose gender performance is a testament of strength. We honor those whose gender performance is a letter of love. We honor those whose gender performance is always in flux. We honor those whose gender performance is met with violence. We honor those whom we have lost to such violence. We remember them as we play. We play. Playing with gender is not new. Playing with gender is drag. Playing with gender isn't always drag. Playing with gender is joyful. Playing with gender is painful. Playing with gender has a legacy, has ancestry, has ancestors, has elders, has futures. Playing with gender is our right and our privilege. It is not just a game and it is only a game. Let's play. So that was a thought bubble that kind of burst one day and I wrote it all down and then I started making up a bunch of exercises and synthesizing things that had happened in classrooms with students of mine and just trying to make things feel more right in the classroom especially. So talking a little bit, well let's stop talking. Let's get into one of the methods. So this is Chaos Calm. This is one of the methods that is deeply indebted to a lot of theater practitioners and acting instructors of the past. If you're familiar with An Bogart's viewpoints, similar to Soft Focus but we're thinking expansively with the body through this method of Chaos Calm. So you can have your sound on or off. You can be muted or not for this but just know you're going to be imagining your body undulating in some ways. However you feel best. You can stand for this. You can sit for this but this is Chaos Calm. We're going to be thinking about the queer potential of energy in our bodies right now. I am not necessarily saying that the metaphysical aspects of this I fully necessarily believe in in this moment or tomorrow or yesterday but right now I want you to give into this as much as you feel safe and comfortable to do so. Our bodies, ourselves, have energy potential. Close your eyes for me please if you can. Take a deep breath in and out and another deep breath in and out and for those of you watching at home you can do this as well. Now I want you to imagine the energy housed within your cells. Your cells are doing so much for you at every single moment of the day. Loving you, keeping you moving. Take a deep breath in and out. Those cells are also made up of other particles that move in and out of those cell walls in and out of your body with all of the other elements around you. Take a deep breath in and out. I want you to imagine the energy in every atom in your cells in your body and now I just want you to imagine them vibrating with potential energy and that vibration begins to move the atoms around and move the cells in your body beginning to move the tissue in your body, the bones and the muscles and you can feel yourself vibrate. The energy stored in those atoms are making you move. You are making you move. Allow that energy to vibrate your body in whatever shape you can imagine with your eyes closed. You can expand and contract to whatever shape you can imagine that energy taking form as. Allow that vibration to shift faster and slower. Take a deep breath in and out and now take the energy of that vibration and release it on a hum. And I want this hum to be the most comfortable hum for your voice, for your throat. You're not performing for anybody else right now. You're not performing for me or the group. This is just the sound, the pitch, the tone that feels most comfortable in your body in this moment. Let it feel warm. Allow that energy to fill up your body on a hum and let it get louder and louder with the vibration in your body. Allow your your body to move with that energy and the hum as it gets louder and then let the energy slowly release. Let the hum get quieter and quieter and the vibration gets slower and slower until silence is nearly there and the movement is almost gone and you come to stillness. Take a deep breath and out and in this moment you might feel lack but there's a lot of potential in this loose space after all of that momentum and energy and open your eyes. Hello. Hi. So that's Chaos Calm and well I just want to hear from you. How did that feel? Did that feel like anything at all? I've done this a couple of times already in person. It's a different experience with a group. Doing it alone is a little bit different across Zoom but how did that feel? How does your body feel? That's amazing. I really liked it. Great. That's good. Anything else? I liked I guess imagining all the cells in my body with the energy. Good, good, good. Great. Lovely. I think done it both in a group setting and this time on my own. I found that there was a really nice connection between body and voice especially in thinking about pitch and aligning what was comfortable for my body, for my throat and letting that come out in the sound. It was a very centering experience. I think Connor popped that in the chat as well. Thank you, Connor. Yeah, lovely. So Chaos Calm came out of this idea that I think ideas of being centered or calm in a space and ready to work or ready to labor theatrically. Those ideas I wanted to throw that not necessarily throw it completely away but allow a centering exercise to be one that is based in an idea that energy of momentum doesn't necessarily have to sit in the binary either. That being full up of energy and being in a lack space of energy is just a spectrum as well. So this queer energy source is something that comes from our own body and we can use it as we see fit on any given day. And you'll see across the board as we go into some of these other activities that really the idea behind Fractals is this queer energy source and returning the agency to the actor's body to create the parameters within which to work, within which to create art. So whatever you are feeling in any given day, you can bring yourself your whole self or parts of yourself to whatever you are creating and that is enough and that is what you are bringing to the space that day. So KS-Com is just one way in to start rehearsal and rehearsal, break up a rehearsal but just a little centering exercise. So here we go. Fractals, what are Fractals? We're going to share a screen. Again, this is Joe trying so hard to make things make sense. Ah, okay. So, hi. Fractals, Fractals. According to the Fractal Foundation, which I found out was real, a Fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are developed and created by repeating a simple process over and over and over in an ongoing feedback loop. Driven by recursion, Fractals are images of dynamic systems, the pictures of chaos. Geometrically, they exist in between our familiar dimensions. Fractal patterns are extremely familiar since nature is full of Fractals. For instance, trees, rivers, coastlines, mountains, bodies, clouds, seashells, hurricanes, et cetera. Just so everyone knows, oh, there's a weird window Fractal happening. Anyway, just so everyone knows, I don't know anything about math. So just I don't know anything about geometry. The name Fractals just came out of me thinking through my synesthetic brain of conceptualizing a lot of concepts as physical objects in space and unfortunately, gender to me is glass. So this is what happens. So here we are. This is a graph. In this graph, here is the idea of the Fractalization model of thinking about gender performance in the craft of acting. This is my understanding of how the exercises in this book are going to scaffold onto themselves. This is not by any means a perfect understanding of gender performance in daily life whatsoever. This is my understanding and model of gender performance in the rehearsal room and on stage that I think is beneficial in helping specifically queer trans and non-binary actors thrive in that environment. So if we look at this little graph over here, the first out of character would be an understanding that an actor has a certain light cast upon them over there on the left. That is the idea of being out of character. That light passes over the actor's body. It's an imaginary light and sends the image of that actor that light reflected off of the actor's body out outward, outward over here, somewhere out into an audience beyond beyond the body itself. So that would be out of character. In a traditional model, as I understand a lot of presence-based Stanislavski derivative acting methodologies, the actor is still over here having light cast on their body reflected off of their body. And as I have studied a lot of acting texts as I have taught them, I have come to understand this prism, this pyramid, to be the character that blocks the audience that is over here from the actor. So the character blocks the actor. A shadow is cast onto the audience that indicates the character's gender to the audience. That being said, it is still a shadow. This is a solid triangle. A solid pyramid is blocking the actor. But there's still a shadow, which means light is still passing into the audience indicating that that actor is still there. So that's where I think we get into a murkiness of thinking about gender bending and drag and historically thinking about binaries with how bodies are perceived by audiences as this shadow is cast onto the audience and understanding how bodies function. Down here, things get a little bit more complicated with the fractalization model that I based this book project around, which the actor is still over here on the left. But we have a series of prisms rather than a pyramid of character that refracts and fractalizes. I know that refracting and fractals are not the same. We have to go with it. Suspension of disbelief, everybody. But the idea that these pyramids have this fractal pattern, as we see here, repeated triangles, the character is still here in the center. But light is able to pass through. The light of the actor's gender is able to pass through pretty fluidly and scatter across all of these different audiences that could perceive gender in some way. So the self, the cast and collaborators prior to the character, so that would be the gender of the actor is being perceived by the actor. So Joe, the actor, perceives Joe the actor. And the cast and collaborators also perceive Joe the actor. Once Joe gets into character, the cast and fellow characters perceive Joe's characters, gender. And I myself am also Joe perceiving Joe playing the character, that character's gender. We'll get into how that functions in just a second. So here we go. Joe, maybe hopefully easier here. Ah, great. Gender, rehearsitivity as an idea. So we have the actor and we have the character over here. The line between the self and the character, the actor and the character, starts to blur a little bit when we start thinking about gender in this way, at least I hope. But what I hope this motive in rehearsal does is allow us to really think about how gender is being performed in a rehearsal space and in a performance space without always having to rely on how the audience and spectators are going to perceive a certain performance. We can start thinking about gender in a way that really, really, really prioritizes how the actor hopes to embody character in rehearsal and beyond. So I know the graphics. It's a lot. It's a lot. I understand. But here, as we see here, the actor performs a certain gender to the cast and collaborators. The actor performs a certain gender to the audience and society and culture. And the actor performs a gender to the self. Over here, the character performs a certain gender to the audience. The character performs to the cast and fellow characters. And the character performs to the actor. I'm going to stop the share just for a second. The reason why these six gender performances, while complicated, I think for, especially I think some of my undergraduate students, even just this semester that I brought this up to on a whim just on a random Thursday. And we were just writing things on the board and it was like, have you ever thought about this? I think with the book project and modeling these structures in rehearsal, we'll get to a place where we can start having conversations about what students and what actors would like to prioritize in any given rehearsal when developing a character. So that means with six potential ways of thinking about the self and the character, if on any given day, a student has, I don't know, if there's a student, me, let's take me, Joe, hi, I'm Joe. And I'm the actor coming into a rehearsal space. And I'm having a trauma response to playing men. I don't want to be a man. My character is a man and I'm not feeling comfortable playing a man that day in a space. I can come in and work on the three gender performances that are centered around me and not the gender performances of the character that I am portraying that day. So activities in the space can focus on me and not the character. So again, always meeting the actor and the student where they are at on any given day. Another way that I think we discovered in person was a great way Tatiana of describing this as well was I had a student once embodying a very high femme character. And this was a cis woman playing a very, very high, high femme wearing pink all the time. And I think a great example of this would be like Elle Woods playing Elle Woods in a rehearsal space if you want to go with a traditional understanding of Elle Woods, right? And if that actor came into the space in my classroom and said, I don't know how to play Elle Woods because that femininity isn't the type of womanhood that I understand. That's not the type of gender performance that I understand in my daily life. This model doesn't necessarily only apply to trans and non-binary students and actors as well. It applies across the board. It frees us from having to think about gender as something that only pertains to some people, but is actually something that pertains to all. Trans studies is for everybody, you know? So that's the model, right? So six gender performances every time you walk on stage are happening, everybody, unfortunately or fortunately, I haven't quite decided. And I think in the coming months as I keep developing these exercises, I do know, though, that being able to have the agency over what you want to work on on any given day has been wonderful for me as an actor and seeing my students do it as well has just been so joyful. Has this made some sense? At least it's, again, circulating in the head and Tatiana and I was like, here's a graphic and we looked at them and then printed them and then they were out in the world and now it's here. So great. For those of you watching from home, if you need to go back and screenshot those, do so. They're not copywritten yet, so don't distribute them. I don't know. I don't know anything about copyright. Anyway, great. Here we go. Let's move into an exercise now because that's that's that's the way we go with this. So one activity that comes out of the book is something called self-similarities. So fractals as a repeating shape are self-similar. So they replicate and then turn outward, right, in different shapes and different patterns, but they're self-similar in that type of mirroring and repetition. So self-similarities as exercises are something that I want us to focus on in rehearsal rooms as well. Just like that energy with ChaosCon being stored within the body, we can also focus on ourselves, especially queer and trans folks, that we might not have source material. We might have to carve out spaces for ourselves, but we can still do deep source work for ourselves when developing character by doing self-similar work with sensation and memory. So this is a childhood memory exercise that we're going to do everybody with emphasis on joy. There are two childhood memory exercises, one on failure and one on joy. I feel like on a Friday we should do the one on joy. So I want you all to think back to a childhood memory based on an object that brings forth joy in your body. Examples, flying a kite for the first time, eating an ice cream cone on a summer day, Tatiana brought into the space in person recently hula-hooping successfully. It was a wonderful gesture. Locate the story of this memory in your body and distill the story into three repeatable gestures and one line of dialogue. Does that make sense to everybody? Does everybody have that? So we need three gestures that can be repeated. And by that I always tell students all of the time you can't flop like a fish onto the ground because you can't do that more than a couple of times without really hurting yourself, right? So just do repeatable gestures, smaller the better, especially within the zoom boxes, I think. But three repeatable gestures and one line of dialogue. So take like a minute or two, explore them, play with them, and yeah, we'll come back in about a minute. Great? Play, play. You can turn your camera off, keep it on, and be ready to do great. And for those of you at home watching, thank you. And also, as everyone is preparing their gestures, you can also do this at home. I know I won't be able to see your gestures. I feel very blue's clues right now because I can't hear your response. But if anyone at home wants to comment what gestures they were working with, I would be happy to take a look at those afterward. Or Tatiana, one of us, would definitely do that after the workshop today. Great. Lovely. Tatiana, because you have done this before and before everybody else's hopping back, do you have one today that you would like to share? Yes, I do. I have a, I was an only child when I was younger. Bear with me. I had a single trampoline, a trampoline for one. So that is the object I'm thinking about today, and I'm happy. Great. Great. Do you want to, can you demonstrate just quickly? I'll pin you, and then we'll see how that goes. All right. I'll put it on speaker. Incredible. I'll make some bigger gestures. Amazing. Great. That's amazing. Can everyone come back as you have your gestures? Lovely. Also, round of applause for Tatiana for going. Zoom is still awkward, everybody, and that is okay because it is an accessible form of community, and that is why we love it. So if anybody else wants to share their gesture, we're going to get into why embodying this is what the potential of it is, but who wants to go? I'm eyeing the group of three because I think that would be fun, but also anybody else, anybody else, feel free to jump in. My object is like a place of joy for me as a child was the beach, and my mom used to make like drip sand castles, so it was like scooping up damp sand and then letting it drip down, and so my gesture is... Great. Yes. Round of applause. Yes. Okay. This is lovely. I would love one more just to play with. Anybody? Anybody care to share? I'll share. I won't tell. Round of applause. Would you mind sharing what it was? I'm so... Yes. I used to trick my younger sibling, and I used to try to talk to my younger sibling, instead of playing more with my Barbie dolls with his GI Joe dolls, and I will always have to be like, I won't tell, but I would, and that's horrible, but I did knowing it was a gender performance thing that he was supposed to be doing. This is so exciting, everybody. Okay. Okay. Oh, I love this so much, everybody. Okay. So pulling from childhood memory, there's something, and I know on our further reading slide, we'll talk about it, but Jack Halberstam's queer art of failure, thinking about childhood, thinking about the possibilities of bumbling, stumbling, failing, falling about. The generous space of childhood. I love locating that, especially for queer artists, finding the joys of the past and pulling it forward, the gestures, the tones, the lines, and things that we can pull into characters in the present. So thinking about self-similarity is the next thing that would happen after doing a reflection, a reflection on the past through self-similarity, and how it then either doesn't sit correctly in your body now, or does feel good, enjoyable in your body now, we would probably walk around the space together, trying on this gesture. We can't really do that in a Zoom space, but we would live like that for a bit, a number of minutes, and see what works, what feels right, what doesn't feel right for the character that we're creating, or just in our bodies in that moment, depending on, again, what part of the prism you're working with that day in the rehearsal space. The next thing that we would work on is something called echo rhythm. So an idea of movement as an echo, an idea that energy, again, is this echoic thing that can grow and shrink and build on itself, and that energy can multiply, but within the self. So imagining the gestures and feelings in your body as something that is self-contained, you yourself, based on that chaos calm that we did before, you have the energy within you to restage this moment. You also have the agency to alter the shape, the dynamic, and the emotion on a certain spectrum, and we can build this energy vocabulary within an echo chamber. So how I imagine this in a space, because I'm on a Zoom box, is kind of helpful. If I were to turn around, and this was a solid wall and not a piece of fabric, I would turn around and echo rhythm as an exercise would be, and you can all do this in your own time if you find like an alleyway or a wall or another room in your house somewhere, you can do this. Again, don't disturb your neighbors unless you feel like you need to. And go somewhere with a solid wall, you can do this now. I think Tatiana, I think it'll be best if you demonstrate this, especially with the trampoline, because you've done this before. But what you would do is repeat one of the gestures over and over again, and the energy of that gesture. So one that would be fun to do would be my sister dropping a bowl of cake batter when I was young. This is a joy, this is a failure, but it's a good exercise. And she said, oh no, the cake batter, very straightforward memory. And she spilled the bowl of cake batter. And that gesture and that line, you send the energy of the gesture at the wall, it ricochets back at your body, and the energy of it, as if you're performing to yourself in a mirror, comes back into your body, and you re-perform that gesture again. Very much inspired by Brecht in a lot of the repeatable gestures, but freeing us from understanding ideas of the silhouette of how bodies are supposed to be perceived in silhouette and in shadow, and instead thinking about how we can repeat things to get new information out of gesture. So oh no, the cake batter and dumping a bowl could get louder, it could get more, the bowl could get bigger, it could get more and more energized, it could get smaller and quieter. There are so many possibilities for thinking about how the energy might change, but it should be a natural progression. It shouldn't be something like oh I know that whoever is instructing me today wants me to get louder and louder and louder, that's not what we're looking for. We're thinking about creating a spectrum of energy in the room that you feel comfortable working within, so that vocabulary can come back later, and I can say remember when you went up here we should go back to that space, or remember when you got quieter and the energy dropped when you got to the end of your echo chamber, that's where we want to go today. So again, building this safety net, this echo chamber of your own limits and parameters as an actor, rather than being prescribed like a one to ten scale, which is traditional in the classroom nowadays, because what is a ten, what is a one, and who is setting that scale, especially with inability and neurotypicism, you know what I'm saying? I think allowing this echo chamber to speak for you and reflect your own safety and comfort. So Tatiana, can you demonstrate just quickly how you might imagine an echo chamber of this trampoline gesture? You don't have to. If you're like, I don't know today. No, absolutely. I'm happy to. Great. So I'll stick to my ending gesture off of the trampoline. My phrase is I have no room to flip. I'm going to aim at the wall that is past my screen. I'm looking at a bed post here, but here we are. No room to flip. No room to flip. I have no room to flip. I have no room to flip. I have no room to flip. I have no room to flip. I have no room to flip. I have no room to flip. I have no room to flip and let's hold there round of applause oh I'm way to flip the energy and uh oh that's so exciting um so another way that echo rhythm allows us to free ourselves again from binary conceptions of of of talking about gesture and talking about energy um uh is the idea that in a lot of spaces I know for myself that I've had the note from directors time and time again especially when playing men um in straight men in particular it's like make that more masculine make that more powerful and the in the idea there is that power is rooted in this like cis men idea of masculinity right like that is where power is is rooted um and freeing the notes from gendered ideas of energy and power that is also something that we're looking to do that the the vocabulary that we're building is that gesture did this as you built it in the echo chamber grab one of those and pull it into the space right we don't have to start gendering like the the way that Tatiana went like this because this doesn't or when Tatiana in our in-person workshop brought in hula hooping and then let go of the hula hoop moving your hips isn't inherently a gender thing right we don't necessarily have to think about it in a binary conception um not that we have to throw gender away completely because we can always fill ourselves up with gender when we want to but as a baseline I think removing it is something that would help many many people feel more comfortable in rehearsal um in a classroom um great character wise to the possibilities of thinking about energy in an echo chamber too there are like nine different characters that came out of Tatiana's um piece just there that I could as a director help push in different directions or one character at different levels of of comfort with the idea that was happening in that scene at any given moment so again playing with all of that with him echo rhythm everybody wow I feel like what a Friday activity that we're all embarking on right now um but anyway um so that is that um so we are at we're at six o'clock I'm going to be cognizant of time um and I just want to pop over uh to our idea of modeling structures um so modeling structures everybody um did everyone bring a poem today did you bring a poem oh my goodness this is amazing you all are the best um so let's grab our short poem um for today um so I want you to think about the since now the light's coming in over here all right um I want you to think about the sensations held in the piece that you brought today um imagine that this poem um is a painting or a musical composition or a sculpture and I want you to take this poem after you read it through um on your own and then I want you to set it in front of you as if you were looking at a piece of an object that you were going to paint like a still life painting um or an object that you were being inspired by to write about um or you know something along the lines of still life right inspiration a muse of some sort what world in this poem can you perceive so recite the poem as you would existing within the world of that poem who is who is reciting this poem imagine the contours and fragments of the poem the way the aesthetics inform how your body moves as you read it and feels as you recite the poem so you can turn off your camera do this a number of times but really think about what the aesthetic world of this poem is and this is again that you can turn your your cameras off for those of you at home um this is uh an exercise that can be done with a poem um the exercise uh as I have written it so far and experimented with it um also works really really well um with monologues so in an acting classroom it would also work um but we don't have much time on this new workshop to develop character through a monologue or you know workshop monologues in the way that I would like to so we're focusing on poems today um but if you're at home and you have a little poem um that you would like to work with um follow along with us that would be lovely and I have a couple just in case people forgot to do oh we have a question hot deanna yes we do it was in relation to the activity we just did would you like to save it for the energy actually let's let's do it right now great we asked a why a wall and not a mirror for echo rhythm so the reason why I I have decided on the wall um is that I wanted to think about how sound hits like a solid wall but I think that a mirror or a window like something see-through could also you know work as well um I also think um that there are other activities and exercises that work on mirroring the self with a mirror um and I wanted this one to be about energy as it is being sent against the the physical wall and metaphorical wall ahead so something very very solid but it could definitely be a mirror as long as you can imagine the weight of the object coming back and forth to you the weight of the um energy the energy of that moment coming back and forth yeah a mirror would be fun though that we should we should test that out at some point maybe I'll do that oh yeah oh I guess this this would be a good time to I'll I'll repeat this again with the goodbyes but for those of you watching at home um you can go to my website www.jmresesres.com um backslash forward slash contact um and send and send an inquiry um about um booking a non-binary acting methods workshop for your theater company school um wherever wherever you might want um to have the style of workshop um I would be happy to come um and and and share materials um with your students or actors yeah that's great all right everybody else in the space when you're feeling up to it you can turn your cameras back on and arrive with me hello all right so would anyone like to share just a recitation of the poem as they would if they were living this poem within the world of this poem and by that I mean if it's a poem that centers around the idea of a rainstorm um you know it could be that you're amongst the rain right you're you're dodging the rain right it could be something as as as straightforward as that um but yeah anyone anyone want to embody this poem and perform it for us right now I'd be more than happy to great please uh this is for context this is a poem that I created six years ago and I like found the other day and I was like why not so lately I have wondered what is it about me that you see how I glow against the canvas for all to know I watch as you stare at the crown of hair that I wear proudly and fluidly crafted with care thick forests of twists and turns reach up and touch the sky they ascend towards the light and become one everlasting burst my sparkling crown fit for a queen perhaps the skin that covers me it's like silk rich in glock and chalk full of melanin and creamy like chocolate milk glistening in the sunshine of the day and everlasting in my own special way everlasting sunshine and a world where black people exist in the future and liberation thank you so much oh my goodness okay uh I want I want to just start working on this poem and working into the modeling structure but I want I want to hear one more poem and then we'll work both poems um and this is this is the last activity we're doing today just so everyone knows um so if you want to share within the space please do so because we're we're focusing on objects and modeling um now um and I know I know we mentioned playing a tomato yes yes tomato yeah that's kind of what we're doing right now so if you want to share I would encourage anybody who wants to share their poem because we'll work it in just a second anybody oh I can go if no one knows but Connor I feel I feel your energy Connor come on oh no no no no no no no no tj uh um so uh I'm only going to read the first paragraph of this because it's long but this is a supermarket in California by Alan Ginsberg what thoughts I have of you tonight Walt Whitman for I walked down the side streets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon in my hungry fatigue and shopping for images I went into the neon supermarket dreaming of your enumerations what peaches and what penumbra's whole family shopping at night aisles full of husbands wives in the avocados babies in the tomatoes and you Garcia Borca what were you doing down by the water melons beautiful beautiful I would love one more too I would love one more if someone wants to go because then we'll have some examples of where these poems can go through this is after please Connor but I was going to say it but then I saw Connor straight so I'll say my story quickly yeah tj you won't you celebrate with me what I've shaped into a kind of life I had no model born in Babylon both non-white and woman what did I see to accept myself to be accept myself I made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay my one hand holding tight my other hand come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed that was Lucille Clifton thank you everybody for just jumping in here and ah I just wish we could all be in a little a little studio together doing this it would be so fun okay so we have three we have three pieces now presented into the space perform beautifully all of them all so so wonderful the exercise now with within this idea of modeling structure is thinking about how we can model character a little bit different because these poems you all brought in yourselves not necessarily something that you don't want to be performing right um or a character's monologue that you might be wrestling with because you don't quite understand where this character is coming from modeling structures as an activity here within within fractals is the idea to then start exploring the aesthetics built into the text free of the preconceived notions that you might have about the work not free socially politically or culturally um in the way that you would want to connect to the piece rather freeing yourself from the idea that you are bound to perform it in a certain way that you have historically been told this is how you need to perform this text right you can perform this in a different way um so the modeling structure would be perform this as an aesthetic gesture built within the text itself how can i say that another way joe in a way that actually makes sense to everyone out in the world so imagine one object or note or color or flavor from the world within this poem you are now that door that flower that elbow that blade of grass that trumpet call that taste of salt water recite the poem as this entity and i want this to to understand even more so this idea of transpossibility here of the queer possibility of playing the object of being an entity of being something outside of preconceived notion how does this transform your body to play this idea this concept your voice your emotional relationship with the piece itself is there more or less to the story here so an example of this happened in my introduction to acting class just a couple of weeks ago where a student performed a monologue um monologues are very rich in that sense because um poems are already full of of imagery that we can play and kind of incorporate into our body naturally monologues feel a little bit more at times i don't want to generalize but at times a little bit more stuck a little bit more rote um in in their performance um and this student performed as a door which is why it's included in this list and it was one of the most incredible things i have ever seen someone perform um because the student actually moved as a door and vocalized as the door opened and closed throughout the monologue just on a whim within like five seconds of me saying you are the door now go um the door moved back and forth and the character came to life as a door and it was just so amazing um but if anyone out of u3 wants to try this in a new way um as an aesthetic gesture within the poem you can't you also don't have to um i know it's been we've been we've been at it for a while now but if anyone wants to try it as a tomato um but i know not all of your poems had tomatoes but one of yours did have a tomato so i saw the seed planted earlier the tomato seed was planted at the beginning no i i know i know i know um we also we definitely don't have to if we don't want to but i'm happy to do a second take oh yes please do once lately i have wondered what is it about me that you see how i clothe against canvas for all to know i watch as you stares the crown of hair that i wear proudly and through the crafted with care thick forests of twists and turns reach up and touch the sky they ascend towards the light and become one everlasting burst my sparkling crown fit for a queen perhaps it's the skin that covers me like silk rich and chock full of melanin and creamy like chocolate milk glistening in the sunshine of the day and everlasting in my own special way a world where black people exist in the future liberation everlasting sunshine thank you so much thank you what were you working with here what what what were you playing with the crown i knew it and i'm so happy about it oh my goodness oh and what what was informing your choices as the crown what was bringing you to this because i feel like the the white gaze and my people like oh that hair oh that crown can i touch it i'm an experience that you can't touch so no you can't have it and no you can't touch my hair this i thank you thank you another another round of applause another snap i thank you thank you all thank you all for for joining today i i can't i can't even express just how i'm just so grateful that everyone is here on the zoom call and talking about this and and thinking about these things because they're things that we should be thinking about and you all are thinking about them in such glorious ways and ah i'm just so grateful i'm so i'm so grateful i don't even know i can't i can't put into words anything else um we only have about 15 minutes and i just want to be quick about something but also be very mindful of it um very very quickly as i pull this up um oh no not that um one last share of this graph um for everybody watching um gender rehearsitivity on this scale of thinking about gender actor and character dynamics within this system of six gender performances within a prism um again returning agency to the actor's body um and the characters that they create this though is a starting point and i want us to understand that thinking about gender is just the way into these exercises that i feel have historically been not talked about in the way that my students um and fellow actors and trans and non-binary folk within the theater community um have had um access to right um i think that this is one way in that being said this matrix of gender and this matrix of spectatorship and perception is a starting point for thinking about race age nation ethnicity this is the starting point um that i have found um in the exercises that i'm building but this is definitely something on a scale that i think will be developed um within classroom spaces where the exercises can be um brought in um and students can can grow and learn hopefully from from these methods um i would be remiss not to mention um this slide in particular i just want to mention my bibliography and the people and genealogies of people that i have been thinking with and developing this work um really really thinking closely with uh Dr. Cheryl DeLuckett's Black Acting Methods Critical Approaches um and her studio and uh Dr. Sweeney Madison's Performed Ethnography and Communication are deep deep deep deep inspirations to my work um as i've been developing um exercises um so yeah please screenshot this at home if you have it um if you can um take a look at all of these uh lovely pieces for further learning um i i stand by uh all of these lovely pieces and people and resources for trans actors as well um continue to explore all of these as well um for for whatever you need um and anybody out there watching as well you can also contact me via my website for advice further learning especially because i know that booking a workshop is not within everyone's financial means so you can always contact me directly um for more information or resources and i'd be happy to share those with anyone and everyone who would care to do so um stopping the share there great questions from the group before we head out comments concerns insults to me recipes fears woes just thanks and gratitude thank you for your time thank you for everything that you are creating and building and letting us all join you today in this sharing thank you thank you for coming today it's it's been i i hope i hope this is not the end of the conversation and i'm going to send out otatiana has a playlist that we thought we were going to play at the beginning but then we realized that if this is going to live on youtube after in the world that copyright was going to be a problem so we're going to send that out to all the participants today so we have something to remember this by which is a playlist of songs that we can all jam to at some point um any other questions thoughts from the group this is really invigorating i like came from like hours and hours of like reading code coding over so just like i just love the switch and it was just such a delight to be able to hold space with you all and thank you so much for bringing all the selves here in the zoom thank you thank you anything else great great ooh spotify link and we'll i'll email it out to you after everything is set and done all right everybody well then we will wrap it up so thank you all um everybody at home for attending the first um hopefully maybe not the last of digital non-binary acting methods workshop here via hall around again um i would like to thank my grant sponsor the mayor's office the boston mayor's office of arts and culture opportunity fund um for helping make this happen um and yeah thank you all thank you all we're done have a great friday wherever whatever time done you're in all right thank you thank you and be well