VI. Observations and Reflections
Describing one’s bodily sensations can be a very vague affair, as it mostly depends on personal and often wordless knowledge. However, I will do my best to present some of my experiences during the process.
VI.I Experiences When Embodying the Isolated Passions
Through the process of embodiment, I experienced that my handbook provided a valuable set of guidelines on the road to a genuine performance. Essentially, the process went in this order: I used Hill’s technique of the “Mazy Round,” accompanied by the descriptions and illustrations by Le Brun to "set" my body and "make it ready" for the passion. At the same time, I channelled my inner images of the desired passion, influenced and inspired by the complexity reflected in Charleton’s descriptions. The inner sensations were strengthened by, and manifested in, bodily movements. As the handbook is meant to be a guide and not the rule, I didn’t always use all the collected material for each passion, and some of it worked more as an inspiration than a regulation. However, in this way, I often experienced a true sensation of emotion that laid the base for the vocal expression. The latter was again influenced by Vandenhoff and Hill's instructions, whose words contributed to tying the voice and the physical sensations together.
Transferring from Speech to Song
During the process, I found that the main issue lay in the transition from speech to song. When declaiming, I often experienced a flow of emotion that went with the recitation, but in transferring that to song, when a “freer body” is demanded, I often found myself in a state that didn’t allow my voice to stream with the necessary flow. I came to the solution of committing to the energy of the emotion, as suggested by Vandenhoff1, manifested in breath and pace of movement, rather than sticking with my momentary sensation of the emotion itself, as many of them, such as Anger, made me tense and limited my availability. This also corresponded with Hill's description in the chapter of Joy: "when natural impressions are imitated, exactly, by art, the effect of such art must seem natural,"2 which implies that a stage representation of the desired passion, rooted in its effects, rather than the performer's personal experience of the passion in the moment, can still be perceived by the audience as genuine. To find the right energy was only possible after having practiced channelling the real emotion first, only then could the proper representation take form. However, the line between the two is a fine one, and it is hard to distinguish when standing on stage. Even so, I had found an entrance into establishing a “stage passion” - moving myself from the privacy of my own room, struggling with my private emotions; to the stage and in front of an audience, expressing passions in a way that worked with the music. In line with my sources, I wanted to avoid an expression that was “ferox, dura, aspera [fierce, hard, rough]”3, and I found that the discussion concerning nature in art came to life: I was embodying the core of my research. Balancing the true emotional sensations and the control the passion had over me, with the instructions that the music provided, became the essence of this process.
Active and Passive passions
When experiencing the energy of the different passions, I discovered that some passions were active and others passive. Based on my physical experiences, I divided these into four sub-categories:
active-positive: joy, desire and love
active-negative: despair, fear, anger and revenge
passive-positive: wonder and hope
passive-negative: grief/melancholy
As I gained more experience, I found that some of the passions were harder to embody than others. I rarely make use of my active-negative passions, so channelling inner images to match these was hard. When attempting to embody Despair, I imagined both the picture of a tapeworm inside my stomach, or a huge, uncontrollable group of rats in the room. When transferring my sensation of Despair to the music, I found that the musical line demanded a freedom that the passion had limited. Since I chose to leave out the historically informed gestures, I decided to add physical movement that would make me able to sing the phrase (that is why you might see me sway while singing in the documentation video), and channel more availability.
The Relationship Between Passion and Text
Other passions came very easily when I had posed the facial expression, such as Melancholy and Joy. (I often found myself uplifted for hours after having trained on embodying the latter, which definitely spoke for the method’s success.) But even though Melancholy was easy to embody, I found it very hard to sing and speak with, being a passive-negative passion. I had interpreted the last section of “Restless in thought” to be based in this emotion, but I quickly found that singing high G’s when completely worn down by grief, is not my biggest strength. To inhabit an energetic manner when the emotion itself doesn’t invite natural energy, as Vandenhoff emphasizes4, is something I yet have to master. I found other ways: In order to be able to do the melody justice, I added a tiny bit of Fear, being an active passion that would allow me the energy I needed. When I started using the passions for the benefit of my performance, rather than letting the obvious match with the text decide, I realized that the core of the expression doesn’t lay with what you say, but how you say it. This connected to the thought that the melody of the passion is advancing the words of meaning in a human’s life (as babies scream their needs and passions before they speak words), and made it easier to use the flow I felt in reciting, as well as opening up for adding “mad elements”. By consciously experimenting with the relation between text and passion, I could become freer and madder. This corresponded to Burggraf and Neuman’s point of creating something that doesn’t match, as a way to establish a mad expression. For instance, when singing “much I fear!”, but expressing Hope, or "Short sleeps, deep sighs" and expressing Wonder, I wanted to create a feeling of mismatch.
The embodied passion also influenced the way my phrases were shaped, which especially went for the melodious and virtuosic melismas. When singing the phrases without embodied passions, my melismas seem to have more or less the same character, but when embodied with contrasting emotions, the outcome is very different. In the melodious line that underlines the text “my fluttering soul is all on fire,” embodied with Desire, I experienced very different melismatic phrasing than when singing “Restless in thought,” embodied with Despair. A way to describe this would be to emphasize the different use of breath: in Despair, my airflow was affected by the explosiveness of the passion, resulting in a choppy and inconsistent line. While in Desire, the longing that characterises the passion influenced the phrasing, and created a breathflow that was more consistent and forward-going. As this difference is audible, I will refer to the video examples in the handbook to further illustrate the difference.
Using a Mirror
Through the whole embodiment process, I had a mirror in front of me. This was, on the one hand, to control that I actually had the expression I desired, informed by Le Brun’s paintings and instructions. With a mirror, it is easier to locate and disclose one's certain set of inhabited facial movements. I quickly became aware that my forehead has muscles that rarely are active, and that it demanded a conscious process to activate them. Some of the passions were also illustrated with an expression that didn’t agree with how I would express them in my private life. This was valid for Hope and Desire, but by matching the inner sensations of the provoked passion, and Le Brun’s illustration of the expression (controlling my facial movements with the mirror) I managed to make the expression natural.
On the other hand, using a mirror gave me the chance to have someone to address my passions and intentions to. This made it much easier to utter the words and music. When worn down with grief, I found no reason to utter a single word, but in the presence of others (being my own reflection), a motivation was channelled, and in this, the energy required to utter meaning came naturally.
VI.II Experiences When Embodying the Full Set of Passions
Transitions
The rapid changes that characterises the nature of the Mad Songs were the hardest to embody. In order to establish a sense of madness, my order of passions was sometimes put together in a consciously irrational way, and sometimes not, according to my sources’ descriptions. Charleton describes how some passions naturally develops into others, and some of these patterns I definitely followed, such has Desire - "always a Consequent of Love."5 Others, for instance Revenge, which is considered by Charleton to be connected to Anger, I chose to pair with the contradictory passion of Joy. To manage these quick, emotionally contrasting shifts, requires a certain availability from the performer, which becomes very limited when one lets one individual passion dominate your body and mind completely. A rapid change that illustrates this issue is the one moving from Anger to Wonder, from an active-negative passion, and into a passive-positive. This demanded a huge shift in energy level. Again, the use 0f body movements became my solution, as it reminded the muscle memory of the passion I had practiced inhabiting. This again proved the efficiency of Hill’s method and his Mazy Round, where imagination and bodily sensations go hand in hand.
Before I applied text to my set of passions, I practiced the transitions by using the passions’ pure energy level and expression. After these sessions, I often found myself dizzy and breathless, which made it evident again that a balance between nature and art is needed. On the other hand, when the energy level of the passion made me move in a way that I felt suited my stage expression, I didn’t attempt to control it - for instance when I started dancing in the phrase that is connected to Joy («And if he stays, I can’t retire»), because I considered it to add to the performance. As Vandenhoff expresses when he describes the unspoken contract between performer and audience: “If he be himself animated and energetic, his audience soon acknowledge a kindred spirit.”6And as the Mad Songs develops from the notion of women's tendency to be possessed by passions, I thought it also added to the madness in the expression.
Extremity
When executing the full song, I became aware of the need to experiment with different kinds of extremity. An example of this is the long passage of Grief towards the end of the song ("Alas, I fear my heart is fled, enslaved to love, and love in vain"). Here, I chose to let my Grief develop from being exaggerated and sobbing, into a more sincere and sober expression, addressed more to myself than the audience. This development was based on Charleton’s article on "Sighs and Tears." He states that Grief is accompanied by "Sighs, when the Grief is extreme: by Tears, when it is but moderate."7His description illustrates how the obvious exaggerated expression doesn’t always strengthen the extremity, as crying without tears indicates a deeper Grief. Whether this is perceived by the audience or not, will be up to the reader to observe. This way of playing with moments to address (or attack) the audience and moments to address myself, is something that became very evident when putting all the elements together. In later experiments, I would love to plan this more beforehand.
Making Mad Music
In my recording of the full Mad Song, I was lucky to have the harpsichordist, Agata Sorotokin with me. Upon recording, we had kept the planned musical structure to a minimum, as my intention was to base our interpretation on the effects of the embodied passions. In doing so, we experienced that this had a huge effect on the tempi. When singing "short sleep, deep sighs, Ah! Much I fear the inevitable time assign’d by fate (…)" the first time, with an underlying Melancholy followed by Fear, I experienced that I took a significantly faster pace than the second time, when the same text had underlying Wonder and Hope. This made the pace of the movements in the passions' influence on the musical interpretation very evident and made way for musically unpredictable phrasing.
Agata’s experiences
The effect that the embodied passions have on my co-musicians, is something I also would like to further investigate. My experience in this experiment was that this way of interpreting invites a spontaneous and unpredictable musical outcome but demands a deeper listening and musical availability from the musicians. Agata expressed that she experienced that the song, when knowing it portrayed a mad character, invited her to use historically informed word painting that contrasted with the lyrics: When accompanying the passage of embodied Grief, she was tempted to add an accompaniment with a bouncy quality, rather than the stretched and slow, as I wanted to emphasize. And rather than strengthening the painful expression with obvious minor chords, she chose major. These effects added to the complexity of the music, and to the madness, as it used “unmatching” elements. How this could have developed further, when approaching this topic more consciously, is something I would love to dive into in later projects.
VI.III Reflections and Conclusions
The Restoration Actresses’ Approach
The experiment of embodying made me conscious of the balance between my personal “stage personality,” and the historically informed stage presence. In aiming for deeper expressions, like Grief, I left room for my personal expression to shine through. This is also something I allowed for in the physical movement. As I have chosen not to use the historically informed gestures as a framework for my body language, I allowed for my own body language, influenced by the embodied passions, to direct my movements. Some might argue that this made the performance less historically informed, but since the repertoire makes room for the performer to free oneself from stylized gestures and encourages to push limits, maybe my interpretation makes the performance even more historically correct? The passions manifest in movement, and when it is not shaped by historical gestures, but rather historical perception and understanding of passions, it emphasizes another kind of informance: The Informance that starts from the inner cultural understanding and ideas in the time, rather than the outcome of it. Here, I want to draw a line to Anne Bracegirdle who truly used the presence of her own stage personality to deepen her performance of the mad roles and songs. By using my own recognisable body movements as an underlying conductor, I use the same technique as the Restoration Actresses, who, by having the base costume of an English Upper-class woman, plays with the audience’s references and creates sympathy by recognition. By then contradicting what is predictable, with fast emotional shifts and unmatching elements, the effect of the madness might become even more significant, and the connection between the performance and the audience’s perception even deeper.
The balance between recognisable and unpredictable elements, raises a further question: Should one go with the musical organic development, or against it in order to establish madness? Does the element of madness lay in the music or the performer? I believe there is not one answer to this question, as there is not one answer to how society interpreted madness in the 17th century either. When transferring the embodied passions to the song, I experienced that my musical interpretation was affected, but I also experienced that the music sometimes demanded a certain body setting, in order to be properly executed. Before I started my process of embodying, I matched the musical phrases and passions, sometimes in a way that I believed matched the lyrics and illustration by the composer, and sometimes in a way that contradicted. I believe therefore that the answer to the question of whether the element of madness lies in the music or the performer, is that this is something that can be varied and experimented within the same performance. The next step of this experimentation would be to test the perception of these choices on an audience, as I will continue to do, and partly have done already in my Professional Integration Activity and my artistic profession.
Having carried out this process of historically informed embodiment, I realise what a difference it would make to dive into it with a longer time perspective. Each time I practiced, I gained more control and consciousness of my bodily movements as well as my vocal sensations. Furthermore, I would like to emphasize the importance of starting from a healthy, open and flexible voice technique. My tendency has always been to cover up what I lack in technique with theatrical effects, which easily can be mistaken for being a true emotion. This habit is something I wish I had gotten rid of before this process. At the same time, the process has also been a way for me to confront it. Finally, this experiment has only made me want to delve even deeper into the understanding of authenticity in performance, and it has strengthened my belief that the historical sources are the way to go to achieve this.
Footnotes:
1: Vandenhoff 1846 p. 177.
2: Hill 1753, p. 357-62, Joy.
3: Vandenhoff 1846, preface, p. 18.
4: ibid p. 177.
5: Charleton 1701, article 20, p. 106, always a Consequent of Love.
6: Vandenhoff 1846, p. 177.
7: Charleton 1701, art. 57, p. 152-4, Sighs and Tears.