Berkoff Style

This Unit we are exploring physical theatre, acting and the style of practitioner Steven Berkoff. In five mins with Steven Berkoff, he describes how he sees himself first and foremost as an actor, as it allows him to play and experiment with theatre. This is seen in the different influences for his work- Plays such as East and West take inspiration from the poetic style of Shakespeare and plays such as Metamorphosis are adaptions of other writer’s works. 

He also takes inspiration from other actors and practitioners. Edmund Kean (1787-1833) performed Shakespeare and had a flair for melodrama. This may have had an impact on the exaggerative style of Berkoff. Jaques Le Coq and his pupil Claude Chagrin studied alongside Berkoff. Le Coq’s use of mime, movement, masks and ensemble are all characteristics that can be seen in Berkoff’s work.

Berkoffs style almost works to strip down a work and centre it on movement and experimentation of voice. He places these two things above the actual words of a script in importance, which is generally opposite to that of traditional theatre.

Articles on his style seem to put a focus on Total Theatre, a practice which upholds that every aspect of theatre must have a purpose and seeks also to create extreme moods.

In our introduction to style, we focused on exploring exaggerated physicality and the influence of mime on his work. First we experimented with replicating extreme physicality by passing faces around the group. This forced us to focus on the details of the other persons face and the specifics of how the face was created through the mouth and eyebrows in particular. We also looked at body language, using the simple idea of moving our body along the line of a circle in order to quickly create expression through the face and body.

What was interesting about this experimentation was not the physicality itself but how easy it was to build a character out of it. The expression on your face could physically affect the way your voice sounded, but it also effected the way you thought of a character. So for example, a characters whose face was turned down and their body hunched over was likely to make more drawn out sounds in a lower pitch. The body language also had a great impact on the way that you moved.

One of Berkoffs other main techniques is the use of strict and definite movement. One of the influences of this is mime, and we explored the challenges of this style in the act of setting a table. With this exercise I found that we often thought we were being more defined than we actually were.

 

 

With mime, it is important that the artist understands the exact dimensions of the surfaces or objects that they are pretending to use. So for example you can see within our piece that during the laying of the cloth the table appears quite thin, whilst later when we set it we place thing much further apart. This is a result of us standing the right distance apart for the table, but not factoring in that or arms should only reach to the edge. This seems like a minor detail, but with the positioning that we use it becomes very obvious to the audience. Equally the throwing of the cloth at 0:45 lacks the understanding of how far the cloth we throw would go and how you would have to catch it.

On the other hand, I feel like my movements during the repeated actions were defined in the sense that there was no differences from one to the other. The detail of making sure my hands stayed the same distance apart or by polishing in the same way made it appear that I was laying real objects.

I think the problem with this came in the disparity not between our own movements, but that which existed when comparing each others.