Thomas and I spent the week in Glasgow doing a six-day training intensive with Company of Wolves. The Wolves are a young company, with one ensemble-driven show under their belts and another in the works. They draw their training from a variety of sources including Song of the Goat (a Grotowski-descended Polish group,) Linklater voice technique, Katie Duck (a vocal and physical improvisation artist based in Amsterdam,) and various other esoteric sources ranging from Siberian singers to Scottish dance therapists. Company of Wolves is run by husband-and-wife team Ewan Downie and Anna Porubcansky.
It was a rigorous, fascinating, beautiful week. We rose before dawn every day (the sun doesn’t rise until around 9:00 in Glasgow in the winter) and took the bus to the National Theater of Scotland rehearsal room. There were 12 other people in our cohort, mostly from the UK. We ran every day—a strange run the Wolves have developed: flat-footed, soft-stepped, arms loose and dangling at the sides. Even though you work up a sweat, the run is remarkably relaxing, shaking tension out and the body into alignment through its action. We were often accompanied by a soft drumbeat. The Wolves are adamant about breathing through the mouth, believing that closed-mouth breathing holds in emotion. We were reminded many times to “let the breath go” and it did indeed come to feel like the difference between fully engaging, fully giving of yourself into the exercise, and holding back.
We sang every day. A mix of group improvisation vocal orchestras, vocal exercises and sounds, and a Chechen song in two part harmony which Anna taught the group. The song required a kind of open-channel shout singing that neither of us had ever done before. It’s a sound that comes up through the back of your skull, or so it feels, and then comes out like calling to the next mountaintop over. (It made us think of Kathleen Hanna.) Our voices felt used at the end of each day, like the vocal equivalent of jogging, new muscles warm and worked and happy. Our bodies felt engaged—not just worn out, because the training focused just as much on caring for yourself (stretching, massaging sore muscles, relaxation,) as on pushing yourself.
Another major focus of the training was on connection: connecting with other group members, caring for them, engaging with them, helping each other and cultivating attentiveness to each other. This took the form of instructions to make brief eye contact when you passed someone while running, or sometimes running in unison, and of partnering exercises, where you helped someone stretch or massaged out their muscles, or held their eye contact while crossing a room, or guided their physical impulses while their eyes were closed.
Here lives one of the deep threads that runs between the Wolves’ work and ours: connection and compassion for fellow ensemble members. Of course, a focus on training the performer body (which this week was really about) is a different thing than a focus on a certain devising culture (which, simply put, is what Applied Mechanics unites over,) although the Wolves also do use elements of their training in devising their shows. But I was struck by the focus on relationship—attentive, caring, deeply connected relationship—between participants; and by the emphasis on taking care of oneself and giving of oneself: a kind of simply and profound generosity, as a foundation for art-making. In these two particulars, we share an ethos with the Company of Wolves: theater of connection, theater of generosity.
All this is just the tip of the iceberg of what we learned in the rehearsal room, where we ran and sang and massaged and jumped and vocalized for seven hours every day for six days. We also met lots of wonderful artists, including a Gaulier-trained Englishman, a brilliant disabled Scottish dancer, and a Glasgow-based director of large-scale devised community projects. Anna and Ewan were super generous with us, arranging accommodations for both of us in Glasgow, introducing us to the excellent board game Carcassone, and generally making sure we were well-fed and well-drunk all week long. And we couldn’t have been there at all without the generosity of our Philadelphia community: Headlong paid for Thomas’s plane ticket and the Independence Foundation paid for mine, Allen Kuharski okayed me missing the first week of classes at Swarthmore so I could have this opportunity, and a bunch of Thomas’s friends all pitched in to raise money to fund his trip. The whole experience was a lesson in multifaceted human giving, capacity, and community.
It’s hard to explain why all that makes for better art, but I believe it does. Watching how these principles weave through the Wolves’ training was both fascinating and gratifying. And if I had any doubt that these deeply humane values fed artistic excellence, that doubt would’ve been obliterated on the day Thomas spoke text from Franny and Zooey in the workshop: everyone in the room was frozen in space and he was running among us, flatfooted, soft-stepped, arms loose, mouth gently open, and when he received the instruction to speak, his voice rang out, smoother and clearer than I’ve ever heard it in six years of working closely together on performance, and it shot into the hearts of everyone in the room and I believed everything he said, and all the soul within it, and understood again but in big new ways what a powerful, beautiful artist my friend is.