The Great Acting Blog: “Man In A Box”

This is what I’ve been doing all week: improvising in this 4 foot high box for a new installation by artist Gail Pickering, which will play at the Purcell Room on March 3rd, and then tour. For my part in the installation, I will be placed in an attic space at the Purcell Room which is only 4 feet high (hence the box in the pic, which is intended as a mock-up of the real room for rehearsal purposes), and play out a scene we have been creating through these improvisations. Further, my performance will be filmed and simultaneously screened for the Purcell Room audience, so essentially, it’s a “filmed-live-performance” that the audience will be seeing.

The rehearsals are extremly demanding, although progress is being made. In form, I enter the box and improvise continually for 30 minutes whilst being filmed (largely in close-up although the camera does move to points of interest, as when I do something interesting with my hands for example), it’s as it would be on the night then. We don’t want any expository narrative in the piece, for example; a man imprisoned, or a man contemplating why he is in the space, but neither do we want the action to be about boredom or trying specifically to fill time, and we don’t want it to be about the space itself , as in; “oh look at me, I’m stuck in this strange space”, infact, the strangeness of the space is beside the point. What we do want is something objectless but also with object, lacking self-consciousness or introspection, something almost child-like in the sense of being active but whose actions lack a broader meaning, they are of themselves.

And trying to find that right action has been a real challenge. The box itself has had a strange effect on me, during my very first improvisation in there, I felt like a caveman or a savage and the camera seemed extremely hostile, at other times the box has seemed like a prison, intimidating and inhibiting. However, I made a big breakthrough yesterday and felt, for the first time, that I had found something concrete in the improvisation, something truthful which served the piece. I know when I’m onto something because I become properly active, more intense, I work up a sweat, and I long to work because I have a sense of what the performance needs to be. Up until that point however, I am in misery.

Performance details as follows:-