Laban Effort Work

In today's session we did a mini-workshop on Laban efforts in order to increase the depth of our characterisations. This work aided to connect our bodies with our interpretations of our characters through tapping in to their physical traits. As an actor who works through the body a lot I really find Laban efforts useful and use them with nearly every character I create. However with Jeffrey Skilling at the beginning of the process I could never really find the right effort to match. In this session though I believe by combing a few efforts I started to find where I embody these throughout my journey through the play. I had already worked with Laban efforts before so here's a link to a post I made my I first started using them:

http://samjohnsonexperimental.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/laban-efforts.html

We were taken through all the different efforts one by one blending them into each other by playing with the different "rules". It was really useful instead of stopping to intellectualise and attempt the effort to just move through it.  This meant I didn't have time to stop and thinking about how the effort should look or feel I just did it. This is what allowed me to be truly exploitative and discover uninhibited by my own brain.

In this session I discovered that during the parts where my mind wanders i.e. when I'm counting money I can use flick. It's a physical way to embody Skilling's slight skatter brain. He's always thinking of the next big thing, the next investment the latest million dollar idea so his attention is sometimes yanked away from what he is doing. Through exploring flick I found that those qualities are definitely present within this Laban effort. To take this to the next level I can now play with this scene going extreme with flick so I get it into my body and then turning down when I do it for real. That way my muscle memory will take me to the place my impulse wants me to go moreover creating further depth to this scene.

There were lot's of other moments I could use Laban efforts in. The moment when I'm walking across the moving tables I should think about gliding instead of slow motion walking. When I'm delivering my testimony to win the battle of Enron I should be thinking about the physicality I found through punch. However the most important discovery I could apply is using wring for when I'm admitting to Andy that Enron is not making any money. I don't even have to do anything physically it's just what's happening in my inner life. It's physically painful and embarrassing for Skilling to ask for help in that scene and to have that imagined wringing going on inside of myself with help me root to his emotions.

Overall this session yielded some great results when it came to deepening my level of characterisation. At this point in the process I feel nearly 99% connected to Skilling and just finding these little extra details to add on to making him a three dimensional person is what is going that 1% up.