Psychological Gesture

Today I had a massive break through. In this session we did work around finding a psychological gesture for our characters. I'd studied PG before but never found a point of practical application. However today after we did the exercise I now understand why it's such a useful tool.

To create a psychological gesture (Ben's adapted method) you need to answer 3 questions:

1. What does my character want in the play? 
2. How does my character get what they want? 
3. How does my character interact with the world? 

In relation to these questions you create and refine a gesture. So for the first one I know my super objective is to change the world. So I played around with finding a movement that encompassed this. This eventually evolved into me making the circle of the globe with my hands and arms then feeling the weight of it when I reached the bottom. Then for how does my character get what they want I imagined Skilling climbing the corporate ladder so I placed my hands on the individual rungs. Then finally for the third question even if I don't want to believe it I know Skilling manipulates the world around him. So I came up with a gesture that encompassed that. The final element was to put all three of these gestures together and find away of flowing one into the other. This would eventually created one strong gesture that embodied all of these questions. There was suddenly a point where it just clicked and the gesture was born. 

I just felt such a strong connection to Skillings inner life in my centre when I started doing the gesture and I would start to feel all most instantly in character. As someone who is so far away from the character in real life it can sometimes take a little but of warming up before I feel completely in character. However now as soon as I do the gesture I just feel 100% there. It's like it instantaneously kick starts my engine and I'm ready to go. I can connect with the given circumstances, my physicality and my imagined landscape all in one gesture. 

This session has been so important to my development. I can now do this PG before I go on stage, during the warm up or whenever I need to feel a little more connected to Skilling in my rehearsals. During the section just before we start doing side stretch and we are repeating "flat back and wide" I will employ this psychological gesture so I'm ready to go straight into being Skilling from the jump. The only fear I have is the more I use it the weaker it might be come; I must make sure it remains to be as an effective of tool as the first time I truly discovered the gesture.