Action Theater is an improvisational physical theater training and performance method created by Ruth Zaporah.

The practice of Action Theater incorporates the disciplined exploration of embodied exercises that lead to increased skills of strong, clear, spontaneous, and artful communication.

Action Theater addresses and expands the vocabularies of expression including: movement, vocalization, and speech. Action Theater is a tool to examine one's perceptive and responsive process, bringing awareness to and thereby disempowering distracting thoughts of self obsessions, fears, judgments and analysis.

The exercises of Action Theater isolate the components of action - time, space, shape and energy -- so they can be examined, experienced, and altered in order to expand the expressive palette. Students increase their ability to hold and express emotion, dance with their own poetry and recover lost personal material. Composition, listening and relationship are deconstructed to be reassembled with greater awareness. Acting from a sense of play, students are encouraged to venture into transpersonal realms, accessing intelligence more encompassing and boundless than their personal experience.

Awareness and play are fundamental to the practice, as both are portals to spontaneous imagination. Within this orientation, the student is no longer bound by the conventional interpretations of reality. They are free to roam throughout the grand spectrum of possibilities, discovering who they are in the moment. Every exercise acts as a mirror, reflecting back to the student their patterns and flights of freedom.

Action Theater is also a performance method, although many of the practitioners come from other performance forms or walks of life. Fundamental to the practice of Action Theater is an embodied presence in performance, where the experiencing of the body informs the content of the moment, moment by moment. For example: how the hand, experiencing the hand, reaching for the glass is as important as reaching for the glass in order to drink from it. Intention is created simultaneously with action in the moment of performance. This awareness in action invites the possibilities of freshness intrinsic to improvisational performance. The Action Theater method offers a map, a way to proceed. The trainings are appropriate for the novice, the explorer and the professional.

A way to proceedRuth Zaporah

Action Theater is an improvisational training process that brings participants into the present. Skills of movement, sound and language are honed and then integrated into a complete expression of one's current experience. Over the years, my own performance intention has evolved. Concurrently, so has my teaching. In the beginning, my professional work was separate from my daily life. I would shift into roles that were seemingly unrelated. However, now I experience them as being one and the same process, One of Action Theater's intentions is to detail perception by expanding awareness-to be aware of the energy and tension in the body, to let feelings and imagination connect with the conditions of the body and to become who we are at that moment, to meet ourselves from the inside out. Several times each year I teach a three- or four-week training. I'm currently working on a book that describes one such training, each chapter representing one day. Simultaneously, and interactively, the book explores the nature of mind and behavior. This article follows one day of the training. A Night Drive: Bright, glaring lights. Red. No red. Red. No red. White, always white. Squint. Face crumbles. Dry skin. Relax shoulder. Lift spine. Wipers (tack-shooshoo-tack-tack tack-shooshoo-tack-tack). Rain. Wet air. Thought: maybe small audience, too wet cold. Boyd, collapse, blood coursing, breath fast. Chest tight. Turn key. Quiet. Pull hard handle. Twist, turn. Pull coat up. Snap door. Step step step. Concrete over earth over rock over fire. Cold metal. Pull door. Ahh! Theater. Comfort. Quiet. Familiar protection. Soft muscles. Breathe even. Breathe. Audience chatter, muffled words, laughter. Large living body. A pulse. Mine. Fast. Very fast. Body, small, hungry, contained fire energy. Black curtain between the stage and me. Pace, to the window, to the curtain, to the window, to the curtain. Tongue on lips. Already dry. Fear. Tight chest. Hand pulls at curtain. Step, step, step toward small spot on stage. Heart fast. Breathe. Breathe. Hot body bursting open. Still. Hold still. Stay still. Thought: Now is the time to die. Die! To Water. Fall back back back. Down into body. Into flesh and evolution. Mouth, lips draw back. Opens. Laughter. Our mind has the capacity to, and, if allowed, does shift the object of its attention in irreverent ways. We can move from thought to feeling to sensation to imagining to remembering to sound to thought to taste to vision to thought and on and on. The less we control, thereby inhibit, and the more we watch and listen, the freer our mind is to play with its vast assortment of stuff. On the other hand, when we're thinking about what to do next, we're missing out on the present moment. We aren't in our bodies, i.e., we're no longer aware of the information coming in through our senses. We lose the present moment because our attention is focused on the future one. When we reach the future, our actions, thought up in the past, are no longer relevant. While we were thinking, our environment changed. We can only think up what is already familiar to us. If it is already familiar, then our actions will lack freshness. What is freshness? Fresh material is material that comes as a surprise. It results from an exchange between body, imagination and memory. There's a direct link between the three. If our attention is one the sensations of the body, that awareness may elicit memory, feeling and imagination. It all happens at once, no particular starting point.

The practices of Action Theater offer a way to proceed that lead to this experience of spontaneous expression. Experience evolves. In the physical world, there's continuous change. Change occurs at speeds varying from lightning fast to leaves-turning-brown slow. Often change strikes without warning. Sometimes it happens incrementally, step by step. And sometimes change transpires so slowly that it looks like there's been no change at all. Since we're part of the physical world, we're continuously changing, too. We change our minds, what we're doing and how we're feeling. We might change in an instant, shift from one state or condition to another. It's not always apparent why. But there's always an inner motivation, a bridge that ties one experience to another. When we change gradually, step by step, or evolve, we transform. It's apparent how one state or condition

moves into another. It might appear that we aren't changing at all. In such cases, change proceeds subtly, under the surface. During this type of change, by engaging with the action we are already in, we develop it. Modes of change are: 1. Shift-stop the action and do something else (either logically or illogically). 2. Transform-change the action incrementally until it becomes something else. 3. Develop-continue the action.Within this particular paradigm of change, there are no other choices. All events, actions, and situations either shift, transform or develop.

Imagine a situation where all three modes of change occur at the same time. For instance, I am talking on the telephone while cooking oatmeal on the stove. During the course of the conversation, my feelings gradually change. I move from contentment, step by step (transform). The oatmeal gets too hot and threatens to burn. I stir more rapidly and, in a panic, I yank the pot from the stove (shift). All this while, I remain on the phone (develop).

Shift, transform and develop offer ways to proceed that respond to awareness rather than thought. All offer ways to perceive and respond to change. On the particular day of the training described in this article, we are focusing on the process of shifting.

FALLING LEAVES/ROCK

With Movement

Stand somewhere in the room. Close your eyes. Watch your breath. Place your attention somewhere in your body that specifically senses breath: the base of your nose, diaphragm or abdomen. Observe the experience of the breath as it comes in and goes out. Watch the pause between each breath.

I'm going to call our words to you that describe natural phenomena. You'll have approximately 8 to 10 minutes to explore each one. These phenomena "move" in a particular way. They timing, how they travel through space, their weight, shape and dynamic are peculiar to them. As you imagine each phenomenon, explore movement within its inherent qualities. Don't pantomime, or act out, or its inherent qualities. Don't pantomime, or act out, or pretend that you are the phenomenon itself. Freely explore motion within the movement quality the image evokes.

Falling leaves. Electricity. Rock. Lightning. Mud. Thunder. Gentle breezes.

As you are moving, allow whatever feelings, thoughts, attitudes or states of mind that come into your awareness to affect what you are doing-the tension of your body, expression on your face, gaze of your eyes. Don't hold onto naything or make a story. Let experiences come and go as a constant flux. Your imagination responds freely to your body's actions. Now, I'll be calling out the changes in erratic time increments. Rock. Falling Leaves. Whirlpool. Lightning. Thunder.

Tornado. Electricity. Rock. Electricity. Rock. Falling leaves. Rock. Electricity. Mud.

In the next few moments, associate with one or two people in the room and continue to explore these qualities but in relation to one another. You may both be moving with the same quality, or different. Now your choices are responses not only to your inner impulses but your partner's behavior as well.

With Sound

Again, I will call out these nouns. Now, explore vocal sound and movement actions that have the qualities you associate with the words you hear. Experience sound and movement as a single action. They start at the same time and stop at the same time. They carry the same feeling and energy.

With Dialogue

Stand facing a partner and begin a conversation. Again, I will call out these nouns. When you hear them, assume the quality of energy in your body that these words suggest. Don't add any extra movement. Stand fairly still. These energies will affect your voice, feelings, attitudes and even the content of your language. As you hear me say each new noun, shift to the appropriate energy while maintaining the content of the conversation.

Falling Leaves/Rock is shift exercise. Students change abruptly from one psycho-physical state to another. This is not pantomime. To pantomime a rock, one might curl up in an oddly shaped ball, lay on the floor and not move, thereby pretending to be something other than oneself. In Falling Leaves/Rock, rather than going outside themselves to imitate a phenomenon, students go inside themselves to find the various states of body-mind resonant with the qualities of that phenomenon. For instance, an inner quality of "rockness" can manifest in a variety of ways: one can walk with rock-like demeanor; discuss friendship with an impersonal, analytical, steely, rock-like containment; wipe his/her brow with a hard, cold, impenetrable rock-like demeanor; discuss friendship with an impersonal, analytical, steely rock-like persona. One might chew in time to leaves falling, talk about sleep in thunder voice or spin in circles with electric energy. These manifestations may range from the ordinary and identifiable to un-nameable yet coherent mind-body states.

At first, as students embody these energies, predictable feelings or states of mind arise. Thunder energy elicits rage; electricity, madness; leaves falling, peacefulness; mud, sensuality; lightning, aggression, etc. As students repeatedly play in these energies, the mind states that are released from each energy form become less predictable and more surprising, less nameable and more knowable.

Later in this training, more practiced students are prepared to approach the ordinary with extra-ordinary awareness. Rather than hearing "rock" as a limitation, they explore rock with a mind open to sensation, feelings and imagination. "Rockness" opens an avenue into hidden personal realms, into the "rockness" living inside. From this perspective, they explore their own particular universe.

We don't use the word "character" in Action Theater. Sometimes we say "entity" or "physical presence." Or we say "being." "Character" is a confining concept. It asks us to be someone other than who we are. A someone that can be describes, "a cranky judge," "a bored wife," a "hard-talking waitress." Instead, we manifest a vast array of entities,

parts of ourselves that may be, up until then, hidden in our psyches. We build upon the uncovered components to create "beings" that are whole and complete.

In order to express ourselves in detail, we must know and control our body and mind: we must become still and empty, a blank screen on which we project the nature our psyches. The detailed perception that we acquire through awareness is reflected by detailed expression. The following exercises lead students toward physical awareness, a first step toward controlling the body.

Shape

How do we know our bodies? As an instrument to perform daily tasks, such as picking up things, moving from place to place, throwing, kicking and squeezing. As a tender or tough wrapper to be protected and nourished, fed, covered up, rested, exercised and, on occasion, medicated or repaired. As a source of information, full of stories, mysteries and ancient truths. And do we know our bodies as an instrument of communication? How aware are we of what it is saying? Do we recognize its capability for infinite design and meaning?

SHAPE ALPHABET

I'm going to call out the letters of the alphabet, A through Z very quickly. As you hear each letter, form its shape with your body.

"A B C D E F G H I J K L………………………………………………………….Z"

Now, take a partner. Again, I'm going to call out the letter of the alphabet, and with your partner, without talking, and especially without laughing, form the letters together. Both of your bodies forming one letter. Concentrate!

"A B C D E F G H I J K L…………………………………………………………..Z"

Shape Alphabet encourages students to see themselves from the outside. It helps them determine if their body shape reflects their intention (in this case, making the letter A). Also, if it relates to their environment-their partner's shape. Watching others and themselves, in trial and error, trained the performer's outside eye. They learn to make images that precisely fit their experience. The small turn of a finger, tilt of the head, inversion of the foot, or the glance of the eyes can completely alter the meaning of a shape. This kind of visual acuity, creating images, is a basic performance skill.

Shape/Shape/Reshape

Get a new partner. A makes a shape, any shape. B makes a different shape and places it in relation to A's shape. Then A steps out of his/her shape and reshapes in relation to B's shape. Then B steps out and reshapes in relation to A's shape. Do this slowly and smoothly so that you step out of one shape and reform into the next shape without stopping, going into neutral, thinking, deciding, planning or creating. Don't touch each other. Don't put weight on each other, because then the other won't be able to change shape. As you do this, I'm going to suggest directions from time to time. Design your shapes accordingly.

Spacious! Constricted! Tight! . . . Angular, twisted, knotted! . . . Circular, round, arched! . . . Complex, detailed! . . .

Fill your shapes with feeling or attitude. Begin to speed up varying the quality of your shapes-work within the same

quality as your partner, or sometimes different. Vary your timing. Increase your speed until you are moving percussively from shape to shape, responding impulsively to each other's shapes and meanings. We'll repeat a portion of this exercise with one half of the group watching the other.

When students begin to work with feelings, context, story and meaning, they may distract themselves away from physical awareness. In this training, we move back and forth between exercises that elicit feelings, content and spirit (e.g., "Falling Leaves/Rock") and exercises that focus primarily on kinetic and sensory awareness (e.g. Shape exercises). With practice, the separation fades and body, mind and spirit integrate within awareness.

With awareness and experience, we can choose movement, sound and/or speech simultaneously or separately with clarity. Each mode has its capabilities and limitations; what we can say with one we can't exactly say with another.

In the Falling Leaves/Rock exercise, students were directed both when to shift and what to shift to (content). In the following exercise students are only directed when to shift. They explore their own content choices. Later in the training, with no director, students shift on their own as one way to proceed in improvisation.

DIRECTOR/ACTOR

With Movement

In partners. One of you is "director," one of you is "actor." Director, you can say one word only, and that word is "shift." Actor, when you hear the word "shift," you change your mind, stop doing what you're doing and do something else that is immediately relevant and of contrasting form from what you just were doing. If what you were just doing was upright, stationary and slow, the next form might be traveling and jerky, and low to the floor. This shift happens abruptly, a sudden switch. When you hear the word, "shift," stay inside yourself and respond to whatever you are aware of at that moment: the feeling you currently have, something you see, hear, touch, fantasize or think. Pretend you are nuts, mad, crazy, free to irrationally change your mind. Be passionate, dramatic, ordinary, un-ordinary.

Director, play with your timing. You can say "shift" rapidly, you can say "shift" slowly. Let the person stay in their material for longer periods.

When you have completed this exercise, have a chat with each other. Director, tell the actor how you experienced their range of feeling as well as action. Was there contrast? Was the actor "connecting" to what they were doing?

Repeat this exercise, changing roles.

With Sound & Movement

Change partners and repeat this sequence, but now, shift with sound and movement.

Again, have a discussion and reverse roles.

With Language

Change partners again and repeat the sequence with verbal monologues, shifting both the form (how the language articulates-timing, volume, sound quality, pitch, etc.) and the content (choice of words, subject matter). For now, don't concern yourself with movement. When you hear "shift," react to whatever comes into your awareness. Stay in your body, your source of energy and information. Remember, you're out of your mind.

The director in this exercise is not a care-taker. Their job is not to pull the actor out of tough situations. Their job is to facilitate the "stretching" of the actor, even if that means the actor squirms uncomfortable. Squirming is a good thing. As good as anything else.

Unfortunately, a person can get lost in squirming. They lose their awareness, their outside eye, and don't even know they're squirming. They judge squirming as "bad." Then they experience pain, any kind of pain that goes along with "doing bad."

Converting squirming from a bad, uncomfortable thing into simply another thing takes practice. Awareness has to be tuned. Sensations in all part of the mind and body need to be noted: what does squirming feel like? How does it move? Breathe? What's its timing, tension? With this awareness, there's no more squirming, jut a particular condition that can't even be called anything. Un-nameable yet knowable.

Listening

Say, "How are you?" Now say, "How are you? And listen to yourself. Can you create a score of the words with a line drawing? If a line represents each word, would the melody and the timing look like this, _ z _ , or this, _ _ _ _ , or this z _ _ ? Say, "How are you?" with a different meaning. What does the line look like now?

The next time you talk on the telephone, have a pencil and paper ready to score the sound of the language you hear. Distance yourself from the content so that you can listen to the sound without interpretation. The content of words often clouds awareness, leaving the listener somewhat deaf, dumb and blind. Score the language as you hear it. Each word may give a rise or a drop or a stutter.

From a quiet mind and body comes control, comes awareness. A quiet mind is a good listener. It's free from impediments such as personal agendas, preferences, criticisms, ideas, opinions and thinking ahead. Just as a quiet mind listens, listening quiets the mind.

TWO UP/TWO DOWN

I've set two chairs out. Two people sit in the chairs, and two other people stand up behind them. The rest of us will be audience. The two people sitting on the chairs will initiate material. The two people standing up will echo (repeat). During the course of the exercise, the initiators can each offer up to three lines, a line being a sentence or a phrase. Each one of these lines must be radically different from one another-the voice quality, volume, pitch, speed, content. Once initiated, the line can be repeated by the initiator as many times as they want. In addition, the initiators can choose to echo each other's lines. The people standing can only echo the lines that they've heard. They must echo them exactly. All of you collaborate on the sound composition. Listen to each other. Play off each other. You are a chorus.

Reverse roles. The two sitting, stand. The two standing sit.

Here students focus on the sound patterns of their language. No fancy techniques is needed. No perfected voice. No years of training. They have all the equipment they need: ears and willingness. They interact like jazz musicians composing a score from the sounds of everyday language.

When we were children, we changed our minds on a dime. We were experts on change and great shifters. We'd cry one minute and laugh the next. We'd take seriously what was or wasn't serious, and we "listened" without distraction to anything that called our attention. We believed in what we were doing. That's what shift is all about.

Zaporah, Ruth,: "A Way To Proceed," Contact Quarterly , Fall 1991, pp. 10-16. This article follows one day in a typical Action Theater training.

IMPROVISATION IN PERFORMANCE: a discussion with Barbara Dilley, Nancy Stark Smith and Ruth Zaporah

In July, 1990, the Movement Studies Program of The Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, hosted a series of seminars with their summer faculty. What follows is an excerpt from the panel discussion with Barbara Dilley (moderating), and guest faculty Nancy Stark Smith and Ruth Zaporah.

BARBARA DILLEY: I'd like to welcome both these ladies, who have taught here at Naropa before; Nancy for many years and Ruth for the third time. I would like to ask them about the relationship between improvisation and performance.

NANCY STARK SMITH: Ruth and I had a really interesting discussion after our performance last year. We realized we didn't have the same assumptions about what it meant to improvise in performance. I think it had something to do with autonomy, with the choices that you make as an improvisor in performance, and it had to do with physical contact. Simone Forti was also in the performance and she's familiar with contact improvisation, but also with physical contact in general in performance. We had talked about a few rules: we weren't going to talk in the performance, and we weren't going to get into physical contact, or was it contact improvisation? We immediately got into both. I don't know it I can sum this up, but it had something to do with the ability to continue to make your own choices when you improvise with others, and when you make physical contact with someone, in what way are you directing them or making them have to play your game. How do you work with each other's material? When are going to far? When are you making decisions for your partner? When are you boxing them in? And when are you too distant? When are you just sort of not relating to each other?

Barbara: In the work I've been doing this summer I've thought a lot about this because I see it happening in any kind of improvisational situation. What is the commitment that people believe they have to make as soon as they establish a relationship with someone in an improvisational environment? What do we bring to that commitment that is extraneous, conventional, social and personal history... all those things come up for me. I think it really has to ve addressed because improvisational forms need to have a broader vocabulary. For instance, when there is a strong contact improvisation vocabulary among a group of students, that tends to be what open improvisation becomes, because that is the most familiar vocabulary. I think there are a lot of improvisational vocabularies and that there could be some goal of expanding the vocabularies.

Nancy: Is an improvisational form a language? How doe we cross languages? How do we communicate with each other when/if we're working in a different language? Ruth?

RUTH ZAPORAH: I think that if you're improvising with another person you're in a relationship. What applies to improvisational relationship is the same as applies to any relationship, no matter what the form of exchange is. I see that there is a common language that we all struggle with. Any of us who have been in relationship know the struggles and the challenges that relationship presents to us. And those same challenges present themselves to me if I am improvising a performance with another person. There's a kind of relationship, that some of you might be familiar with, where all the time that you're together you're talking about your relationship. Or there's another kind of relationship that is like carpenters building a house. Here they're not arguing about what kind of nails to buy. Their focus is on building this house. It's not about their relationship. They're past that place already. The kind of improvisation that I like, that I have preference to do with other people, is where it's about building the house. It's not about are we gonna build it may way or are we gonna build it your way.

Barbara: But wouldn't you had to have sat down and talked about what kind of house you wanted to build before you started to build it? If you are taking about protocol of relationship and improvisation, there has to be some kind of social form. You have to introduce one another and find out what you're interested in and try to articulate the kind of house you would like to build together.

Ruth: That can be. And sometimes you just wing it and dive in. Sometimes I have dived in with people and it's like a castle gets built. It's about our mind energies kind of cooking. And at other times it's about us never getting a house built because we're always blocking each other, countering each other, pulling stuff away from each other, manipulating each other.

Voice: If you're both hired on to make a house and Ruth is an experienced wood carpenter and every house Nancy has ever made she built out of stone, then there is a language problem. Then you need to move back out of boards and move back out of stones and just move into putting things together; letting go of the language of boards and letting go of the language of stones and finding a more primitive level.

Ruth: Could you not build a house of stone and board? There's something under the stone and the board which has to do with intention. If my intention is to be in control then I'm going to get stuck in the stone and board routine. If my intention is to take whatever resources are available in a positive and accepting way without resistance, control, or manipulation, then whatever resources are available end up building this crazy kind of house.

Barbara: I think that you have to have some conversation–set up some rehearsal environment. What is the common modality? Whether it's sitting-around-the-table-having-coffee rehearsal or whether it's actually spending months mushing around in the space and getting to the most difficult places of your self-consciousness or of your boredom or of your irritations, or whatever, with the process, then moving beyond that and having that as a basis for improvisational material.

Nancy: the Grand Union dance/performance collective was a great example of very different materials coming to bear in a dance/theatre improvisational situation, which I enjoyed tremendously. In their work I saw a lot of "blocking" and "countering" going on. I think when you have those difficulties it does drive you down into what is more fundamental–‘What is performance? What are you doing?', rather than ‘Is this improvised or isn't this improvised'.

Voice: Do you have a specific definition of improvisation?

Nancy: There is a full spectrum. It isn't one thing. Even when you say ‘totally open improvisation', that's relative. I mean, you've got your tools, you've got your assumptions, and you've got your setup. There are some people who might make an improvised piece that has some very specific guidelines: they're going to work with this image for five minutes, then they're going to shift to this, and then this person is going to come in. They set up a structure of some kind, whether it's an idea, or a personnel structure of who's going to do what with whom; or who's going to be where; and is there going to be music? Besides that, they don't know how they are going to work, what's going to happen. Everything between really set movement to utterly no plan. But you have all your history of your way of working. That's a lot. I used to think that when I went out to do contact improvision that I didn't know what was going to happen. Well, I didn't know what dynamic would happen; I didn't know what kind of relationship would happen. But there was a lot I did know that I didn't even realize I knew, that I was assuming.

Zaporah, Ruth, "Improvisation in Performance," Contact Quarterly , Summer/Fall 1992, pp. 43- 46, a discussion between Ruth Zaporah, Nancy Stark Smith and Barbara Dilley. All masters in their own forms of physical performance, these three share some ideas.

Some Notes on ContentFrom an Action Theater training in Roccatederighi, Italy

By Ruth Zaporah

I have taught close to fifty month-long trainings. Maybe more. With each training I hope for insight, new ideas, but more important, excitement. I'm not yet prepared to hang up my hat, but I will when I begin to only repeat myself. I'm intent on uncovering the keys to the machinery of improvisation. How exactly does it work? What does it run on, what fuels it? Do the concepts of efficiency, reality, authenticity apply? In this writing, I use the word "improvisation" to refer to the form Action Theater. There are many forms of improvisation. Each is compromised of different requests and intentions, rules and requirement. Yet each also is built upon the relationship between awareness, imagination and action. This past June, I taught a month training in Roccatederighi, Italy. I will share with you some insights that I had while working there. They're not new idea. But the way I hold them now takes me even more directly into the intrigues of improvisation. On the twelfth day of the training, I began to think about relationship. It seemed that the material of our improvisations is nothing more than our relationship to the material of our minds, whether that be sensations, thoughts, fantasies or feelings. The task of the Action Theater performer is to express not just actions alone but his or her relationship to the actions at the moment of discovery. This is true for all actions-physical, speech or vocalization. How is the performer experiencing the action at the time they are doing it? They communicate this information through the expression of their face, the tension in their body, and the focus and energy emanating through their eyes. Here's what I mean: Assign yourself a simple gesture. Maybe wave your hand. Pay attention to exactly how you do this, because you will be repeating it over and over again in just that same way. Now each time you repeat the gesture, shift the focus of your eyes, from down, to up, to sideways, to diagonal. Now, change the expression of your face, or the tension of your body each time. See how the meaning of the action changes. It feels different, doesn't it? Ask a friend to do the same thing so that you can observe or read the changes of content. We talk about actions as being "abstract" or "concrete." Actions are a manifestation of the relationship between time, shape, space, dynamics and, or course, the body. An abstract actions illustrates only these formal elements. A concrete action not only contains these elements, but also carries information about the performer. Through the expression of feeling, emotion, image, or story we are invited into their imagination. The action itself does not define its abstractness or concreteness. This is determined by the auxiliary information provided by the performer. Take, for example, the word "house." It can be abstract or ambiguous if the performer does not bring meaning if the performer does not fill the entire actions with content specific to the moment by, again, how they do it. Is the actor happy to be clapping? Sorry to be clapping? Feeling obliged to clap? Some performance modes rely primarily on form to state their case. Here, action-whether it is dance or the spoken word-is abstracted from sotry, dislodged from any identifiable context. We can't assign meaning other than in formal terms: time, space, shape, dynamics, composition, relationship. Rituals are also an example. Here, the performer becomes subordinate to the act. It is the act itself that carries meaning, either as symbol or metaphor. When I work with new students, their improvisations are often ritualistic. Their faces are non-expressive and their actions lack detail and specificity. They appear to be entranced by whatever it is that they're doing but I, the audience, am left out of their experience or inner story. I noticed when I invited students to play with their relationship to action, they were more likely to improvise with increased liveliness, focus and commitment. Their attention was diverted from how they were filling moments to how they were experiencing them. The word "play" is so overused that I hesitate to contribute to its thinning. Yet I can't think of a better word to describe my experience of improvising. Frivolity if often associated with play. As is childishness, silliness, and inconsequentiality. However, I think play is the most apt description of what it feels like to be improvising. With practice and insight, the improviser experiences the manifestations of their body and mind, i.e., sensation, thought , imaginings, feeling, memory and intuition, as separate from themselves. They've gained the capability to distinguish the perceiver from themselves. They've gained the capacity to distinguish the perceiver from what is

being perceived. This releases them from all identifications. Now the improviser has choice. They can either merge into the material or not. What a relief!! No longer is the improviser held hostage by their story: that habitual material that continues to surface year after year. They are now free to respond to all stimuli as they see fit. With this insight, one becomes both forgiving and amused with the complexities on oneself-a self seen as a conglomeration of inherited and enculturated patterns of perception and behavior. A complex system that just happened to come together as it did. How could one take hits so seriously? Hence the word "play." The body and mind offer a treasure chest of enticements that ask to be illuminated, danced with, sung, spoken and shared. A responsibility comes with this advantage. Self-awareness leads to a collective orientation. What binds us all together is the understanding that we are all reeling from the identifications that we constantly make: "This is who I am. That is who you are." As soon as I realize that the imaginings of my mind and my observing self are not one and the same, then neither are yours. How can we do not feel comraderie for one another when we're all wrestling with illusion? As improvisers, this understanding frees us up tremendously. We can experience our bodies and minds as musical instruments like pianos, or puzzles, like intricately fitted aspects of the whole of life. All to be explored, toyed with, decorated, exposed, and with curiosity and practice, mastered. An Action Theater improvisation has content. The improvisers unveil a story. Now, this story may be odd, a nonlinear event, similar to a dream, that erupts from the imagination of the improvisers. Mastery occurs when the improviser, well-oriented in their body, also follows the content of the improvisation, whether that content is expressing itself through movement, speech or vocalization. In the third week of the training, I began reviewing content. In Action Theater, content plays a big part; there is story to every moment of action. But where does the story come from? It seemed that there are four tracks of attention going on. One track is sensory information entering by way of sight, hearing, touch, kinesthesia, tasting. Another track is the improvisor's inner dialogue: what they're thinking, feeling, imagining, saying to themselves. The third track is the collective narrative of the improvisation: the story that's building, characters and events-the outward content. And the fourth is the parameters of the container itself, in this case, the Action Theater form. In Action Theater, the improviser must be aware of and respond to all four tracks simultaneously. If any one of these tracks becomes lost, the improvisation falls short and loses its liveliness. The improviser may choose to emphasize one track, placing it in the foreground of experience, yet they must hold the other tracks in their awareness. This is no easy task. Of course, in the doing, experience doesn't compartmentalize like this. Everything happens simultaneously and affects everything else. However, in training, it is useful to separate these tracks for illumination. I've always emphasized the need for clear form and the tactics of embodied action. But in Rocca, I found myself not only introducing but reiterating content as a vital element of each moment of the improvisation. In the past, I've not dwelled on content for fear of putting students in their heads, resulting in cerebral and deadly creations. Content is like the weather. It always is. It may be the fantasy story of the improvisation or the anxiety story of the improviser. In any case, there is always content and that content is evident to anybody watching. I convinced the students that their process (thought and feelings about what they should or shouldn't be doing) which, until then, they had misjudged as privy to only them, was visible, tangible, and, in fact, affects the content of the composition. I noticed a stunning change. Students got that they weren't invisible. They were in their bodies whether they knew it or not and now they knew it. They experienced themselves as part of the content, part of the story, an integral part of the fantasy itself. The content of their personal process must be acknowledged in the improvisation because it's there anyway. The danger of course is that all improvisations will be about the improvisers themselves and how they feel about improvising. Nothing is more uninteresting. So what do we do? The content of thoughts, judgments, and feelings can be viewed as fertilizer, material that nourishes the images, characters and events of the improvisation. For example, suppose during an improvisation I notice that I am feeling anxious. I don't feel a part of what's going on. My partner's actions seem unclear. I can play with the feeling of anxiety and, for example, through language, build a narrative of, say, a woman confronted by many doors. She knows one of them will lead her to a much awaited engagement and the others will only lead her to more doors, etc. Or, through movement, anxiety can translate into energy and fuel well-formed movement. The same is true with

song or vocalization. This may shift the content of the improvisation into a new direction, but improvisations can layer many different stories. The task is to promote the improvisation rather than retard it. Surely that stuff of our minds is often all we need for fertile imagery. So, I say to students, "Follow the content!"

Zaporah, Ruth,: "Notes onContent," Contact Quarterly , Summer/Fall. 1998, pp. 50-52. An examination on the nature of content. "Content is like weather. It always is."

What's On My Mind Now:Frames, Listening, and Expression

I have been teaching Action Theater for twenty-five years. I should say Action Theater has been teaching me. A form of physical theater improvisation, Action Theater combines movement, vocalization, and speech into integrated expression of the current moment. I began examining this approach in the early 1970s when, as an improvising dancer, I wanted to speak. I tried some acting classes, but at least the ones I shoe didn't address the body. I felt like a fish out of water with no sign of water anywhere. I suspected there was a way to follow speech similar to the way I was following movement. Proceeding on this hunch, and with interested students and weekly solo performances in my studio in Berkeley, I dove into the murky and sometimes extraordinarily hazardous waters of physical theater improvisation. "Murky" in that every trial, every "Let's try this," was intuitive, a shot in the dark. "Hazardous" because humiliation, embarrassment, shame, and terror became unwanted but ever-present partners in this dance. I live within a restless nature. Improvisation supports that nature in that it offers endless puzzles to be solved. As soon as I feel I "get" something (for example, speech is movement), I have much more to figure out (how to move speech and then how to teach moving speech, and on and on). Since I earn my living by teaching and have for thirty years, it's fortunate that improvisation remains mysterious, elusive, challenging, and occasionally terrifying. These terrifying moments lead me to even deeper questions, metaphysical in nature. Who am I? Who is improvising? Is it my personality? What is personality? What's not personality? What is perception? Who is living? I was a philosophy student in college, and in 1968 I began an ongoing exploration and practice of Buddhist mediation-at that time Zen, more recently Dzogchen. Both practices-meditation and improvisation-work on the mind, the former without physical action, the latter with. Both are about being open to the present moment and what offers. Both cultivate a quiet, non-chattering mind, a mind of acceptance rather than doubt and resistance. Both cultivate awareness as a way to step back from concept, leaving an open perceptual field undiminished by immediate naming. What did I mean? Your hand is outstretched and the palm is up. Instead of immediately applying a concept such as begging or imploring, the action is experienced as sensory, nameless. In this sense, every moment is its first impression, before making reduced it to a thing. In my mind, meditation and improvisation are always talking to each other, informing and affecting the way I go about both. When I'm improvising, I know what's going on but I'm not thinking about it. There doesn't seem to be room for thought. By thought I mean the activity of self-conscious "I." there is awareness, and it seems that's all there is. My mind/body merges with action, and action merges with mind/body. The self-conscious "I" that analyzes, categorizes, distrusts, doubts, fears, envies, etc., and thus feels separate from experience, disappears. Action is experienced within as a felt-sense, a knowing that is not conceptual but exists without thought. The improvisation unfolds through my mind/body, using it and all that it knows, its skills and limitation. It doesn't feel as if I am creating anything. Instead there is awareness that is open and willing to be led by the event itself. This skill takes practice. Every few years I submit an article to Contact Quarterly. I notice that what prompts this sometimes difficult task is that I'm in to something. An aspect of improvisation has captured my imagination and I feel the need to write about it, to see it clearly within the light of words and ideas. Frames, listening, and expression are what's on my mind now.

FRAMES

An improviser follows action as it unfolds, each moment leading to the next within the intent of the improvisation. If I intend a movement improvisation confined to a chair, for example, I follow moments of action while adhering to that intention. The intention acts on the material that surfaces, and vice versa. The intention sets limits on the improvisation. It closes doors, insisting that the improviser search out others that are possibly less obvious, less predictable. What constitutes a moment? What is the form of structure? What is the content, story, or meaning? This, of course, is determined by the improvisor's perceptions. Action Theater improvisers, contact improvisor's perceptions. Action Theater improvisors, contact improvisers, jazz vocalists, painters, and poets all view moments differently because they have different priorities. But, there is an essential condition hat is common to all moments-one unfolds into the next; there is no stopping. Actions take place within a flow, a continuum-a stream of movement and

stillness, sound and silence-each moment a response to the moment before. The perceiver, the improviser, is integral to these responses. Proclivities, perceptions, and interpretations are not separate from actions. The perceiver and what is perceived are the same. Consequently, how an action is perceived has as many variables as there are improvisers. The improvisors' horizons of awareness combined with their areas of focus-whether dance, music, or poetry-determine which variables are dominant and which are ignored. It is these dominant variables that "frame" or define the action moment to moment. If a dancer sees a horse galloping through a field, she sees movement; a painter may see color and shape; a poet, metaphor and symbol. For example, in movement improvisation, every moment of action is composed of certain elements-structure or shape, timing, relationship to space, dynamics, and the state of mind that fuels the action. The composite of these elements is the frame. Just as a frame surrounds a picture on a wall, distinguishing it from anything else in the room, so an improvisational frame contains and describes the various elements of the moment. The relationship between these elements creates the content. Here are a couple of examples of frames: 1. Body stand still, fingers quivering. Eyes dart, with lips tight, speech high and clipped with long pauses. Narrative describes a baby's birth. 2. Languid, circular, and full-bodied movement around the space, with occasional pauses as eyes peer intensely from side to side. Breath audible in a different rhythm than the steps. During pause in movement, the breath becomes slightly louder, fingers tighten together rendering the hands as paddles. So why frames? Frames drive awareness into more specificity. What could have been overlooked as mundane becomes profound, gorgeous, or unique. Action Theater training relentlessly asks improvisers to notice what's going on, to identify the frame or components of action. Every moment. Not through words, not by talking about it or describing it, but just as a function of awareness. Many exercises require improvisers to commit themselves to a particular frame, to play within its boundaries-to accept its limits, to relax any resistance that might be expressed as restlessness or the need to understand or to move on, to repeat, stop, or think. Eventually, perceiving experience as felt-sense becomes second nature, and exercises are no longer necessary to channel attention. Frames come and go, beads on a chain of continuous experience. The frames change spontaneously as the objects of awareness-what the improviser hears, sees, thinks, feels, or imagines-change, their specificity noted and embraced by the improviser as they happen. The body/mind then becomes a vehicle for nonconceptual experiencing and the manifestation of an improvisational universe.

LISTENING

I was working with advanced Action Theater students in Zurich. They knew the Action Theater language and tactics, creating neat, well-formed, and often interesting improvisations. The improvisations weren't making them, taking them out on a limb, shaking them up, smoothing them out, leading them into surprising specificity. I thought about my own journey when I'm improvising. What do I experience? Not only the content of the actions-the message of the movements or the meaning of the words-bu the underneath. What is that? What is the source? What is it that erupts into action and what do I do that allows me to be available to that? It is difficult to talk about these things-the underneath, the source, the positioning of the mind/body that causes availability-for the words on chooses are never quite right, because the words are conceptualizations of a nonconceptual experience. Within this nonconceptual experience, the improviser is not separate or outside of the experience itself. In the most glorious of these moments, I'm not talking to myself about frames or listening or time or shape or space of the audience. There is consciousness of knowing, and that knowing improvises a show. Having said that, here is an attempt at putting this nonconceptual experience into words: Listen! Listen without listening to anything. Listen to the sound of space. Listening listens. Within the sound of space, other sounds occur, gestures appear, images illuminate, and thoughts travel. The bird calls at the window. At first there is no idea of "bird." Then in an instant the idea of bird comes into mind. First, it was just a sound. Then the name bird. A gesture occurs in space. The hand turns over or the eyes shift or a word is spoken. Just that. Then in a flash I assign meaning.

The foot steps. Just that. To describe it to you, I say the foot stepped. But as the foot stepped, when it was sleeping there was no thought: foot stepping. Only listening and not just with the ears. After some time of practice, a kind of spacious identifying occurs, where the attention of the improviser is not narrowed by what happened, instead, happenings occur within the awareness of silence and space. The improviser merges within each happening and simultaneously rest within the space that holds each happening. This is not experienced as a split of attention. There is always a sense of completely unified moment-moment to moment. There is a magic to this. What is magic? When we resist immediately naming experience, moments of action open, pointing toward unknown terrains-terrains that cannot be planned, predicted, or thought up. I have experienced voices, languages, and states of mind that feel like ancient or preverbal conditions of nature. I have experienced endless journeys within vibrational fields, moving me on and on into some kind of animal memory or maybe even plant or rock. Working within frames doesn't inhibit this. A frame is like a boat-we sit in it to paddle but our attention is on the scenery. While improvising, we cannot help but be moved by the comings and goings of things. Our job is to hitch a ride on the passing events by accepting and playing within each moment as it becomes another. But with time we cannot help but also be moved by what doesn't come and go: the silent space within which all is held. That is the space of listening.

EXPRESSION

One thing that Action Theater students do is practice changing the expressions on their faces in front of a mirror, or in front of each other. They mirror each other's changing faces. Sometimes they change their expressions slowly, sometimes quickly. No thought. No story. No emotions like sad, happy, angry, or seductive are guiding them. Their instruction is to follow the flesh of the face-to let sensations of the flesh lead them through changes-to notice what is happening on a sensation level (the chin is pulling down or the lips are tight or the brow is creasing) and then go further in that direction until some other sensation becomes noticeable and then follow that. The trick is to allow inner feelings to change along with the flesh, to stay connected-to feel the congruence of the inner experience with the outer manifestation. One is not leading the other. Both the face and feeling simultaneously ride waves of evolving mind/body states. Why do we practice facial flexibility? The job of Action Theater improvisers is to manifest their moment-to-moment experience-not just what they're doing but how they are experiencing what they're doing: either its meaning or how it feels or both. Meaning and feeling may be two different things. For example, I can lift my shoulders in disgust-"disgust" being the meaning. Or the lift of the shoulders connect with a mind state that has no name, that can't be called anything, but has an energetic quality to it (light, dense, constricted, open, askew, dull, etc.), and that quality extends through my face and eyes. Try this: Raise your right hand and look directly ahead. Raise it again and shift your eyes (not your head) to the right, now down, now up. Now directly ahead and raise one eyebrow. These little adjustments may add or change the meaning of what might have been simply a physical action. The facial changes are experienced as movement, as are those of the eyes, the arm, the foot. Facial movement is an equal player in every perceived frame of action, all the components of each frame, share, respond, and loop back into the same source: the continuum of consciousness. In Action Theater it's feeling states rather than emotions that play out. Emotions are what we call psycho-physical experiences that are the result of conceptual interpretations of past, current, future, or imaginal events. For example, something-an image, memory, current event-comes into our awareness. We make a judgment about it, consciously or unconsciously. It's good. It's bad. It's mean, ugly, sublime, sexy. Then our bodies react to the story we've created, and as long as we continue to fuel the story, our bodies continue to fuel the story, our bodies continue to react. Our attention is on the story. It could go like this: I hear a piece of music. It reminds me of my father who passed away last year. That was one of his favorites. I begin to long for my father, feel deserted, unprotected. That's where I dwell-under the weighted thoughts of being unprotected. I think of all the ways I'm unprotected, vulnerable, etc. I feel lonely, angry at having to always fend for myself. Now I'm caught in a downward spiral of a pathetic story. My mood changes, my body feels heavy, my

perceptions are contracted. I lie in bed in a state of gloomy inertia. Feeling states may look like emotions but the improvisor's relationship to the experience is quite different. There is no judgment or evaluation, no thing is good or bad. Feeling states arise spontaneously and linger until replaced by another. The shift from one feeling of state to another is determined by the content and musicality of each moment of the improvisation, as sensed by the improviser. Unlike emotions, feelings states are unnameable. They can't be called happy, sad, or lonely. The state of the mind and body are congruent, intentional, and happen simultaneously, whereas with an emotion, the condition of the body is a response to the thoughts of the mind. In a sense, feelings ar passing fancies, whether dark or light, tense or relaxed, pretty or ugly. They appear only to be replaced by others. The improviser is free to play within a vast array of mind states. In Action Theater, we practice performing from a non-conceptual base. Using movement and sound, we improvise through feeling states and actions that are preverbal, that have no language or story supporting them. Yet they are true, recognizable, and content-ful. Later, when we introduce language into our practice, we remain rooted in the nonconceptual experience of the moment. We hear the sound and feel the passage of the word as it moves through our mouths.

Zaporah, Ruth,: "What's on my Mind Now," Contact Quarterly , Winter/Spring, 2002, pp. 51-56. Essays on frames, listening and expression, three basic components of Action Theater improvisation.

Psyche Meets Soma:Accessing Creativity Through Ruth Zaporah’s Action Theater

by Susanna Morrow, MFA, PhD

This article establishes Action Theater pedagogy as a vital and unique contribution to the field of improvisational training. Developed by performer-pedagogue Ruth Zaporah during the 1970’s boom in experimental performance in the San Francisco Bay area, and in continual refinement over the past 40 years, this interdisciplinary model bridges enables performers to become creators. Fundamental to Action Theater pedagogy is embodied presence, a state of awareness in which performers maintain conscious contact with their somatic experience as they improvise. An examination of Zaporah’s performance style, renders an account of the aesthetic of Action Theater, which favors the integration of movement, speech and sound, abrupt changes in character and formal style, and dream-like enactments of multiple aspects of human experience. Facets from the historical context in which Zaporah developed are briefly identified. Key features of Action Theater pedagogy – the interdependent relationship between form and content and the practice of framing and shifting – are treated in depth to portray the originality and efficacy of this training. Informed by interviews with Zaporah and her long-term students, as well as my practice of and research into Action Theater, this article concludes by positioning Action Theater within related performance practices.

Keywords: improvisation, interdisciplinary performance, awareness, physical theater, psychophysical training

In 2007, I attended an hour-long solo performance in Santa Fe, New Mexico by the then seventy year old Ruth Zaporah and witnessed immediate poeisis in action where her wild imagination and precise technique rendered a cohesive, inventive and clear performance at speed - without rehearsal. As she traveled through a changing landscape within herself – peopled by various characters, some pedestrian and some primal; her sense of humor, use of space, timing, and composition surprised and delighted me. Zaporah was in the moment of creation, on the precipice of the unknown and fully committed to the present moment. Zaporah’s technique, which she has codified into the practice of “Action Theater,” allows her to enter an empty performance space, often alone, and improvise a performance that demands a deep connection to her imagination and an immediate, lucid enactment of its stirrings that coheres as a composition. This skill has evolved over her forty-year career as an improvisational performer and teacher, a journey that has taken her to engagements throughout the United States, Europe (especially Germany, Estonia, and Italy), Israel, China and Bosnia. She also writes about improvisation from a subjective perspective as a performer/pedagogue. From the early 1980’s, Contact Quarterly has featured her articles and interviews; her performance reflection, “Dance: a Body With a Mind of It’s Own,” has been anthologized in Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader and Being. In 1995 she published Action Theater: The Improvisation of Presence, a book of over 100 exercises and short essays that gives a sample outline of a month-long intensive. In 2006 she self-published Action Theater: The Manual, a companion volume to her book outlining advanced exercises and innovations in her theory and terminology. She has been a compelling force in the development of postmodern dance/theater improvisation especially on the West Coast of the United States; and has also given language to the connection between body-based improvisation and Buddhist meditation practice. The principal venue for her evolution as a practitioner-pedagogue was the San Francisco Bay Area during the explosion of interdisciplinary performance in the 1970’s; like other members of that community such as Anna Halprin, Mangrove (Contact Improvisation) and the Grotowski-inspired Blake Street Hawkeyes, Ruth Zaporah strove to erase the boundaries between dance and theater and the hierarchy of scripted or set work over improvisation. Through regular teaching and performing in solo and with other collaborators from theater and dance, she learned to synergize movement, sound and speech into a continuous creative flow. Embodied presence is the cornerstone of Action Theater: attention rooted to the present moment through the tracking of sensory experience as it develops and changes. In her earliest experiments with pure improvisation (improvisation with no predetermined limits or prepared material)(i)Zaporah had a breakthrough when she realized that staying aware of physical sensations as they evolved in her moment-to-moment experience freed her mind from

the pressure of creating. Rather than “trying to come up with something,” conjoining her body and mind in present awareness opened her to inspiration and allowed content to form itself through the medium of her actions. When describing a solo performance she remarks, “the dance had danced itself” (1997, p. 132). For Zaporah, automatic creativity is not a disembodied trance state, but, instead, demands a heightened level of listening combined with the formal dexterity to render impulse into action. If embodied presence is the cornerstone of Action Theater, formal dexterity and the ability to “listen” to oneself and one’s acting partners form its structure. As opposed to training models that teach a vocabulary of movements, Action Theater practice hones performance skills through exploration. As with Viewpoints training, Zaporah’s exercises deconstruct various elements of performance (e.g., space, movement, facial expression, voice, emotion, speech and relationships) isolating them from one another, and thereby, challenging practitioners to increase awareness of themselves in performance and expand their expressive palettes. Students first learn principles of form through movement by exploring a wide variety of self-generated “frames” – a limited repertoire of formal choices fueled by a specific internal feeling state (content). As students “shift” from one frame to another, with the aim of finding contrasts in both form and content, they become more limber physically, emotionally, and imaginatively. After exploring movement frames principally in duets and small groups, students incorporate vocal sound with their movement, and finally progress to what Zaporah terms “physical narrative:” human speech grounded in the sensory experience of the body. Action Theater gives practitioners a grammar of performance to allow the emotions, stories or sensations they are experiencing to be clearly communicated to audiences and ensembles through relevant formal choices. Just as grammar assists writers in making their meanings clear, choices in timing, spatial orientation, speed, and other matters make performers’ internal experience intelligible. Despite Zaporah’s innovations as a physical theater improviser and her highly effective training model, her work has been under-researched, eluding capture on the page by scholar-practitioners. This article offers a preliminary glimpse into the world of Action Theater through my body/mind as academic researcher and student of Action Theater over the past seven years. Informed by personal experiences in the training, interviews with Zaporah and her long time students, as well as historical research into the development of Action Theater, this essay seeks to identify key features of Ruth Zaporah’s performance and pedagogy and evaluate how these features enrich the field of dance/theater improvisation. The first section characterizes the aesthetics of Action Theater and the aims of training in this form. The historical context in which Zaporah developed is then briefly considered. Salient features of the practice of Action Theater follow with tangible exercises and my subjective experience as a student. Finally, the essay concludes by positioning Action Theater within the context of contemporary performer training.

She Is What She Teaches: Aesthetics of Action TheaterWatching Ruth Zaporah in one of her performance pieces is like an exercise in surreal meditation [...] The changes were mercurial, characters flowing into one another imperceptibly [...] The language of the body and that of the voice merge identities. The body movement has a literal, narrative quality; whereas the voice is an extension of the body's moving arts." (Tucker, 1987)

In an interview Jenny Schaffer, long time student of Action Theater, remarked that Zaporah “ is the work she teaches,” characterizing the strong link between her performances and her pedagogy (2004, pers. comm., 8 July). As such, Tucker’s review above reveals distinguishing traits of Zaporah as a performer and hence Action Theater as a practice. Tucker attests to Zaporah’s mastery of form – her ability to synergize the actions of moving and speaking, bridging the disciplinary divide between theater and dance. Zaporah’s proclivity for “mercurial changes” forms an integral part of Action Theater pedagogy as well. Zaporah’s ability to change herself – appearing as a new character, in a new environment, or simply playing within a new physical vocabulary – keeps her improvisations multi-layered and unexpected. As she shifts, the story for the audience also changes, leaping abruptly into new imaginative terrain in the style of postmodern montage. For example, in the 2007 performance I witnessed, she embodied a teenager on the internet, a woman trying to choose between living in a house or the jungle, and a mysterious ghost-like “being” mostly expressed through sound, and numerous other identities. Some of these characters, or in her terminology “frames,” resurfaced at intervals in the performance, lending cohesion to the event; however, her performances never follow a single narrative thread, and often her characters are somewhat alienated from reality through eccentricities in their movement or speech. Tucker describes this performance as “an exercise in surreal

meditation” partially due to the dream-like shifting terrain of content, but perhaps also because she recognized the wild shifts and turns of her own body/mind in Zaporah’s zany performance. There is a meditative aspect to Zaporah’s performances as well as the training she created. In her view, improvisation training is a form of active meditation, calling performance skills a “vehicle through which we investigate how the mind works” (Cushman, 1991). First and foremost, Action Theater is a performance practice; however its evolution has been informed by Zaporah’s exploration and inquiry into the nature of being through the study of Eastern spiritual practices, particularly Buddhism. Zaporah approaches improvisation as a laboratory for discovering practical, embodied ways of removing obstacles – primarily mental constructs – that veil the ability to perceive reality directly and participate in creative flow. It is this dialogue among performance, teaching and awareness practice that makes her contribution to theater remarkable. Action Theater is a set of tools and also a method of inquiry. As such, Action Theater not only attracts performers who wish to gain improvisation skills, it also appeals to practitioners interested in gaining spiritual insight and enhancing their sense of possibility and play in everyday life. Reflecting on the connection between improvisation and spirituality, performance scholar David Gere remarks:

Indeed, the rhetoric of magic runs throughout the discussion of improvisation: to theorize about improvisation is to theorize about consciousness, and to theorize about consciousness is to push the boundaries of physical discourse toward consideration of the spirit, the divine, the unfathomable, and the unimaginable (Gere, 2003: xiv).

A Climate for Free Spirits: Zaporah’s Historical Context Beginning as early at 1945 with the arrival of dancer/choreographer Anna Halprin, the San Francisco Bay Area became host to a distinct culture of performance that held values in conscious opposition to the aesthetic tastes in New York City (Ross, 2007: p. 69). For many of the artists who relocated to the Bay Area between 1945-1970, this area of America represented the freedom to create an arts scene “from scratch-” one that represented the cultural ideals that would come to full flower in the 1960’s. By the end of the 1960’s a “West Coast” style of performance had emerged. There were several outstanding features of this style: 1) an emphasis on life-reflecting rather than virtuosic performances that revealed the individual human more than exhibiting technical mastery ; 2) interdisciplinary collaboration – especially dancers using language and actors using sound and movement; 3) interaction with political life (including rituals and happenings); and 4) a sense of humor and playfulness as opposed to the more studied and serious reputation of New York City artists (Artists in Exile, 2000). Berkeley had become what dance historian Janice Ross calls “a climate for free spirits” (1980), or what Robert Hurwitt characterizes as a seething and lively “hotbed of experimental theater” (1997). Artists were not expected to cohere to a single aesthetic; and audiences were willing to support artists even when they gave “bad” performances, generally appreciating risk-taking more than mastery. When she moved from Baltimore, Maryland to Berkeley, California in 1969, Zaporah walked into a community ripe for experimentation not only in improvisational performance, but in performance training. Unlike traditional acting which emphasizes the use of an external script and the donning of roles created by an author, or traditional dance which teaches movement vocabulary, many community members wanted to actualize themselves through creativity. Improvisation particularly appealed to these students because it allowed them an avenue for spontaneous self expression. Soon after her arrival, Zaporah was introduced to dance improvisation by Al Wunder, a former instructor for Alwin Nikolais in New York City. Though her technique bears little resemblance to Wunder’s work, Zaporah credits him as her “one and only improvisation mentor” (1995, dedication) because he recognized her natural talent for improvisation, encouraging her to develop her gifts. In 1971, Wunder and Zaporah, along with aerial dance pioneer Terry Sendgraff, opened the Berkeley Dance Theater Gymnasium, hosting classes, workshops and ongoing studio performances. Zaporah began to teach and regularly perform improvisations, preferring to learn on her feet, developing according to her own tastes rather than studying a specific technique. She asserts: “I was so dedicated to the discovery process that I isolated myself from my dance and theater colleagues, not peeking outside of my laboratory, not wanting to see what others were doing”(1995: p. xx). Zaporah’s desire to speak, an urge to break free of the soundless gestures of dance, led her to theater. By 1975, Zaporah considered herself a theater artist rather than a dancer, coining the term “Action Theater”

to describe her original pedagogy. In Zaporah’s view, theater, as opposed to dance, was the medium for narrative, emotional expression, and character. Though she collaborated with other dancers, the development of the aesthetic of Action Theater, with its emphasis on rapid switching of characters, a combination of sound, movement and language, and pure improvisation evolved through Zaporah’s solo exploration and collaboration with theater artists. Her most influential collaborator, with whom she still performs today, was Bob Ernst, member of the Jerzey Grotowski influenced Blake Street Hawkeyes.(ii)Collaborating with Ernst, a musician as well as an actor, compelled Zaporah to use her voice expressively. At times in the studio, they would improvise only with sound, allowing a series of vocal sounds to develop over long intervals of time or playing drums with one another to underscore a narrative. Returning to the primordial quality of sound elevated the composition of their improvisations making them structurally similar to music and aesthetically layered. Zaporah and Ernst were able to bridge the divide between their differing backgrounds in theater and dance, creating as two artists rather than as an actor and a dancer. This interdisciplinary way of performing became one of the aims of Action Theater training. The overall vision behind the exercises that Zaporah teaches in Action Theater enables students to learn what she herself has learned in 40 years of performing. As Zaporah explains, “I self-examine what I do when I perform... and I break it all up into exercises and scores” (1976). As opposed to directors who are separated from the process of performing, Zaporah teaches from inside performance. She leads her students through doors she has opened in herself. Because her performances were improvised, there are no scripts or scores that remain; however Action Theater endures as a vital relic of her participation in the West-Coast U.S. experimental arts movement.

Practicing Action Theater I began my study of Action Theater in 2003 as a PhD student in Theater with a focus on pedagogy and devising. I was attracted to Zaporah’s work because it purportedly bridged the art/life divide. Having earned an MFA in Acting and worked professionally as both an actress and a dancer, I was at a point in my career where performance skills, in and of themselves, were not my main impetus for training. Action Theater excited me because it would force me to break away from traditional scripted performance, and push me to create work of my own with movement, sound and speech. The multiple trainings I have attended with Zaporah since 2003 have followed roughly the same format, though her teaching constantly evolves as she re-articulates principles and develops new exercises. A day of training consists of 2 sessions, a 3-hour morning session followed by a 2-hour afternoon session. Morning sessions begin with a variety of exercises centered on honing a specific skill such as the expressive use of the eyes or the integration of movement and text. Students work alone and in ensemble, using their bodies, voices or words according to the exercise’s demands. Afternoon sessions are devoted to performance in which all students execute an improvisatory score in solo or small groups with their other classmates serving as the audience (a score in this context is a formal limitation of some sort, e.g. sitting in chairs and only using voices). The skills developed in the exercises are always immediately applied to performance because, in Zaporah’s view, the pressures of performance provide the impetus for learning to exteriorize the fruits of inner exploration. Although one focus of Action Theater is to sensitize the student to inner sensations and imagery as a resource for creativity, the end goal of performance demands that expression be precise and compelling to the audience. In one training I attended Zaporah quipped, “just because you’re feeling something is not enough of a reason for me to be looking at it” (2005). One aspect of the theory underlying Action Theater pedagogy is the relationship between form and content. In Zaporah’s view, all actions, including movement, sound, and speech, are comprised of form and content, such that their interplay determines the meaning of an action to an audience and/or acting partners. Form encompasses details of an action’s execution—how it is done—whereas content describes the intention of an action—why it is done both in terms of instrumental use and sub-textual motivation. Content in Action Theater is a complex concept, but a provisional definition includes (a) a type of experience, such as confusion, fear, or rage; b) an action, such as dancing for an audience, putting on clothes, or scrubbing a floor; or c) a character, such as a worn-out father, a neurotic hostess, or an excited child. All actions should be motivated by a specific goal and enlivened by a human presence.(iii) In several of her exercises for beginners, students play with the form of a familiar action, such as putting on a

sock, speeding it up, slowing it down, and changing its sequence and timing, in order to “look at a common action in an uncommon way” (1995, p.2). Zaporah’s emphasis on form is rare for a theater artist; actors trained in psychological realism tend to dwell on motivations for actions rather than on the details of an action itself. However, because she came to theater through dance, Zaporah’s formal mastery led her investigation of form’s relationship to content. She developed a training that engenders a dialogue between these essentially inseparable aspects of action. Formal dexterity must become second nature to an improviser, a fluent skill, because in performance there is no time to analyze content or to experiment with form. Action Theater envisions the actor as creator rather than as an interpreter. When working with set content, such as a scripted play, an actor’s work is to bring the words, situations, and character to life. In Action Theater, the actor fleshes out the worlds that are being created in his or her psyche in the moment. Many improvisational techniques use predetermined characters, scenarios, themes or locales to serve as the starting point and container for the development of content. By contrast, Action Theater students “start fresh,” perhaps contained by formal parameters such as only using sound or movement, however the content remains completely open. Scenarios and characters are not forbidden in Action Theater; rather, they are one possibility among many. In describing how her approach is different than scenario-based improvisation, Zaporah writes, “Lifelike and non-lifelike situations arise through physical explorations within forms and frameworks” (2006). Frames and Shifts The “forms and frameworks” of Action Theater function at the interstice between formal structure and enlivened content. The practice of “framing and shifting” engenders a dynamic relationship between form and content, and thus constitutes the core of Action Theater pedagogy. In her manual, Zaporah defines her use of the term “frame” by explaining that

every moment of action is comprised of certain elements—the structure or shape, timing, relationship to space, dynamic, and the state of mind [content] that fuels the action. The composite of these elements in any instant would be the frame. Just as a frame surrounds a picture on a wall, distinguishing it from anything else in the room, so an action frame contains and describes the content of the current improvisational moment. (p. 17-18)

By practicing framing, students identify particular elements of the action in which they are immersed and then play within those limitations, exhausting the compositional possibilities.(iv) In her exercises, Zaporah distinguishes three types of frames: (a) movement, (b) sound and movement, and (c) physical narrative. A physical narrative is a frame that contains words; Zaporah qualifies the narrative as “physical” to remind students to pay attention to the form of the words (e.g., the movement of the mouth, cadence, and so on) rather than only the story described by the words. Students play within the boundaries of a self-generated frame rather than immediately moving onto another action. They go in depth with their experience, discovering the intricacies of what might have initially appeared to be a movement on the way to something else; for example, if a student walks across the room to get a chair, the walking is an action, in and of itself, and not merely a scene shift. When a seemingly trivial action becomes a frame, the student notices and plays with the formal components of her action—in this case, walking; as she crosses the room to get the chair, she might walk in an irregular rhythm, take several steps forward and several backward, or play with the force of her steps. In framing this action, the student also attends to the content of the action—how the action makes her feel. The content may be only the somatic experience of walking, or it may arouse a feeling of excitement or trepidation; that feeling, in turn, may generate a story of some kind, such as the chair becoming a sleeping parent she attempts to sneak past. Thus, framing a simple action enriches the improvisation, because new material is generated through the exploration of form. To create a variety of frames, students practice “shifting,” a fairly straightforward practice in which they move from one frame into a new frame (contrasting in form and content), not gradually but immediately. Although the concept is easy to understand, it is very difficult to practice. Shifting feels awkward and unnatural to many students, because either they become so immersed in a frame that they cannot shift out of it quickly or they do not allow themselves to be saturated by their current frame because they know it is only temporary. Zaporah, however, believes that shifting is as natural as child’s play, stating that “when we were children, we changed our minds on a dime. We were experts on change and great shifters. We’d cry one minute and laugh the next. […] We believed in what we were doing, and we dropped it without a thought if something else took our attention. That’s what shift is all about”(1995, p. 37). In the maturation/socialization process, most adults iron out their mood swings and develop

the ability to block out inner and outer stimuli to retain a single-pointed focus. Action Theater training works at undoing what Zaporah views as habits of repression, loosening and relaxing habitual behaviors and mental constructs to replace the deadness of habit with conscious, embodied experience. Students learn to commit to an action completely, and, simultaneously, be aware of its context (e.g., its shaping and the environment.). They also learn to maintain a focus that is flexible and responsive, regaining a sense of child-like play while engaging their adult capacity for awareness of self, others, and the environment. Practicing frames and shifts strengthens performers’ agility in giving form to a wide variety of contents. For example, in the exercise, “trading frames,” students work in pairs, interrupting one another with contrasting frames; parameters may dictate that partners only use one type of frame (movement, sound and movement, physical narrative) or that they explore all three types. My partner and I stand in neutral (a state of alertness with the eyes moving); my partner begins a movement frame; I notice, experience, and then respond to his or her movement frame with a contrasting movement frame. Zaporah’s most recent teaching refrain, “notice, experience, respond” (intermediate 2008) coaches actors to notice what their partner is doing, and when the partner shifts frames, to experience these new actions inter-subjectively (as if the partner’s actions were the one’s own) and then respond from this absorbed state. The opposite of “notice, experience, respond” is to see something, objectify it by attaching a name to it, such as “a temper tantrum,” and respond based on previous experience. The value of embodied listening is that improvisations move beyond banal cause-and-effect logic and into a terrain of the imagination that is connected but not mundane. For example, if I label my partner’s action as a “temper tantrum,” my response will be limited to “completing the scene” by becoming his teacher or parent; however, if I experience my partner’s action from an embodied orientation, I will energetically absorb the force of his fists against the ground, and the tension in his head and torso. As I connect to my partner’s actions as if they were mine, my body leads me into the next frame. Rather than “completing the scene,” my response will add a new dimension to the improvisation. The frame I create contrasts my partner’s frame in terms of form and content. Perhaps I stroke my hair, subtly shifting from side to side while singing a lullaby. To continue the exercise, when I begin my frame, my partner pauses within his frame, experiences this new frame, and then interrupts my frame with a new contrasting frame. Over the course of the exercise, students endeavor not to repeat movements, emotions, tones of voice, or characters. As students search their body/minds for new ways of being, they become more integrated mentally, emotionally and physically, feeling minute movements and sensing subtle shifts in mental and emotional states as clues for new frames(v) The “trading frames” exercise is often followed by “solo shifts,” where students respond to their own frames with contrasting frames. As students determine the limits of their frames, they interrupt themselves, immediately shifting into a new frame without pausing. The speed at which students must shift demands that they move beyond conceptual thinking about contrast and work in an instinctual way. In my private instruction with Zaporah (2005), I had an experience in “solo shifts” that taught me how much possibility and complexity exists within a seemingly limited range. At one point in my improvisation, I shifted into a frame defined by the following formal components. My body was in a kneeling position, facing profile to the audience, and my actions were comprised of slapping the floor with my hands, clapping, standing on my knees, and twisting my torso. Although I could shift in and out of frames at will, I played within this frame for almost 10 minutes, and as I accepted the formal boundaries of the frame, I became aware of a compelling feeling state. It was as if the action had its own development, a vitality produced by the interplay of form and content. Noticing and accepting the limits of this frame enabled me to find a new place in myself where I was fully absorbed in my action, and completely committed, but without any “idea” about what I was doing. I was not conceptually separate from my action, thinking about form, content, or contrast, as often happens when learning a new skill set; instead, I was in a moment of grace, where these elements integrated themselves, and I had a glimpse of the play and mystery that underlies Action Theater improvisation. Embodied Speech: The experience in movement described above was one of embodied presence, in which I went beyond tracking the form of my action to what Zaporah calls “saturation.” A performer is saturated when she is not only aware of herself in action, but also gives herself over to the experience of its execution so that the embodied experience propels the improvisation into fresh territory. Zaporah proclaims the benefits of embodied presence, distinguishing it from our habitual tendency to use an action as a means to an end rather than as an end in itself: “It’s not an easy thing, to become fully embodied, to allow the body to inform the content of every action. We tend to narrow our

focus onto the story and function of our actions, whether movement or speech. By opening to the body’s experience, each moment becomes particular, unpredicted, inspired and fresh” (2006, p. 3). Opening to the body’s experience informs every moment of Action Theater including speech. In Physical Narratives, the language imagination collaborates with the muscles of articulation, resonators, and breath. If the mind is no longer the sole creator of language, the improvisation remains open-ended and surprising, as friction is created between the semantic and somatic. As Zaporah explains,

So even in speech there is an unpredictability as the sensory experience of speech rubs against the execution of the words and vice versa, creating an unforeseen journey. By allowing the physical experience of speech to interact with the vocabulary itself, speech becomes a present experience” (2006, p. 11-12).

Some Action Theater exercises, although based in the body, restrict movement to allow students to exclusively focus on sound and speech. The performer discovers that sounding and speaking are forms of movement and can, therefore, relate lessons learned in gross actions to the more subtle movements that produce sound. When improvising narratives it is especially tempting for the mind to jump ahead of the body’s expression, mapping out a train of thought that the body then lumbers behind as if taking dictation; as the performer moves out of relationship to the unknown, the audience will also become distanced from the performance. In embodied presence, the performer’s imagination is engaged in the inchoate story and at the same time, he allows the somatic experience of speaking to affect the content. In 2005, I worked with Zaporah privately. She gave me an exercise with narratives in which she provided a kind of gibberish—a string of sounds that resembled speech; I then began a narrative mimicking the qualities of her gibberish. In other words, the sound of the voice determined and preceded which words I chose. I discovered that, at a certain point in constructing a narrative, the story took precedence over my somatic and emotional experience. At that point, Zaporah stopped me and redirected me to sensory experience. When I was able to stay embodied, my word choice was much richer because I was feeling the words in my mouth and savoring the sensual experience of speech.

Positioning Action Theater: Positioning Action Theater within the broader improvisational movement brings Zaporah’s model into sharper focus and reveals the key elements that make her training unique. Action Theater incorporates elements of dance and theater and was developed within the post-modern dance movement in the United States. These artists came of age in the 1970’s primarily through their connection to the Judson Dance Theater and shared a fascination with improvisation, chance procedures and montage. Improvisational performance decentralized the director/choreographer as the primary source of artistic vision, instead allowing for ensemble creation that highlighted the individuality of each performer. As the barrier between performers and creators dissolved, disciplinary divides blurred as dancers began to speak and actors engaged in physical theater. The shift away from the hierarchy of director/choreographer over performers necessitated a different type of training emphasizing compositional awareness and the ability to instinctually respond to impulses from internal directives or ensemble members rather than promoting particular techniques and facility in learning choreography. Reflecting upon peak performance experiences, such as effortlessly connecting to creative flow or responding spontaneously to a group impulse, allowed performers to identify constituent components. These components then became the building blocks of improvisational training. In eschewing predetermined sequences and imposed movement vocabularies, many post-modern innovators including Ruth Zaporah instead concentrated on formal constraints that allowed for individual responses even while encouraging compositional awareness. Through explorative play within frameworks, practitioners developed abilities to inhabit their senses, enlarge their perceptual fields, attune to ensemble members and connect to inspiration. The focus needed to perform set material differed from that of improvisational performance to such an extent that the creative state of mind became an objective of training. Accessing this state of mind involved tuning into bodily sensation and energetic impulse and moving beyond a limited sense of self; these “skills” allowed performers to inhabit aspects of the human experience that were suppressed in day to day life. The post-modern aesthetic movement in the United States seeded various trainings that have been in continual development from the 1970’s to

the present. In particular, Viewpoints training pioneered by Mary Overlie and Simone Forti’s Logomotion most closely resemble Action Theater, and can therefore serve to position Zaporah’s training within a wider context of contemporary performance practices. Viewpoints training as adapted for theater by Anne Bogart and Tina Landau, shares pedagogical aims with Action Theater. In both types of training, students gain compositional skills and expand their expressive palette through exercises that limit their range of choices to one or more components of action. Concerned with visual and physical clarity, as well as spontaneity, Action Theater and Viewpoints trainings espouse a reciprocal relationship between external formal precision and inner imaginative freedom. Both Zaporah and Bogart push actors to move beyond psychological realism, giving up judgments about what does and does not constitute “normal behavior.” Through improvisation, practitioners seek to rediscover elements of the human experience marginalized in daily life; this excavation yields more than improved performance skills. Lessons learned in the training open doors within the mind/body of the practitioner (Bogart & Landau 2005, p. 19). These two methods share common aims within the process of training - creating ensemble, expanding the expressive palette, and so on – but the end products in public performance differ. Viewpoints training uses improvisation as a means to create scripted performances. As theater artists, Bogart and Landau have found ways to bridge the divide between improvisation and composition, culling group explorations, and shaping the material to then be presented as a consistent product. By contrast, Action Theater training is steadfastly improvisational. Though Action Theater exercises can be used to generate material, the ability to repeat performances is never addressed. In a personal interview, Barbara Dilley, former member of Judson Church identified Zaporah as one of the few improvisers of her generation who remained faithful to a purely spontaneous performance form throughout her career. As such, Action Theater training consistently challenges students to face the fear of having nothing to do or say. Rather than cultivating the awareness needed to repeat material, Action Theater practice encourages a creative state of presence on which performers can rely. In encouraging creativity, Action Theater practice invites students to access content in their exploration of forms; in contrast, Viewpoints exercises focus primarily on forms, adding content later in the process of composition. Zaporah consistently challenges students to access a living presence within improvisational exercises; though formal parameters may dictate the range of choices within a given score, students move through and beyond these practical constraints to detect and embody the human/being alive within their movements. In performance, Zaporah is often compared to a mime or post-modern vaudevillian because of her facial expressions and stylistic use of rhythm and timing. In the practice of Action Theater, students develop a plasticity in facial gestures, particularly eye movements so that the face becomes filled with the same energy as the body and vice versa. In Zaporah’s view, the eyes convey living presence. As in some forms of traditional Asian theater, eye movements suggest characters and/or situations; in Action Theater, eyes function similarly and also inform the improviser about the character they are inhabiting in any given moment. Action Theater and Viewpoints training also differ in their approaches to language and sound. Consonant with Action Theater training, exercises in Vocal Viewpoints have two principle aims, to 1) instill an “awareness of pure sound separate from psychological or linguistic meaning;” and 2) “highlight the limitations of one’s vocal range and subsequently encourage more radical and dynamic vocal choices” (Bogart & Landau 2005, p. 105). However, Viewpoints training begins with scripted text, whereas students in Action Theater never engage with the written word. While both trainings apply lessons learned in movement to the physical act of speaking, students of Action Theater explore sound and movement in the initial phases of training, while Bogart and Landau suggest addressing vocal work later in the process. For example, on the first day of Action Theater training, the morning session is often limited to movement only; in the afternoon, Zaporah introduces scores focusing exclusively vocal sound and/or language. Thus her method supports the integration of movement, sound and language by incorporating these skills on each day of training. An advanced practitioner in both Action Theater and Viewpoints, Krista Denio remarked in an interview that the vocal pedagogy of Action Theater is more elaborate and effective than that of Vocal Viewpoints (2005). Along with Viewpoints, Simone Forti’s “Logomotion” shares similarities with Action Theater. Forti’s training appeals mainly to dancers who wish to incorporate speech into their improvisations. Like Zaporah, Forti was trained in dance and made certain discoveries about improvising speech as she related her fluency with movement to her language imagination. As in Action Theater, students of Logomotion learn to connect to inner imagery through

sensual grounding in the body, and intuitively flow between speaking and moving as they improvise (Forti 2003, p. 62). As in Action Theater, exercises in Logomotion apply both to ensemble and solo performance. Furthermore, like Zaporah, Forti regularly performs improvisation in solo and in small groups. The philosophies of Action Theater and Logomotion differ from one another on several key points, primarily in relation to characters and personal material. While both trainings address the creation of narratives, Action Theater emphasizes much more the way words are spoken than Logomotion; students are challenged to enhance their vocal imagination by exploring diverse registers as well as rhythms of speaking. In exploring voice, students discover distinct characters, whereas in Forti’s work, the language seems to come from the individual performers themselves. For example, Logomotion narratives often incorporate memories from the performer’s life made vivid through sensory details. In contrast, Zaporah discourages the use of personal material partly because, in her view, if material belongs to a performer, then it limits the extent to which the material can be put into play. To illustrate, in Action Theater, ensemble members often collectively develop narratives, so that content belongs to no one performer. If personal material arises in an improvisation, Zaporah recommends that it be depersonalized. In a training intensive, she gave the example of a former student who found herself weeping during an improvisation. Rather than dissolving into this cathartic moment, she coached the student to tune into the sound of weeping and treat the component sounds as elements of a frame (2003). Honing the ability to be fully invested in the moment of weeping while at the same time aware of its shaping grounds performers in the present moment so that they do not regress into their past. Though both Zaporah and Forti both perform improvisations, their method of preparation differs. In her performances, Simone Forti establishes a “point of departure” as a predetermined inspiration for the improvisation (Hermann 2003). The various processes she uses to foment content – selecting random words from the dictionary, 20-minute timed writings, visits to natural environments, and so on – connect improvisers to an inner well of sensations, memories and associations before they step onto the stage. In contrast, Zaporah demands that students enter the performance space “empty” and give shape to impulses that arise in the present moment, unconditioned by past experience. Speaking of her preparatory process, Zaporah alludes to the difficulty of approaching each performance as if it is an empty canvas: “I have planned nothing and that has kept me very busy” (2005).

Conclusion: “Call it magic or spirit or skill, as you wish, but the spark that sets improvisation in motion comes on top of committed labor. Without the fuel of training, the spark would have nothing to burn (Gere 2003, xv).” The practice of Action Theater provides a place to labor; to hone awareness, performance skills, and responsiveness in the context of imaginative play. The most basic exercises in Action Theater challenge students to expand their range of responses to change, thus loosening the scar tissue of their egos and broadening the basis for creativity. Cultivating a total response change is an aesthetically unique feature of Action Theater training, and it is not arbitrary, utilized only for its efficacy in performer training. Being congruent with change is to be fully human and vibrantly alive. What might seem inhuman – a performer rapidly shifting in and out of personae and universes - is actually qualitatively and quantitatively more human. Zaporah asserts that Action Theater exercises “disturb the status quo” (2006, p. 4) - by breaking down patterns and forcing new types of coordinations. Students avail themselves not only to new ways of expressing, but also to undiscovered aspects of themselves and the human experience. The studio becomes a liminal space that sparks transformations.

(i)The definition of “pure improvisation” is borrowed from Improvisation scholars, Hazel Smith and Roger Dean.(ii)Founding members of the Blake Street Hawkeyes were originally part of the Iowa Theater Lab, were the first Americans to adopt Grotowski’s model proposed in Towards a Poor Theater, subscribing to extensive and grueling performer training, a minimalist aesthetic where the performer is fore grounded, experimentation with simple musical instruments, and theater as a “spiritual act” (Wolford).(iii)“Human” is broadly construed in Zaporah’s usage including primal and uncanny expressions.(iv)Zaporah’s most recent definition of frames is simpler and suggests that action has agency in forming itself: “[A frame is] a constellation of elements that are continually reorganizing themselves” (intermediate training 2008).

(v)Though in this exercise, all frames must be new material, in performance scores, returning to previous material (from the improvisation) is encouraged because it creates pattern and structure, making the improvisation more coherent.

Susanna Morrow MFA, PhD, Psyche meets Soma, accessing creativity through Ruth Zaporah's Action Theater,Theater, Dance and Performance Training , vol 2, 2011. An in depth well researched article placing Action Theater in historical perspective along with a view into Zaporah's process.

New Performance: Action Theater by Nancy Becker

      Ruth Zaporah is part of a rapidly growing number of San Francisco Bay Area dancers who are presenting improvisation as a performance mode. In the Berkeley community of which Zaporah is a member, ideas whose sources can be traced to Eastern philosophies, physical disciplines, or the humanistic psychology movement, are a part of the prevailing value system. Among those ideas which have become shibboleths are proscriptions to "live in the moment", or in the "here and now", "focus upon process, not product" and "become self-actualized". Zaporah's Action Theater is one of the currently flouring forms of improvisation that can be seen as an extension of these values into dance and theater performance.

I.

Action Theatre, according to its creator Ruth Zaporah, is a kind of "living publicly". Before a performance, Zaporah provides herself with a few props, perhaps some alternate clothing, maybe a radio or phonograph. She will probably decide to decide the time into three or more segments, but she will never employ script or director. At an Action Theatre performance, audience members sit on the floor on two sides of Zaporah's studio. There is no stage, no curtain and only a very basic lighting system. When the audience enters Zaporah is, typically, walking around in the performance space, doing stretching exercises, arranging props, perhaps chatting with someone. The demarcation between her pre-performance activity and the beginning of the performance itself is never distinct. Similarly, the ending is undefined. After a number of sequences Zaporah suddenly bows, joins the clapping, seats herself outside the studio and chats with the audience. There is no backstage and no backstage mystique. Zaporah's performances are intensifications and abstractions of her life experience. Her intent is to transform the memories and emotions that she experiences during a performance into material that is both metaphoric and archetypal. After attending a performance of Action Theatre, I asked Zaporah to retrace the association which led to the contents of the evening. When she sat on a park bench and alluded to "little ones" and "big ones", I gradually realized she was referring to little and big passers-by. Zaporah explained that when she was a child, she and her father would go to places such as the airport or a train station or a park bench and would sit and "people watch". She recalls these trips as adventures that were an important part of her theatrical training. Zaporah also recalls dancing for her family every Sunday night. In what she now remembers as a ritual, she always appealed tor her father to "start her" and he always told her to begin by pushing her hair aside with one hand and then the other. In the performance, when Zaporah found herself sweeping her hair to the sides with alternate hands, her response was to intensify this gesture, transforming it into a dramatic arm motion which gradually involved her whole body. The sight of a friend in the audience who was giving Zaporah piano lessons, led her to the highly charged command, "blacks and whites, play them!" and a recent compliment from another friend who told Zaporah she had "class" became transformed into an extended monologue on the class system. In this sequence, she portrayed the lower class as a midget, the upper class as a big fat lady and the middle class as a middle-sized person. Zaporah amplified this humorous and graphic presentation of an abstract concept by crouching, standing and getting up on the park bench. At one point, while standing on the bench, she authoritatively ordered the middle class to "march in unison backwards!" Zaporah explained that a recent visit to a studio with white walls, floor and ceiling, led her to play the role of a helpless waif, abandoned in a similar setting. After realizing that there were doors in this unresponsive environment, (they didn't tell me there were doors"), she stared blankly at the audience and enlisted their corroboration of her bizarre imagined memories: "People came in and I was covered with money, remember that? Then men came in and I was covered with men, remember that?" When I asked Zaporah how she evaluates what comes out in a performance she explained, "I attempt to hit a transcendent space where I can pull out all the stops and I'm not holding back. Also, I like to feel that what I've done has been entertaining. If the performance was successful, the audience walks out and feels high. In one way or

another they were touched."II.

Ruth Zaporah's background is primarily in modern dance. She traces the origins of her interest in improvisation to 1967 when she was hired by Towson State College in Maryland to teach dance to drama students. She soon realized that her students were interested in movement only as it related to theatrical roles, so she developed improvisational exercises to help them. Later she used improvisation as a technique for teaching dance students. At first her improvisation exercises focused upon the traditional elements of dance: time, space, shape and energy. However, Zaporah valued those times when students' responses would reveal something going on inside themselves; she gradually developed exercises that encouraged them to develop personal motivation for their movement and that allowed them to "show who they were at that moment". Today Zaporah sees her teaching and her performances as a form of "physical theater".

III.

Action Theatre is dependent upon the scope of Zaporah's skills and personality. This fact is at the core of both its limitations and strengths as a theatrical form. After having seen two or more performances of Action Theatre, the personnae Zaporah is likely to reveal become predictable: she will probably emerge, in turn, as vacuous, seductive, timid and as "tough broad". The success of Zaporah's improvisations rests upon the fact that she has a zany sense of humor, is a skilled dancer, and an actress with a protean face and a very powerful voice. Within moments she can appear beautiful or plain, blank or animated, very young or very old, out of control or excessively controlled, authoritarian or meek. Although Zaporah's usual conversational tone is subdued, the sounds she makes in a performance are often astonishingly expressive. She manages to integrate disparate sequences in a way that gives each performance a sense of unity.

Becker, Nancy, "Action Theatre," New Performance , Volume 1, No.2, 1985. A description of Zaporah and her work.

(NOT) A BAG OF TRICKSBy Ruth Zaporah

From the very beginning, the beginning being fifteen to eighteen years ago, I realized improvisation is a hunt to find ease, comfort, and play. We all know the misery of feeling lost, confused, or panicked, and I saw that improvisation was fertile territory for exploring those feelings. That's precisely what still best excites ad fascinates me about the process. Improvisation is life in microcosm: moment-to-moment challenge of maintaining a mind of lively flow and avoiding a mind of dullness and discomfort. Improvisation presents the same intrigues, pitfalls, and rewards. Operating in the mind of lively flow require a shift of consciousness, an objectivity of self and other. Imagine looking in a mirror without judgment and without wanting anything. Look with curiosity at your face. Look at it not as it should be, but as it is. The wonder of it. If we perceive our present experience clearly, without reference to past or future, likes or labels, each moment in our experience will resolve in the next moment. That resolution is also a new moment, a beginning. This is Improvisation: the lively flow. Sara and Ingeborg are collaborating to construct a narrative. They are improvising with a structure that requires them to take turns adding a verbal segment to the narrative the other has just delivered. A ways into the exercise, I notice Sara is restless and having difficulty. I interrupt to ask her what is going on. Sara says that she can't relate to the "monster with red eyes and green feet" that Ingeborg has just introduced. It isn't real for her. Sara is stuck in the past, in an old conception of a Disneyland monster. I suggest that she accept Ingeborg's monster (material offered is always a gift) and give it a personal of her choice. She can create her own experience of monster (or green feet), personalize it or develop it as metaphor. Look in the mirror without judgment. Last year a student, after being in workshop for three or four months, asked, "What is improvisation? A bag of tricks?" She was referring to the skills and techniques she had been accumulating over the past weeks. Techniques of this nature: Improvise action using movements, sounds, and language, randomly alternating these forms and yet never doing more than one at a time.Or Tell a story and through the expression of the story, display an emotional subtext that is different than the content of the language. These could be viewed as tricks. Or they could be viewed as exercises to awaken the endless possibilities of spontaneous expression-free, idiosyncratic unpredictable, and authentic to the spirit of the performer. A spontaneous mind works from an unencumbered perspective. To find this, in workshop, we look at experience. We take it apart. We look at experience. We take it apart. We look at our behavior, our habits. We take them apart. Then we experiment with putting the parts back together in unfamiliar ways, which often feel awkward. We learn that we can do this. We are free to reconstruct our expression to reveal our spontaneous inner selves. In the studio, we practice consciously creating experience. Through this practice (not just by thinking or reading about it), we come to realize that we are continually creating our experience-in the studio and in the outside world. A student in the middle of the room is surrounded by the other students, who are standing near the walls in a large circle. Slowly they approach the student in the center. As they move in, they speak in loud voices, in words and tones that are angry, seductive, threatening, insulting. The student in the center is instructed to only stand in the center, to watch, to listen, and to breathe. The students approach closer and closer, until they are right on top of the student in the center. Their voices are loud, their tones are cruel, frightening, demonic. The student in the center practices WATCHING. Something new, some new information comes into our consciousness. We respond with thought, feeling or action, or, most often with a combination of these. There can be a sweet space between the information coming in and the response going out. In that space, we can observe the moment. We can see it clearly even before we feel the impulse to act. For most of us, the impulse to act and even the nature of the act are reflexive. Habits. Touch a hot stove, pull our hand away. Get a smile, feel liked. We respond to information in ways that are familially or culturally prescribed, or in ways we created at one time in our lives because that response was useful for a particular situation. But now is now. And now, in that sweet moment, we can perceive with clarity and create our experience. We can rest and watch and choose our response. We can design our action. We can make art. Practicing improvisation reminds me of the potential in a simple act, and of the bravery I need to fully execute it.

In the process, a simple act becomes a work of wonder.

Zaporah, Ruth,: "(Not) a Bag of Tricks," Contact Quarterly , Spring/Summer 1987, pp. 36,37. A look at how a focus on can awaken spontaneity.

The Creative Spirit: An Article from Yoga Journal,September/October 1991

Action Theatre

      In the Warehouse Studio in Berkeley, California, performance artist ruth Zaporah is teaching a group if improvisational acting students to "create a catastrophe." We've been working in small groups, letting surreal, nonlinear scenes spontaneously unfold through movement, sound, and free-form language (no dialogue allowed). Zaporah is gently poking fun at our efforts. "You think what you're doing is really special, somehow," she says. "Important. Sacred even. You're afraid to dive off and shake the whole thing up, especially when you don't really know what you're going to do." To practice shaking things up, Zaporah instructs us to take turns creating catastrophes–radically changing an unfolding scene by introducing material that bears absolutely no relationship to what has come before. When someone in the group derails a scene in this way, the rest of the group must instantly respond, letting go of what we were doing, flowing seamlessly into the new reality that has been created, and continuing to explore it until someone else crashes in. This exercise is part if the repertoire of Action Theatre, Zaporah's innovative approach to teaching improvisational acting–and much more. "If I had to say I teach on thing, it would be awareness," says Zaporah. "I used to think I was teaching performance skills. But in the last few years I've realized that the performance skills are really a vehicle through which we investigate how the mind works. We work on being spontaneous, on breaking through and cracking up the way we perceive our world." Zaporah turned to improvisation from a background in traditional dance because she was interested in investigating "how to bring the whole person into performance. Because dance certainly didn't do it. I couldn't even watch dance performances, I thought they were so boring, I wasn't seeing people, I was seeing highly skilled, highly trained physical machines." Less than half of Zaporah's students are interested in performing formally. The skills she teaches, she claims, are equally applicable offstage and on stage. Whether we're in front of an audience, sitting at the dinner table with our family, or lying alone in our bed, the basic components of our experience are the same. "Performance skills are a very valuable way of teaching awareness, because you look at formal elements like time, shape, and space, which are always with you," she explains. "When people start looking at their timing, for instance–how they respond in a moment-to-moment way–they realize that life is just change. Nothing ever stops, nothing ever ends, nothing eve starts, everything is just changing. So the more I'm willing to go with the constant changing, the better I feel." The process is both terrifying and exhilarating, I discover as my group launches into the catastrophe exercise. More that anything I've ever done, it catapults me into the present moment; there's no time to think about what's just happened or to plan for what's about to happen, to critique my performance or doubt my ability. Our story line dissolves and reforms. Consensus reality shifts moment by moment as the imaginary world we're collectively creating coalesces and breaks apart again and again. One moment we're rebelliously tearing off our clothes and tossing them into the corner; a second later we're fashion models, preening and prancing as we put on each other's discarded finery; abruptly we're guilty children, scurrying to pick up the mess before Mom walks in the door. One woman begins dreamily reciting the names of colors: "Blue, red, yellow, orange, banana, strawberry, apple. . ." "Fruit salad?" asks another member of the ensemble. A third jumps up eagerly: "I'll have some!" As the group clusters around to sample from her invisible bowl, a man kneels at our feet to take measurements, frowning thoughtfully. "Very good," he says. "With a little more work, you'll be just where you ought to be for your age group." Let go, Zaporah keeps reminding us. Let go. "We take ourselves so seriously, then we get attached to being serious. The catastrophe exercise says–yes, this is very serious, and then bang, it's gone," she says. "It's not serious at all. Nothing is. And everything is."

Dance: A Body with a Mind of Its Own by Ruth Zaporah

      I am a physical performer of improvisation theater. As both actor and dancer I weave images through movement, language and vocalization. I enter the performing arena with no pre-arranged concepts. I begin with a spontaneous action and then, step by step, build a scenario until the content is realized and the piece feels complete. Within it, I introduce characters, events, and situations that reflect the mingling of imagination, memories and sensory input. The pieces are often dream-like landscapes, grounded in humor and pathos. I am endlessly surprised by what happens. The year was 1976. I was performing in Ann Arbor. I had asked the presenters to create a set within which I would improvise. That evening, the set included a Raggedy Ann-like doll which was lying on the floor downstage center. Early on the doll drew my attention. I named her Alice. Within the first fifteen minutes of the improvisation, Alice died. The remainder of the show focused on how others in her life responded to her death. As I was bowing at the end of the show I noticed three women sitting on the floor near where Alice had been lying. While everyone else clapped, they were completely still. Later, they came to see me backstage. Through their crying, they told me that a year ago, that very night, their mutual and dear friend, Alice, had died. Before my performance, they had gone out to dinner together to honor her passing. A shock went through my body and left me trembling. The territory of embodied improvisation that I had just visited had implications beyond my comprehension. If I ere to continue, for my own safety, I must observe very closely. When I refer to the body, I also refer to the mind, for the two are known through one another, and are inseparable. The body knows itself through the mind as the mind knows itself through the body. Sometimes it is convenient to talk about the body and the mind as separate entities. We can talk about taming or disciplining the body, quieting the mind, relaxing the body, focusing attention. But can you imagine doing any of these things without both body and mind? I have been practicing physical improvisation for thirty years. My mind and body, their oneness, is the instrument of my art. Sometimes my body seems to have a mind of its own. It fidgets, slumps and jerks while my mental attention is elsewhere. And conversely, my mind, (as we all experience in meditation practice), fidgets, slumps and jerks while my body appears to be calm and still. We talk about the mind and body as if they were separate but, in fact, it's our attention that's split. Through improvisational practice, awareness expands to hold our entire self. "Ruthy, dance for us." I'm 4 years old. At every family event, this invitation is spoken by some one. I never decline. I am shy, buy when I dance I have a voice, I am seen. In the family, I am a Dancer. Simultaneously, another and quite different realization was brewing. At 6, in 1942, I began formal Dance studies. Three afternoons and most of Saturday mornings of each and every week. I attended Ballet class. This regimen continued through High School. Ballet classes in those days were exceedingly impersonal. The student was seen only as a body. A student arrived, silently changed clothes in a grey and metal locker room, careful not to let her gaze turn toward another naked body, entered the glistening white and mirrored ballet room, and within the vacuum of her isolation, inched along toward mastery. At the end of the session, students clapped their hands, left the room as silently as they had entered, and stuffed their stimulated young bodies into plaid skirts and penny loafers. As I write this, it's clear that those hours in ballet class were often a place of pure bodily experience. Yes, there were times charged with judgement, moments filled with confusion, self hatred, or pride. But there were also stretches of non-restful, calm. I relaxed into the action itself, losing all sense of self, of Ruth, of me. Dance is silent. The lips are shut tight. The motion can be serene or violent. Either way, there's no guarantee that because the body is filling every moment with action, the mind can't also be filling every equivalent moment with disembodied thought. For me the thoughts were often about the action: judging, evaluating or directing. Can we stop thoughts so that our body and mind are aligned into a singular happening? I'm not sure we have to stop anything. What I remember is that I came upon a secret place of silence and I was repeatedly drawn to it. Neither my family, friends or teachers guided or prepared me. At the time, I couldn't have talked about it either. It just seemed right. I was continually drawn to this place, more like space, and that space became home. Dance itself is thoughtless. It is its own event. It doesn't follow anything and it doesn't lead anywhere. It is not about gain or absolution. Dance dances itself and is not at all tied to the conceptual world or even the concept of

dance. Until my 30s, I danced, danced and danced, took classes, created dances and taught both technique and improvisation. Only when dancing did I feel truly peaceful. I knew my body and its capabilities and danced within my limitations. I remained focused on the actions themselves, and they always offered cues for further explorations. I remained relaxed and imagination thrived. I knew that if I was fascinated, so too would be the audience. All of this knowledge integrated into my awareness. Awareness danced. Then, in the early ‘70s, I became restless within the confinement of silence. I felt handicapped. I wanted to talk, to be heard, to explore "real" life, grapple with its issues. I began to experiment with speech, character, and vocalization of feeling. Wrestling with these forms for a very long time, I tripped over myself continually, forcing analyzing, and constructing. I was determined to create meaningful content. All this led to more separation, myself from myself. Eventually, however, I got a clue; I felt my mouth moving. My mind had relaxed its hold on content. I had experienced speech and feeling as their own dance–movements arising and falling away, mouth moving, mind moving, thoughts, feelings, all moving. I sense the body as no different than the space it is moving in and the sound it is moving to. If I'm improvising with a partner, each of our bodies becomes an extension of the other. I perceive her body as no other than my own; her voice, my voice; her story, mine. If I'm dancing in a public dance hall or a private party, I merge into the larger body of sounds, colors, heat, sweat, motion. I'm not alone in this. Dance has served through time and cultures as a collecting force, a softening of the hard edges that separate on person from another, an activity of communication. Bob and I are improvising together on stage. The performance begins with both of us standing, playing conga drums. We chant. My voice is inside of his and his is inside of mine. We wail. I begin a narrative on top of the clamorous beat. My voice and the sound of the drums rise, swell and recede together. I tell of a woman, sitting before the fire in her living room. She feels the familiar cold wind slipping in from under her front door. She's tried to seal the space under the door many times, to no avail. The wind continues to torment her as it slams against her fragile body. As these words escapes from my lips, I sense that I'm following a script that is writing itself. Each word comes on its own, I discover it as i hear and feel it forming itself. The beats of Bob's drum and the timing of my words are riding on the same energy. Even though we're not doing the same thing, our bodies have merged. Abruptly, as if we were being directed, we stop. Bob crosses the floor. He sees a river between us and is intent on crossing its hazardous waters. I too see the river and share his distress. I reach out to him and throw him a line of a song which he repeats. I sing, he sings, again and again, until we are both on the same side of the river. In the altered state and extraordinary space of performance, Bob is me and I am him. No boundaries exist between us. His river is THE river, real and tangible; his distress, mine; his safety, also mine. For many years, I struggled with the awkward moments that follow a performance. Audience members would come backstage to offer their appreciation, to tell me how much they loved the piece of me. If the performance had been a struggle for me, if I had been plagued by judgements, I felt ashamed, as if I'd pulled one over on them. Or I felt overly exposed, the soft belly of my psyche hung out on the line of spectacle. If I had sailed through the show without a disembodied thought, I was still unable to receive their praise. Here they were talking to Ruth and yet, ever so vaguely, I suspected that it wasn't Ruth they had witnessed. Ruth wasn't there. Instead the dance had danced itself. After years of practice in performance, I have learned to no longer identify with content as it arises. I don't know where it comes from, certainly not always from my personal experience. The episode of the Raggedy Ann doll, Alice, begins to make sense. If the performer is truly riding the energy of the moment, without any ego interference, the audience recognizes this dynamic and relaxes into it. The performance becomes a collective experience, the audience and the performer meeting in a clear space. I am leading a training in Freiburg, Germany, July 1995. It is the fourth of what is to be 10 days of work. The students are grappling with an improvisation score that focuses on relationship. Whether their partner is projecting an image through movement, vocalization or speech, they are to respond with a contrasting form. For example, if one speaks, the other must move or make sounds. After several rounds of sluggish practice, I suggest that the students shift their perception and accept their partner's action as their own–to view their partner's body and all its actions as extensions of their own body with no sense of separation. They are to consider that one body, not two, is expressing itself. They are to experience the improvisation as an ongoing stream of action.

I feel the room lighten and the energy become fluid. Students relax. They are quicker to respond. Afterward, they say this idea of no ownership has helped them to view all action as having equal value. "Ruthy, dance for us." The dancing that began with a child's need to be seen became, over the years, a release from the separate self. Movement, speech, action. It's all dance emanating from the inside out, one movement nourishing the next, uncoiling itself. You reach your hand out. Hand reaches, No hand.

Cushman, Anne, "The Spirit of Creativity," Yoga Journal , September/October 1991, pp. 50- 58,102-103. A description of Zaporah and her work as an expression of spirit.