Today's class was interesting, although emotionally difficult in the end.
Our teacher is Scott Conte. This class's focus is on adding Chekov technique to the Meisner. Chekov technique, as I understand it, is mostly psychological gestures and creating a reality around yourself using your imagination.
So we started the class doing a bunch of group exercises, basic Meisner repetitions, some exercises to get ourselves connected to our bodies, and then we started learning about psychological gestures. The purpose of a psychological gesture is by physically creating a gesture that embodies an emotional action, it brings the subconcious to life and allows it to be expressed physically on a subconcious level. I think that's the right way to explain it. (???)
So, the gesture we focused on today was pushing away. We explored as a group different ways to push away, forwards, backwards, up, down. You focus the gesture on another person. You imagine the energy of the gesture welling up behind you, and then coming through you into the movement of the gesture. You lunge forward onto one leg, pushing away from yourself with both hands. When you've moved as far forward as you can, you hold the position for 15 seconds, radiating out the energy of pushing away through your entire body. Then you step forward into the energy field you created just in front of you, and take in the energy, feel it, live in it. (So no stepping back from the gesture, and no shaking off energy when you step out.)
As I explored pushing away, I could feel my emotional center (solar plexus, between the ribs and belly button) becoming more raw, the wounds from the last few months were being torn open slowly. I felt like crying. Perhaps because I've spent so much of my life pushing people away, and now that I'm focusing on trying to let them in, it just hurt to focus energy on pushing them away again. And I wasn't able to let it go easily, because as Scott told us, once it's in your body, it's there, and it may show up unexpectly in a scene or a repeat.
After the group exercise, Scott had us go on stage in pairs, and just repeat for a minute or two, then do the pushing away gesture to each other, step into the energy, and repeat again from there. Wow, there was such a difference in everyone between the repeating before the gesture and after the gesture. Everyone was much more grounded, connected, seeing the other person much more clearly after the gesture. The majority of the class said they felt more open to being connected to the other person. My experience was a little bit different. After the gesture, I felt so vulnerable, I just totally freaked out. The guy I was repeating with was just looking straight into me, he kept smiling at me, at what he saw in me, it was such a warm smile, but I could not take that in, every time I tried my mind would shut me down, I couldn't even say what it was that I was seeing so clearly in his face, my mind would not allow me to find the words to describe it. It was really intense and scary, even though he was smiling at me so warmly, almost tenderly, I was so afraid that he would hurt me if I let him in. After class, I was very withdrawn, protective, didn't really want to talk to anyone, I just wanted to crawl into a hole and hide.
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