These are selected scenes from a performance called Portraits of the Cherry Orchard by
the Song of the Goat Theatre Company.
Song of the Goat is an award-winning ensemble that has achieved remarkable attention both
in Poland, where it was founded, as well as across other parts of the globe.
These performances are not made for mere entertainment.
This ensemble aims to make an immediate connection between the actors and the audience.
Its goal is to convey a means for a deep and profound understanding of being.
Grzegorz Bral co-founded this company in 1996 in Poland.
Today, after years of producing theatre and performing in many countries, Bral, who sees
himself as a teacher more so than a director, has decided to establish the London School
of Performing Arts Practices.
Bral's goal is to pass on his unique technique to students of theatre.
In addition to this, he organizes an annual festival in his homeland Poland.
The festival is called Brave.
Its aim is to give voice to cultures that are marginalized or are dying out.
Through this festival, Bral provides a space for indigenous people and cultures to express
their way of life through music and performing arts.
He describes these different cultural activities as the natural branches of his original theatrical
work.
I want the world of theatre to be more like lucid dreaming.
I want the theatre world to be more like entering our dreams, our hopes, our desires
without literally expressing them.
Bral creates this dreamlike world through the power of music.
I practice music as the way to enter the reality that is not reality, the reality that is like
a dream with his own language, with his own narration.
I think text is also a music.
It's not only what you say, it's the particular vibration which is coming from your heart
or from your understanding or from your experience.
Big part of the performance is that nobody is more important, nobody is less important.
That is equally important because performance is the star.
Throughout the years, the Song of the Goat Theatre has found its unique technique known
as the coordination technique.
In this technique, all acting tools employed by performers such as voice, body, energy
and emotions are in coordination with each other.
Each performer is in sync with the others.
This coordination becomes an integral part of Bral's work.
Coordination technique is gained through rigorous practice, research and insight in
indigenous cultures and in human nature as a whole.
On the beginning, there is an inspiration which is text story, not necessarily the linear
story but just the story that is touching.
Somehow, it is not just chasing after what's interesting, what's new, it's just I have
to identify that I'm at a particular time in my life and I need to talk about kingly.
I need to talk about the destruction of the kingdom through human pride.
The first step in creating a performance is selecting a play and choosing a script but
the Song of the Goat Theatre approaches a play or script in its unique way.
I am looking for the biggest dramatic tension in this play and then I talk to composers
and I said, look, these are the main dramatic figures, these are the main dramatic tensions.
Would you like to compose a piece of music that represents this and let's try to search
for it.
And they start composing, they start writing and searching for the music that would represent
this.
And then also, I start researching some words, lines, dialogues, monologues and I see what
kind of emotion is embedded in that story.
During this approach, Song of the Goat has created successful performances.
One of these successes is the play called Songs of Lear adapted from Shakespeare's King
Lear.
It was performed in 2012 at Edinburgh International Theatre Festival where it won numerous awards
and was listed as one of the best performances of the festival.
After the success of Songs of Lear, the ensemble was invited to create a new performance for
the Edinburgh Festival 2014.
This new performance would be based on old Scottish songs and appropriately called Return
to the Voice.
Scottish music was the inspiration driving this performance.
We see that by the same token, music as a whole plays a significant part in all Song
of the Goat performances.
I use music and songs in a performance in order to not be only a rational, only psychological,
only pragmatic here and now, I practice music as the way to enter the reality that is not
reality.
Music allows me to be very, in a way, archetypical.
So I go for something that is representative for many, many people like a shirt, like a
common dream.
In their work, the performers aim to embody the truth and the hidden reality of the moment
and to communicate it with the audience through their body, voice, energy, emotion and through
their being and presence as a whole.
I'm kind of a director that is always watching rehearsals of my colleagues from the audience
perspective.
So I'm not a director who is trying to accomplish some kind of my own dream.
I'm trying to make a performance that would satisfy the audience, that would give them
a profound, a touching, a significant experience.
Most of the, we say, material from the rehearsals comes from actors, not from me.
So we do a lot of exchange.
They produce, they invent, they improvise, lots of material themselves.
And then it's, my job is to pick up something which is significant, which works, which is
interesting, which is beautiful, which is touching and orchestrate this.
I try to orchestrate and I try to create a structure of the performance in such a way
that the spectator doesn't have to think.
It is he or she is immersed in action and it's precisely with eyes, with ears, with attention,
it's following the action precisely where we want them to go.
We understand that ultimately theater, you do for audience, you not do theater just for
your own sake, just for your own ambitions.
You do theater to uplift audience from a somehow little lower stage of experiencing the life
into the little higher stage of experiencing the life.
We make theater for audience to become more sensitive human beings, which is, I know it's
very strange to say, but I think that people come to theater in order to feel better people,
in order to feel more sensitive, more experienced, touched.
Thank you.
