Eugenio Barba
Excerpts from from The Paper Canoe


Sats - the energy can be suspended

Energy can be suspended in immobility in motion.

Above and beyond the metaphorical uses to which it can be put, the word energy implies a difference of potential. Geographers, for example, refer to the energy of a region to indicate the arithmetic difference between maximum and minimum heights.

At school, we were taught that when a physical system contains a difference of potential, it is able to carry out work, that is, to 'produce energy' (water flowing down a slope makes the mill turn, the turbine creates electrical power).

The Greek word enirgbeia means just that: to be ready for action, on the verge of producing work.

In physical behaviour, the transition from intention to action is a typical example of difference in potential.

In the instant which precedes the action, when all the necessary force is ready to be released into space but as though suspended and still under control, the performer perceives her/his energy in the form of sats, of dynamic preparation. The sats is the moment in which the action is thought/acted by the entire organism, which reacts with tensions, even in immobility. It is the point at which one decides to act. There is a muscular, nervous and mental commitment, already directed towards an objective. It is the tightening or the gathering together of oneself from which the action departs. It is the spring before it is sprung. It is the attitude of the feline ready for anything: to bound forward, to withdraw, to return to a position of rest. An athlete, a tennis player or boxer, immobile or moving, ready to react. It is John Wayne facing an adversary. It is Buster Keaton about to take a step. It is Maria Callas on the verge of an aria.

The performer knows how to distinguish the sats from the gesticulatory inertia in which movements roll over each other without internal power. The sats engages the entire body. The energy which is accumulated in the trunk and presses on the legs can be canalized into a caress of the hand or into the hurried steps of a run, into a slow movement of the eyes, into the leap of the tiger or the flight of the butterfly.

Sats is impulse and counterimpulse.

In the language of Meyerhold's work, we find the word predigra, 'preacting':

Pre-acting is a trampoline, a moment of tension resulting in acting. Acting is a coda [musical term in Italian in original text], while preacting is the element which accumulates, develops and waits to be resolved.

 

Another of Meyerhold's terms is otkaz, 'refusal', or ? in musical terminology ? the alteration of a note by one or two semitones which interrupts the development of the melody:

The principle of otkaz implies the precise definition of the points at which one movement ends and another begins, a stop and a go at the same time. Otkaz is a clean stop which suspends the preceding movement and prepares the following one. It thus makes it possible to reunite dynamically two segments of an exercise; it puts the subsequent segment into relief, and gives it a push, an impulse, like a trampoline. The otkaz can also signal to a partner that one is ready to pass on to the next phase of the exercise. It is a very brief act, going against, opposite to, the overall direction of the movement: the recoil before going forward, the impulse of the hand being raised before it strikes, the flexion before standing.

 

For Grotowski this 'pre-movement':

can be done at different levels, like a kind of silence before the movement, a silence which is filled with potential or can occur as a stop of the action at a precise moment?

Etienne Decroux, obviously, does not use the Norwegian word sats, but formulates the experience in this way:

This is immobile immobility; the Pressure of water on the dike, the hovering of a fly stopped by the windowpane, the delayed fall of the leaning tower which remains standing. Then, similar to the way we stretch a bow before taking aim, man implodes yet again.

Implosion should not necessarily make one think of a successive explosion, an impetuous, bursting, rapid action.

This does not mean that the sats must be so emphasized that the performer's action becomes 'staccato' or proceeds by saccades, by fits and starts. If the sats are too marked, they become inorganic, that is, they suppress the performer's life and dull the spectator's senses.

In his work, Ingemar Lindh describes Decroux"immobile immobility' as follows: to execute the intention in immobility. It is what ethologists call MI, Movements of Intention: the cat is not doing anything yet, but we understand that it wants to snatch a fly.

Sats is not something which belongs only to the 'sculptor who sculpts the body from the inside'. It is not connected only to dynamic immobility. In a sequence of actions, it is a small charge of energy which causes the action to change its course and intensity or suddenly suspends it. It is a moment of transition which leads to a new, precise posture, and thus to a change in the tonus of the entire body. In the action of sitting, for example, we can single out the moment when, as we bend, we are no longer able to control our weight and the body descends. If we stop just before that moment we are in a sats: we can return to a standing position or decide to sit. To find the life of the sats, the performer must play with the spectators' kinaesthetic sense and prevent them from foreseeing what is about to happen. The action must surprise the spectators.

The word 'surprise' should not be misunderstood. We are not referring to a level of organization which has to do with the macroscopic and more evident aspects of the scenic action. We are not referring, in short, to a performer who wants to provoke astonishment.

Rather, it is a question of subliminal surprises, which the spectator does not become aware of with the conscious 'eye' but with the 'eye' of the senses, with the kinaesthetic sense. To give life to the sats, to those continuous changes of muscular tonus which make the leaps of thought visible, the performer and her/his 'first spectator' ? the director ? must know how to control?the action as if it was under a microscope.

Meyerhold:

The actor's work consists in a clever alternation of acting and pre acting. [ ... I It is not acting as such which interests us, but predigra, pre acting, because expectation arouses in the spectator a greater tension than that which is rovoked in him by something already received or pre-digested. This is not theatre. The spectator wants to dive into the expectation of the action.

 

Referring to an actress:

I asked you to sit there, but you do it in much too obvious a way, you

reveal my design to the spectator. First you should barely sit down, and

then sit completely. You must conceal the outline of the plan that L the

director, have made.

 

The performer knows what s/he is about to do, but must not anticipate it. The sats is the technical explanation of that commonplace according to which the performer's skill consists in knowing how to repeat the performance as if every action was being made for the first time.

The work on sats is the means by which one penetrates into the cellular world of scenic behaviour. It serves to eliminate the separation between thought and physical action which is often, for reasons of economy, characteristic of behaviour in daily life. It is essential, for example, to know how to walk without thinking about how to do it. The sats is a minute charge with which the thought innervates the action and is experienced as thought?action, energy, rhythm in space.

In Bali, the sats has a precise equivalent, tangkis, and is one of the four components of performative technique:

1 agem, attitude, base position;

2 tandang, to walk, to move in space;

3 tangkis, transition, the change from one posture, direction, level, to another;

4 tangkep, expression.

Tangkis literally means 'to escape', 'to avoid', but also, 'a way of doing'. It is the means by which the performer can 'escape' from the rhythm s/he is following and create a variation in the design of movements.

Tangkis can be a quick, vigorous micro?movement (unforgettable after having seen a Balinese performance). It is then defined as angsel, the essence of which is keras, strong. But it can also be mants, alus, gentle, in which case it is called seleyog, soft, and is supple, flowing, 'legato'.

I Made Bandem compares the tangkis moments with punctuation. They are the full stops which separate one sentence from another and 'avoid' the sense of being lost in an indistinct flow of words. He concludes: 'without tangkis, there is no bayu ("wind", energy) and therefore no dance. But a dance with only tangkis is bayu gone crazy.'

In Peking Opera, certain sats (impulse?counterimpulse) emerge in a particularly clear way. The performer rapidly executes an intricate design of movements and at the height of tension, stops in a position of precarious balance ? liang xiang ? ready to start off again in a direction which will surprise the spectator's expectations. During one of the sessions of ISTA, a Peking Opera master formulated the technical base of these dilated sats in this way: Movement stop, inside no stop. Perhaps because he spoke little English, or perhaps because a working language always tends towards extreme concision, he defined the nature and value of sats and its secret richness for the performer in the shortest possible way: one can hold the movement back without immobilizing it. Almost the exact same words turned up during the work with Ingemar Lindh.

'Many have observed, quite aptly, that the basis of nd dance lies in stopping each movement just at the moment when the muscles are tensed , writes Kunio Komparu, thus revealing the same principle of movement stop, inside no stop. This mastery of sats is the performer's objective. He adds: 'The times of action in no? exist for the sake of the times of stillness, and [ ... ] the stance and carriage are the bases not of movement but of the acquisition of the technique of non?movement.'18

In Japan, this ability of the performer to continue an action even when it has been finished is called to?in. The term suggests the resonating sound of a bell after it has been struck by a clapper. This sound, which persists without any dynamic cause, creates a world of echoes and impressions for those who hear it.

Vakhtangov called the ability to assume a position and to justify its internal tension 'to live in the pauses'. He suggested to the ctor: pose for a photograph; you are dancing, the music suddenly stops and you are ready to continue; in a restaurant you are trying to listen to what is being said about you at a nearby table; you are in bed and are trying to identify a noise in the next room: a thief or a mouse?

The sats is the tiny keystone of every physical action. It makes it possible for the performer to be technically precise even when working according to the 'magic if' and 'emotional memory' procedures.

Here is Stanislavski, in rehearsal, in the last years of his life, intent on awakening the scenic blos of an actor who already has a great deal of professional experience.

Stanislavski helps him by using the word 'rhythm'. which belongs to their common working language. But he places the word in the context of a sentence which makes itunrecognizable:

"You are not standing in the correct rhythm!'

Vassili Toporkov, the actor, thinks:

'To stand in rhythm! How to stand in rhythm?

To walk, to dance, to sing in rhythm, this I could understand, but to stand

And he asks:

'Pardon me, Konstantin Sergeyevitch, but I have no idea whatsoever

what rhythm is.'

Stanislavski is in fact working on the sats, or rather, on that which in the working language adopted in this book we call sats.

That is not important. Around that corner is a mouse. Take a stick and lie in wait for it; kill it as soon as it jumps out ... No, that way you will let it escape. Watch more attentively ? more attentively. As soon as I clap my hands, beat it with the stick ... Ah, see how late you are! Once more. Concentrate more. Try to make the stroke of the stick almost simultaneous with the clap. Well then, do you see that now you are standing in a completely different rhythm than before? Do you feel the difference? To stand and watch for a mouse ? that is one rhythm; to watch a tiger that is creeping up on you is quite another one.21

If we removed the word 'rhythm' from Konstantin Sergeyevitch Stanislavski s words above and substituted for it the word 'emotion', the essential meaning of his instructions would not change. The most interesting fact for us, however, would remain concealed: that the effectiveness of the 'magic if' or the 'emotional memory' is stimulated from the outside, by working on the sats. By this means, the performer is freed from the fetters of having 'to decide to act'. S/he reacts, is decided.

It is work on sats and on immobility in motion which Stanislavski is drawing attention to in the list of the twenty?five phases which make up the Method of Physical Actions during rehearsals. Phases eighteen and nineteen are:

18. Seated around the table, the actors should now read the playscript to each other. At the same time, but without moving, they should attempt to convey their Physical Actions.

19. This time, moving only their heads and hands to demonstrate their activities, the actors read the play again at the table.22

Intermezzo: the bear who reads the thought, or rather, decipbers the sats

'Now', says Mr. C. politely, 'I must tell you a story. While travelling in Russia, I spent some time on the property belonging to Mr. G., a gentleman, whose sons were at that time assiduously practising fencing. The elder son in particular had become quite expert and, one morning when I was in his room, he handed me a foil. We fenced, but it so happened that I was better than he and, moreover, had the urge to unsettle him. Nearly all my thrusts hit the mark and, finally, his foil flew into a corner. As he retrieved it he remarked, half in jest, but also slightly resentfully, that he had met his match. He then added that each and every one of us has his match somewhere in the world, and that he could even take me to mine. His brothers burst out laughing and exclaimed: "Yes! Let's go! Down to the woodshed!" And they took me by the hand and led me to a bear which their father, Mr. G., was having raised on the estate.'

'In quite a state of shock, I approached the bear, who was standing on his hind legs, his back up against the stake to which he was tied. His right paw was raised, ready to strike, and he was looking straight into my eyes. This was his fencer's stance. Finding myself faced with such an adversary, I felt as though I was dreaming, but: "Strike! strike!", said Mr. G., "see if you can hit him!"'

'Recovering my senses somewhat, I attacked with my foil; the bear made a slight movement with his paw and parried. I tried to confuse him with feints; the bear didn't move. I attacked again, quickly ? had my opponent been another man, I would certainly have struck his chest. The bear made another slight movement with his paw and parried. I was reduced almost to the state of the young Mr.G. The bear's serious manner contributed to my growing nervousness, thrusts and feints followed one after another, I was covered with sweat ? in vain!'

'The bear did not only parry my thrusts like the best fencer in the world, but ignored my feints, in a way which no fencer in the world would have been able to imitate. He was simply there, eye to eye with me, as if he could read my soul, his paw raised and ready to strike, and when my thrusts were not real, he didn't move.'

'Do you believe this story?

'Completely!', I exclaimed enthusiastically. 'It is so convincing, I would believe it even if a stranger told it to me; I believe it even more coming from you."'