The "wise fox"

The Journey Towards a “Wise Fox”

5^th September 2013

Neha Tickoo

MA Performance Studies(IIIrd sem)

word count : 2493

An oblivious beginning

There was very little element of surprise at the moment when I was told by the director, Deepan Sivaraman that I will be rendering Fox’s character from the play The Little Prince. This play came to be formed as part of my Masters elective course called Space and Spectatorship. I call it an oblivious beginning because this particular course was being offered for the first time and no one had any idea what the end product might be like. This course involved a lot theatrical practice sessions oriented towards body orientation and divisive techniques throughout the semester. In most of the exercises we were given random, day to day, as well as non-human situations to delve, process, maybe individually or as part of a team, and act it out. For example, we often played these games in the group sessions that involved Deepan to pick a couple of students out of the circle and ask them to enact two animals in a fierce combat. Other games often included movement practices from yoga that challenged the sedentary body. Often we ventured outside the classroom/studio to explore the spaces around the campus and devising short plot less performances along the lines of the architecture of the space and the buildings. This particular exercise later came to used after the script was fragmented and the respective actors were supposed to act out their scene visualized in that specific locale. 

Why “The Little Prince”

The text selection for the final performance also underwent a fairly democratic process of inviting every participant to bring in their choices of texts. Some brought Saadat Hassan Mantos short stories, a couple of us chose Dario Fo’s  ‘Accidental Death of an Anarchist’, and one of us brought the play called ‘the Balcony’ by Jean Janet. I personally, could not decide on any play text and thus finalized on one of the poems written by me called ‘I Am Zooni’. But after some discussions, eventually the director had to prevail by suggesting the novella by Antonie de Saint Exupery, ‘The Little Prince’. However, we all agreed to the selection as this short novella charmed all of us in it's visual conception and it fitted quite well to the course and play requirements. The first exercise that we all engaged was in was to prepare a make shift plane in the studio, and this plane was devised out of some chairs, waste carton boxes, cloth, machine parts and loads of adhesive tape. Then we were asked to visualize and perform short solo acting exercise that involved the actor to depict a day in the life of a pilot lost in wilderness, left only with his crashed plane. Each one of us had a different response and he exercise was fruitful, as we realized later, that it was the pilot's scene which was to become first scene of the play.

Soon all of us were to embark on the process of moulding the script, of reading, re-reading, reading aloud, and segmenting the text into scenes described and un-described previously. say, for example, dialogues were drastically worked upon and re-thought and played out several times. The dramaturgical aspects came into play here and the script was reworked precisely in places and manners which could render it to be staged and dramatized. Therefore, several brainstorming sessions ensued that made sure that each scene was dramaturgically refined. This is why, many several little princes were chosen to play the role that is traditionally played by one actor only. To help us, the students, understand the dramaturgical aspect understand better, we were shown its cinematic adaptation which later became, at several different junctures, a point of reference. 

This is when the roles were announced and as i mentioned earlier I wasn't surprised at all. This was due to the fact, of which I and others including the director were well aware, that we were all ‘non-actors’ (not trained as actors) and thus all of us knew that the characters of the play would be shaped by the individual personalities of the participants themselves. 

Attempt(s) at “Foxiness”: method acting

Thus began my journey to bring alive the character of Fox from text to the black-box theatre in our campus. The initial exercises after designation of the roles were to try and visualize our characters in the settings of the scenes described in the text. For the portrayal of the Fox, I believed that some devised movement based actions, although not very elaborate, would benefit the eventual characterization. This procedure draws a lot from the Method acting practice followed by several actors across genres. Method acting technique, which was influenced by Stanslaviski's acting technique and developed further by Lee Strasburg, focuses exactly on the actor’s relationship with the character role. One of the earliest improvisation techniques that were used to develop my character was to try and search up a space apt for the fox scene and then enact it the using all the possibilities that space has to offer. This was done, re-done and rejected and remoulded at couple of places, say, for example, spaces were chosen on the basis of their ability to hide the fox from the hunters. So the initial exercises involved a lot of running, jumping and hiding and shouting as part of the wild fox's oeuvre. But soon I realized that this led me to pant a lot and thus hindering in my capability to deliver dialogues meaningfully. Also I soon realized that on the stage, the black box, would not have provide the fox any type of hiding space. So, what followed was careful examination of the fox's characterization. I finally knew that it is not required for me to run around a lot, and this realization was helpful to me till the final performance, even the one we did fifth time over. I knew I had to indulge in the process of “thinking it over" again and again. I had to understand how a fox living in the wilderness behaves, and I found very little information on the internet. Mostly what it gave me was the adjective "cunning" is associated with the poor innocent fox. So I had to move much beyond this stereotype as I knew my fox was a rather wise one and I had to respect that. This understanding led me to visualize the fox as someone i knew, maybe. Someone who has taste, yet is scared to stay alone, without friends in the wild, and wants to love the friend he finds in the little prince. These qualities gave him a very humane outlook, rather much more human than what humans really can be. But i had to sustain that basic fox like playfulness, and body language that rendered her full of charm and wit and love and wisdom. 

Therefore, it took several many sessions to bring out that desired effect of a playful yet extremely wise fox. This process involved numerous inputs from fellow participants and the director himself. I realized that it inevitably also meant internalizing the character of the fox in my regular day to day actions, like walking, responding, etc although quite subtly but harboring on the very many possibilities of depicting the “foxiness”. This is how the technique of method acting works, as actors try to live the role in their depiction of a character. While during the rehearsals, I came to be known as The Fox, and still do, by my fellow participants. And thus this invoked in me the so called "fox instinct" and especially my neck and torso movements would respond to being called by the name of Fox, instead of my own name. This also ensued with another fellow participant who had to render the role of the Snake, and he recalled making hissing noises while alone and sometimes even in company of others, that of course in company of his friends only! 

The Necessary Shift

Since several repetitions happened of the same play, thus in the first show my conception of fox was quite animalistic yet wise and playful. My costume in the first show depicted the brown of the fox and also the feathers of the chickens the fox had eaten. My movements were rather swift and thus the fellow little prince often too had to run along with me. Initially I thought that it would give me the desired effect. But after I watched the video recording of the first performance, I personally was disappointed with results, although the feedback suggested the opposite. My costume did not really work for me, i looked too wild and too frisky to be thought as a "pretty fox" according to little prince. And my running-to-and-fro on the stage, across the sand, around the crashed plane, did not help me as my dialogues could not be heard too clearly. I was aghast and had to transform myself in the forthcoming performances. I was surprised and dismayed that repeated rehearsals did not give me what one video gave me as a response, as a feed back. Thus, I often asked one of my colleagues to record (through phone camera) the rehearsal of the Fox scene. This method of recording my rehearsal to be seen by myself became how I was to gradually inculcate perfection of the role. 

Fox in first show

Fox in first show

For the forthcoming shows, I was determined to change the look and presentation over all. Firstly I thought of re-conceptualizing the costume. I knew I had to do this judiciously within a limited amount of funds available. So almost everyday i got some piece of dress from my own wardrobe, in the colours of brown, and mustard to show them to Deepan and redesign it. I found a brown hat from some corner of my house, and a mustard skirt which I had stopped wearing, and brown stockings and a string of trinket bells around my waist to complete the look. The idea, on my part, was to desist from any realistic stylization of the Fox’s persona. I did away with the feathers, as it I felt that it made me look more like a chicken, rather than a fox, as per the feedback by fellow participants. So the end product of the redesigned fox was a very pretty version, who likes to eat chicken, and loves to makes friends with complete strangers and also her moves are much more contained but at the same time fluid and graceful. 

Fox after Improvisation

Fox in movement

Dance: Food for “Fox”

My background training in dance helped significantly. As a trained Kathak dancer, speed and grace are two things that cannot be done away from the dance. So as a means of warm-up before every session, I made sure I danced for around twenty minutes at a stretch so as to let my body move more fluidly in the scene. In fact, i danced kathak more than i rehearsed my own piece with the fellow actor. The eventual performance also had me swirling here and there with fluidity of the neck movements and graceful eyelid fluttering etc. But the feedback after each rehearsal session shaped my character tremendously. Often, I was told that, while the Fox and the little prince are separating at the end of the 7minute scene, the fox tends to become less of a fox and seemed more like a human being. This became very difficult to be tackled as, eventually the scene dealt with the emotion of separation and bereavement. I often felt while delivering the role that, the emotions of separation could not be expressed as an ordinary fox. The element of human expressivity had to be present. But that said, i believe maybe that's where actor training comes in handy, in cases of delivering the best of both worlds, from an animal to a human being. Yet, given this situation, I believe the role of fox was delivered convincingly, if not to the levels of perfection. 
 
An “Eye” for details

Moving ahead, the props that i used were very few. Although there is no mention of a physical tangible gift that the fox passes on to the prince in the text, we improvised on this aspect and included a realistic "eye of the heart" in a finely crafted gift box. In the scene, the little prince departs from the Fox with this realization that “what is essential is always invisible to the eye”. We may claim that this can be the central theme of the whole play, at a glance. So I decided, with inputs from my colleagues that we could, in fact, create a realistic eye-ball in a fine box that is given away as a gift from the Fox to the little Prince. But It was not only with this fox scene but every other scene, which were eight in total, followed similar improvisations with respect to material props. Most of them, playing more humane characters, except fox and the snake, largely followed a Stanslaviskian acting technique rather that method acting.

Tunes of Wild

Nevertheless, this brings us to the final aspect about music. Some part of the music to my scene was provided by the bells that were worn by me on the waist. With my movements, the sound of the bells gave me the desired effect, that of an animal wandering in wild but a bell hanging from around it’s body, announcing that it is owned and has been in contact with human civilization. But other than that, drums and guitar provided a synchronous effect to my scene, and I had to work along with very capable musicians in choreographing the movements around the time of my arrival on the stage. The type of beats and sounds created were that were chosen could effectively portray the sense of wilderness, somewhat like the sound of the tribal drums. But often in between, while enacting dialogues with the little prince, the guitar would play to highlight the playfulness of the fox and accordingly, the departure scene also emerged as poignant with the right notes played in the backdrop. 

The “eye of the heart”.

Conclusion

Now as the play happened in time gone by, in that excessively hot and humid environment in a packed black box theatre space, bereft of any air-conditioning, and audiences braving such circumstances armed with only a bottle of water and a hand fan, I believe the whole team of Little Prince managed to throw across the idea that of a spectatorship which is not alien from the context of the play being enacted. In retrospect, the people who witnessed the play recount it as an experience of actually being stranded in a tropical desert and remember the Fox, her eye flutter, the trinket bells on her waist, and the “eye of the heart”.