1a clase con Henry - curso 2009/10

It's the first class with our main teacher and school director and everyone seems very relaxed. It is noticeable the different atmosphere that reigns in a class of the second year and one of the first year. Two separate worlds also in the attitute of the pedagogue towards the students. I use this wordy word because I think it is in his very capacity of teacher that the Henry modulates the relationship with the students. There's a couple of comments about the time to rest during summer and some people report some accidents. Henry then asks whether somebody else needed to have an accident to give themselves a rest. Here are the beginning of some very therapeutic comments of which I take note only to keenly.

I think the relationship teacher-student is something I am deeply interested about as that's the very base of the teaching/learning process. However I hope I will be able to separate it, unless necesary, from the personal experience and also have a kind of balanced place in my description of the classes, with regards to the contents.


After the preliminary words Henry talk about the content of this first term, about the image-creating ability of the actor. The idea behind this is that theatre should be a place where images -which can never compete with the acuracy and detail of cinema- can have a different purpose, the purpose of awakening our imagination and taking us to different places. Images created by the actors movement which suggest things beyond that body.

we take ourselves to walk the space, just as we used to in the first year, there's a certain lightness and complicity in the way we're told to do that. We walk and we explore the four elements. First we are told to be walking surrounded by water, by a river that pushes and pulls us in the space. Then we become taht river and Henry indicates the need to free the neck in order to better convey that idea of an uncontrolled and unitary body that moves in the space. From at some point the river calms down somewhere in the space although the movement remains somehow in the body. However that fluid movement starts to get thicker and thicker until we become clay and can barely move in the space. After this we start to experience some sparks in the body at intervals. It's fire coming! And from there we take it to air.

Coming back to the idea of creating images with our body we're asked to create with our body the simplest element: a dot. And also we're asked to make ourselves disappear giving all the importance to the dot. We try on our own and then we pair up showing the other our version of it. Then we show in front of the class and the question that arises is: do we see the dot or do we see the person behind the dot? why do we see the person, what do we see the person doing?

then move to other geographic elements, start to reveal a third dimension. with a circle first: either sun or moon, what type of night, what temperature and as many qualities as we can...

THen with other elements, in pairs, provoking each other to react quickly.

Then in groups we form stairs and we are told to give those stairs also a quality, a whole character with its history and so on.

Sadly I just got some work and need to get back to translation. Conflicting forces at play...