Ten Days in Tarbena: an evolutionary approach to moving through silence and sound to speech

In this article the author draws on their participation in a ten-day training in Action Theater led by its creator Ruth Zaporah in Tarbena, Spain, June 2014. This interdisciplinary improvisation form utilises silent movement, sound and movement, and speech to create improvisatory performance. It is argued here that Zaporah’s established pedagogical form takes improvisers through a process of dealing with language which can be viewed in evolutionary terms. Moving through silent movement and the vocalisation of sounds allows for a focus on sensation which gives rise to a greater awareness of what Zaporah refers to as ‘feeling states’. The content of improvisatory performance depends on staying in touch with feeling states such that it complicates issues to do with feeling and emotion in ways that become particularly challenging when an improviser is compelled to use speech or what Zaporah refers to as ‘physical narrative’. The author draws on Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s phenomenology to propose that we view Action Theater’s use of speech as ‘post-kinetic’ and thereby prioritise its somatic rather than semantic ground.

This is a draft of a chapter that has been accepted for publication by Oxford University Press in the forthcoming book The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance edited by Vida L. Midgelow due for publication in 2019. -
Vesty, Robert (2019) Ten Days in Tarbena: an evolutionary approach to moving through silence and sound to speech. In: The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance. Midgelow, Vida L., ed. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199396986. reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press - https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-impro...