BONES OF THE STORY

Let fly!

Let's look at how we can bring inner life to the bones of a story.

Whether you are an actor or a director you are aiming to experience the vivid interplay of impulses and ideas — not just a lifeless form of information-exchange. You want to find ways to lift the text up off the page and let it fly.

THE SPACE-BETWEEN

If you have ever been in my class, you will know that I talk about two different kinds of "space-between".

The first is the space between us, as actors and humans, which the Samoan people (Tagata Sāmoa) call Le Vā.

And the other is the space inside and between the words on the page, which poet John Keats called Negative Capability.

It is this second idea I want to think about in this article.xs The images you see here of bird-bones are the best way I have ever seen of opening this up.

TEXT

Your eyes trick you into thinking that the text you learn and speak is a dense, solid mass. A weighty matter of gravitas which we call a line.