The beast in man

"You must be able to transform yourself into an animal to play characters, to go into the unknown."

-Juliette Binoche

Photo by Mark Pritchard

Bridget and I are exploring the animal body in performance, working with our actors an ensemble of pigeons who transform into humans, and not the other way round. Involuntary transformation in fairytales is usually the result of a curse, and works as a confinement or restraint for the character. For example, the beast in Beauty and the Beast, or the prince in East of the Sun and West of the Moon. In The Wild Swans, a story that partially parallels The Pigeon's Bride, the evil queen is the villain of the piece, and the breaking of the spell is the heroinne's task.. In The Pigeon's Bride it's something different.

We meet the pigeon amid a chorus of birds singing and chirping in the treetops outside the princess' tower; she longs to hear what they are saying to eachother. The magic spell that the pigeon is under doesn't receive the focus one would expect - it reads as merely a fact of life that must be respected. The eleven other pigeon princes dont seem to concerned about the spell they have been placed under: they bathe in milk, transform into humans for the day, and go off down the street laughing, arm in arm.

The world of the pigeon and the world of man are certainly separate, but the pigeon seems more embarassed about being a human than being a bird.

Photo by Mark Pritchard

Actor training often employs the animal body as a way of finding the essence of a character, anchoring the choices from a primitive centre, while allow the performer to take choices to the extremes of possibility. By beginning from a place far outside the social frame, and cultivating the animalism in the performer - their responsivity to thought, feeling, sensation and intuition - we unlock a more detailed authentic core in the performer. The return to human form and the social frame is always a wittling back, a restriction, a subsidence. To be human, in fact, is to be less free.

The Princess describes the Prince's transformation as being an enchantment placed upon him by force, he is trapped in this secret cycle of transformation. But I am drawn - through instinct, backed up by articulation - towards an alternate reading: what began as a curse may have become something else.