Playing with Presence:
A Conversation With David Gaines
By Amanda Huotari
June 22, 2007

David Gaines toured internationally for ten years with The Moving Picture Mime Show, a very successful theatre company based in London. He was then invited to Paris to teach alongside Jacques Lecoq at the Ecole Lecoq as a professor of improvisation, mask, and movement. Since leaving France to return to the U.S., he has taught workshops at many universities and colleges, including three years on faculty at the graduate school of the University of Missouri at Kansas City. This summer, Celebration Barn presents students with two opportunities to study with David including Introduction to Lecoq Technique August 20-25 and Theater Collaboration with Davis Robinson August 27-September 1.

AH: What first attracted you to theater?
DG: I was a kid enthusiastic about goofing off, and theater offers the opportunity to exercise and value it. Though I also did straight theater, the eccentric side of mime and clowning have been the most fertile areas of exploration for me. I got to do that in college and after got to go to Europe to discover how European masters do it, most importantly, Jacques Lecoq.

AH: What led you to teach at the Lecoq School in Paris?
DG: After being a student at the Lecoq School, I formed a company with 2 classmates in London. We became successful and managed to tour around the world for the next 10 years. At the end everyone had grown to the point to be ready to go in different directions. When Lecoq heard I was available he invited me to come teach at his school. I was delighted to accept that. I taught there for two years.

AH: What did working with Lecoq teach you about teaching?
DG: It taught me two things. First, his management style: he hires teachers that he knows will be good teachers and then he gets out of their way. Second, he taught me that even great teachers have clunker classes. I witnessed Lecoq teaching a class that went nowhere one day and I thought I wasn't understanding. Later, he turned to me and said, "Boy, I really screwed that one up."

I realized that in the process of artistic creation, you have to allow for doing bad work. If you always worry about your work being perfect, you'll never do anything. The analogy with nature is that without a lot of horse sh*t, you can't produce a beautiful flower.

AH: You speak a lot about 'presence' in your work. How do you approach helping a performer be 'present' and why is it important?
DG: We start in the beginning by examining what is going on with any performer when faced with being watched by the audience. It's the same whether you're an actor on stage or a business manager addressing a group or even on a more social level, just a person meeting and talking to new people in a social event.

The response and normal response to that situation is anxiety. By examining it, dealing with it, and playing with that experience, people learn to be more relaxed under those conditions. When they are relaxed more of themselves come through, and that self is their presence, which the audience finds interesting and delightful.

AH: What does a performer need to be 'responsive' to?
DG: Responsive to what happens on stage, to what others may do, to what happens inside of them, and how they might feel about what happens on stage.

A lot of that responsiveness comes from the enthusiasm and liberty from the sense of play that is at the core of the workshop process.

Admittedly, the play isn't totally unstructured. It's designed to reveal an experience with the general principles of performance and improvising with others.

But the structure doesn't make it less fun, in fact, more fun, just as the rules of basketball or football make them more engaging and satisfying than just tossing the ball around.

AH: What kind of structures are you going to explore in the Collaboration Workshop with Davis Robinson?
DG: We are going to examine a few different kinds of structures to see which ones are best for different types of people. Different peoples imaginations are provoked in different ways. Some respond well to conceptual challenges like "Give me a play with the title, 'x'." Some are stimulated by a structure of restraints, for example, a play that is precisely 5 minutes, using 5 characters and 5 scenes.

AH: One of your company's most successful projects was The Seven Samurai. How did your company choose its subjects?
DG: That one was chosen because one of us, well, actually me, did an improvisation based on the provocation to retell a movie in a particular style. The style and narrative were specified and that left room for the artistic imagination in the detail and departures chosen; the lazzi, if you will.

Each time we made a new show, we tried to use a different approach to its development. One show we did was based on a Borges short story because it contained no characters, no plot and no dialogue. It was a pain!

Another way of working is character based like virtually all of our mask work. You start with masks or characters and ask, "What do they do?"

There are lots of approaches. What matters most is having a process and a working dynamic that allows you to enjoy playing together with what you're working on. If you enjoy working on it, you will continue to improv. If you don't, you'll stop being a creator at the end of rehearsal and simply become an ill-tempered mechanic.

Click here to learn more about Introduction to Lecoq Technique August 20-25 and Theater Collaboration with Davis Robinson August 27-September 1.