“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.” – Buckminster Fuller

Today’s conversation with Doug started a bit differently. For one thing, I already had my coffee (I’m working on substituting one bad habit with another right now, and that means doubling my coffee intake). This made me twitchy, but therefore oddly attuned to the topic of the day.

We were talking about Bucky’s movement principles- the 6 movement types that could be used to describe all movement in the universe. We were looking at them with an eye toward how those movement principles could help Doug (the actor) find a physical path through the show in rehearsal.

Briefly, here’s his basic movement principles:

• Axial Rotation- spinning around a interior point (imagine a five yearold spinning around and round)
• Orbital Rotation- revolving around an exterior point (imagine the same five year old spinning around you)
• Expansion/Contraction (five year old at little ball, five year old stretched to tippy toes)
• Inside/Outside (five year old going in and out of a box, which, incidentally, they love to do)
• Torque (what happens to your soda can when you twist the top and bottom in opposite directions)
• Precession- unpredictable forces acted on a spinning object which tend to create effects at a ninety degree angle from the direction of force (think of waves moving out sideways from a moving boat)

It is hard to think about these movement principles without applying them to the movements of a human body. It’s like the dance of the universe, really, but its also oddly reminiscent of those beginning dance classes as a child where you are asked to shrink into a ball and then leap like a lion.

Which is, incidentally, an exercise you also do in every beginning acting class. Which brought us around to the various acting techniques that employ a kind of physical vocabulary similar to Bucky’s- am I attracted to this person/idea/statement or repelled from it (Expansion contraction)? Am I inside this group or out of it? Am I in but trying to get out? Or torque- is my body taking me one direction and my head another? And what unpredicatable effects (precession) is the thing I’m saying having on people outside my immediate line of sight?

This last idea, that an intention focused in one direction could have unintended consequences on either side, has become an incredibly useful approach for directing the production in a three quarter thrust space (seating on three sides of the stage). Unlike a traditional staging, with the actor on one side and the audience on the other, where any sideways, “precessional” effects roll off into the wings (where only the stage hands get sideswiped by them), a three-quarter thrust staging has a performer constantly speaking to one section of the audience while another section is getting the side, or the back of his head. What are the unintended sideways consequences of this performance choice on the audience behind me? or to my right?

It becomes a more sculptural approach to theater…moving beyond the notebook sketch that implies dimension with tricks of light and misdirection and into the world of dance, where basic geometry is at least as important as color or sound.

Which reminded me, in the end, of Bucky’s daughter, Allegra Fuller Snyder, a retired professor of dance, who wrote of her father, “In order to really understand Bucky’s work, you must, in essence, be a dancer yourself. You must understand your body and experience as a way of knowing… his understanding of universe was through his dancing in his mind.”

R. Buckminster Fuller: THE HISTORY (and Mystery) OF THE UNIVERSE will open October 14th in the Ellyn Bye Studio. Until then, I will continue to spin tales of my chats with writer/director Doug Jacobs.

P.S.- In a weird kind of synchronicity, it turns out that Buckminster Fuller was born the same year as Busby Berkeley, the famous creator of synchronized swimming musical numbers that artfully demonstrate ALL of Bucky’s Movement principles…

Read Part I of Conversations with Doug
Read Part II of Conversations with Doug

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