DIALOGUE WITH CONTACT
Grace Morrison and Kevin Shewey in a scene taken from Zoe Kazan’s “Trudy and Max in Love” (2013)
Over the years we have explored contact in application to scenes, finding both blocking and unselfconscious intensity of relationship. This is a scene about romantic realization about the push/pull of forbidden emotion. This scene is new for the actors- a showcase scene that is memorized, but not yet blocked. The contact with the scene dialogue is fueled by their comfort with each other as frequent scene partners, and the emotional content of the text. They are literally circling around each other, testing.
In this video, first we see an exploration of the scene through contact improvisation while the actors are speaking the text, and then the same scene immediately played out without contact. I ask the actors to maintain the energy of the relationship explored in the contact session. The resulting realistic scene is physically and emotionally charged and responsive, and it blocked itself, driven by actor intent. The text can be found at the end of the post.