Wisdom from the SITI Company -Suzuki

Notes on Suzuki Training from Saratoga, Summer 2004

Don’t change the form to accommodate your weakness.

Change your weakness to meet the requirements of the form.

The count (each action) is the score. Play all the notes and give them equal importance.

Don’t shift yourself forward, shift the ROOM back. When you turn the world should turn. 

Suzuki is not moving training, it’s stillness training. Training you to be there fully there in every moment, even the moments in between each action. Each moment is a journey and Suzuki shows us how to be engaged in every single part of it. 

Every movement is about compressing the space, compressing time, making the moment dense. Compression takes force and implies resistance.

In the stomp the emphasis is on creating the form, the container and outside, in order to bring change to the contents. In the fall prior to shakuhachi the form, the container, is destroyed which brings all the attention to the effect the action has had on the contents, the insides. How do you build from there to regain the relationship between the container and contents during the shakuhachi?

You don’t train to perfect the forms. You practice to develop as an actor.

Every action is an event.

Remember the chicken. Your journey is not to the other side of the room. Your concentration is on the next step, the next stop of your centre. Because you step only in one direction you just happen to make it across the room.

If you take this as speech practice, breath training you will be prepared to breathe and access your voice at any time.

Your voice is like kite. You hang onto the string in the centre, but let it fly to where you send it. It’s always controlled from the centre.

What you project externally should be the result of what is going on internally. It is the expression of your own individual theatricality. You generate inwardly to project out.

If you want to change, you must change your breath.

The reason the training is so popular is because usually, so little is asked of actors.

Success takes courage, collaboration, a desire, or appetite to express and a love of the artform. 

But mainly it takes courage. 

Anne Bogart