Violence Made Me Feel Like I’d Left My Body. Physical Theater Helped Me Return

I played a ghost once, the spirit of a girl who went into a cave one night and never came out. My job was to supply frantic screams into an offstage microphone and thereby hex the living action of the play. To see my name on the cast list beside that of the dead girl was a comfort—no actual flesh to deal with, just disembodied longing.

I was in my early twenties, and the role would be my return to the theater after an experience of violence the year before. I didn’t talk about what happened, a statistical cliché: A party. My unattended drink. And then, nothing. I only have pieces of what came next, an event I experienced as if floating above my own body, as if that were someone else below, someone else being hurt. It was an evacuation of my physical self, and after, I simply chose not to return. The body I seemed to hover above had bruises on her arms. But if I stayed back far enough, I couldn’t feel them.

So to be cast as the ghost was a relief. I read the play and knew I would largely be obscured from the audience, in darkness or behind a scrim. I hoped that my ghost would be one of special effects, costumes and lighting doing the work of making a wraith of me. This felt like an exhale, like safety.

It was an evacuation of my physical self, and after, I simply chose not to return.  

But in rehearsals, I repeatedly received the same note: “You’re not in your body.” I learned quickly there would be no fog machines. My costume would be only a translucent gray slip. And the end of the play would include a full, physical reveal of the ghost—nowhere to hide.

When I was a little girl, I believed my body was a temple of God, a dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. But the concept of bodily holiness took on new meaning when I began to pursue a life as an actor, a profession that required a public offering of the body. It was a delicate thing in my early theater career—feeling my body to be holy, holiness demanding a level of privacy, and balancing these notions with the need to be carnal and powerfully expressive onstage. I enjoyed these internal negotiations. But then a man hurt me because he could, and I wanted to forget the fact of my bodily existence altogether.

Even more distressing than the play’s end, the full-body reveal of the ghost, was the curse in act 2. As the ghost girl, I’d have to burn words into a man’s back with a simple lift of my hand, a gesture requiring an intense physical presence. I wanted to dissolve, a tiny Hamlet wishing that my too-too-solid flesh would melt. But I also wanted to be a great storyteller, and the moment of the curse would demand an unflinching and honest and open physicality.

There is a state I’m always reaching for as an actor, an energetic movement beyond myself, becoming bigger, more light-filled. In the gesture of the curse, I wanted to make artistic choices that set the stage alight. In rehearsals, I raised my arm and reached it toward the actor playing the man who’d wronged my ghost. I reached, I strained, and still I felt emptiness. Another actor shrugged at me on a ten-minute break: “You’ve got to get into your body.”

I hated this talk about “being in the body,” language I’d only ever heard used by theater people. At that time in my life, I felt most in my body while lying facedown on the kitchen floor, hoping I might sink into the linoleum. I tried to make myself smaller, self-protection from what scared me most, the many ways I might express in the body the unsettledness of my heart.

At the library, in search of anything that might help, I lifted a blue volume from the shelves, Towards a Poor Theatre. Published in 1968, the book contains interviews outlining Polish director Jerzy Grotowski’s physical approach to acting, techniques that pushed against barriers between the carnal and spiritual.

Grotowski’s theater was uninterested in sets, costuming, and props—a theater free of excess. Instead, the actor and her body are at the heart of a ritualistic path to training, her corporeal self conveying an inner world. Intense physical exercises are the marrow of this work. Corporels, for example, involve exploration of movement within specific forms. “The cat” requires an actor to undulate the spinal column and circle the hips, her hands and feet on the floor. Eventually, there are crouches and kicks, the knees and elbows bending, fully committed physical movement arising from the actor’s internal impulses.

This approach had no appeal to me, and I felt ill while skimming the book. At the time, I wanted to be hidden and still onstage. I wanted to be hidden and still in life. There was some security in a stock-still existence. No one could accuse you of making a decision that led you to a place of danger. No one could accuse you of asking for anything.

One afternoon, the cast spent a rehearsal improvising a scene that occurs before the events of the play: A raucous teenage party in a cave, the events leading to my character’s death. Our director left assorted items in the dressing rooms for us to find—a flashlight, chips, and six-packs of soda meant to be beer. Inside the cavernous theater space, all light sources had been covered carefully with thick black paper or heavy fabric. My castmates and I navigated the darkness, hanging on to one another’s limbs.

In character, we told clumsy jokes and danced drunkenly. We graffitied the walls of the cave with our names. I laid myself on the cool floor and imagined I could hear cold echoes coming from other caverns.

“C’mon,” said one of the boys. “Somethin’ I wanna show ya.”

I shook my head, enjoying the ground, the way it held me, and the imagined buzz of the beer. When he reached for both my wrists and pulled me up, I let myself hang limp and threw my head back, trying to stay with the sensations of my body but feeling myself beginning to slip away. Then, far from the group, somewhere darker, he stroked my hair, said shhhhh, then lifted me gently.

He carried me through a stage door, into the backstage hallway, into the light, and into the dressing rooms where a sign taped to the shower curtain simply said abyss. He pulled back the curtain and placed me on the cold tile floor. Dropping the slight twang he’d adopted for his character, he said, “You’re dead now, sorry.” Then he left. I felt numb.

Later in the rehearsal, the note came again after I raised my arm to bring on the calamity of the curse: “We need you to inhabit this moment,” our director said. “The moment has to fill your body. Then it has to fill the whole room. Make it fill the universe.”

The artistic blockages I was dealing with were many, and primary among them was my rejection of the physical vulnerability the moment would require. Added to this was a fear of objectification and a Catholic childhood understanding of the flesh as inclined to sin. There was also growing up in a body at a time when diet pills and belly wraps and self-defense keychains with pom-poms and tassels were simply in the ether. And I didn’t have to try hard to imagine violence against a body like mine. I didn’t have to imagine at all. But I was becoming tired of hiding, and so I turned to Grotowski again.

In Grotowski’s physical training, the aspect I was most able to comprehend on my own were the plastiques, exercises in which different parts of the body move in isolation and then in conversation with one another or with a partner. These exercises are designed to create a sensation of flow, to synthesize the work of the body and mind, a type of connection I needed to relearn.

These exercises are designed to create a sensation of flow, to synthesize the work of the body and mind, a type of connection I needed to relearn.

Again and again, I watched clips from a 1975 CBS special called “The Body Speaks.” It features Grotowski’s artistic collaborator Ryszard Cieślak in conversation with theater critic Margaret Croyden. The special includes black-and-white footage of a bare-chested Cieślak whipping his hair as he performs the plastiques. His fingers move with vigorous intent and suddenly jerk in opposition to his wrist as he writhes through space. His shoulder and neck enter the dialogue, then his torso and legs. The plastiques are an unbroken and unplanned stream of movements, each responding to the last, transforming the body into a strange, flowing creature.

“You have to feel your body open,” Cieślak says in “The Body Speaks,” “and you have to go beyond the body, go beyond the obstacles, go beyond the limits of the body.”

Alone in the rehearsal hall, I let my hair hang down and moved my head impulsively, the way I’d seen Cieślak move, pulling my shoulder up in slow arches before my elbow kicked away from me. I moved in response to internal stimulus, following images in my mind as they arose—a chain-link fence at dawn, damp tree bark, the sensation of a bee sting. I began slowly, but soon my whole body twisted and thrashed. The longer I spent in the exercise, the more I felt what I can only describe as a shock to the system.

Sweat formed on my brow. As I stayed with the sensations in my body, I felt a brief moment of panic. But I was alone, I reminded myself. I was safe. And the more vigorously I moved, the more I sank into a feeling of liquid astonishment at my very anatomy. I rolled my wrists and wove my fingers pointedly through the air and was filled with reverence for the three bones of the arm, the twenty-seven bones of the human hand. I’d never given much thought to my fist, its tendon sheaths and ligaments, the beauty of the tender meat of the thumb. But in the exercise, the mere existence of my fingertips suddenly seemed cause for celebration. In my body, joy, and also rage.

I felt like a physical embodiment of the religious iconography of my youth, a heart ablaze. But instead of energy directed up toward the heavens, the energy was everywhere. It was both within and without, erupting like a sunburst, even when I slowed down, even when I was finally still.

The body tells many stories—ones of solace and delight, indulgence and languishing, stories of ache, illness, love. My job as an actor was to keep my heart close to my mouth and to put it in my fingertips too. I could worry about this body being susceptible to injury and harm. I could hide, spending a lifetime small and hoping for mercy. Or I could begin the task of gently returning to myself, to learn full corporeal praise. I could touch my body. I could honor it. I could ask questions of it and give it gifts: What do you want in your arms and on your tongue? Where do you want to be? Whose hands do you want in yours?

Discovering Grotowski’s methodology was the beginning of a practice that would compel me, both in the theater and out, to put my legs in motion toward things I love, toward what quickens the heart, toward what expands me.

Before each rehearsal, I worked through the plastiques. And in performance, I raised my arm and reached. In concentrated movements, I could feel the energy coursing through me, internal patterns like tree branches appearing after a lightning strike, electricity’s path made visible. I opened my mouth, threw back my head, and spread my fingers as if my power could blister a message onto a man’s back: Remember me.

After I laid the curse, the story shot toward the moment the ghost would be seen in her entirety, the play’s final moments. After a clap of thunder, a door swung open, and there I stood, soaked to the bone, my body pulsing for just the flicker of a single, harrowing second before the blackout. I was in her body. I was in mine.

• 0