Ensemble Notes Elements of Ensemble work and Training ~ Introduction' to Part Three: Forming Ensemble: Some Approaches to Training Shared Training ~ This was seen as paramount to ensemble work by practitioners such as Sharon Carnicke and Copeau. As opposed to traditional training this focused on new young actors through developing something more fundamental than the acquisition of technique; it promotes the development of shared sensibility, enhanced sensitivity, common vocabulary, collective understanding and even, as I explore below, shared ethics. They would be taught a new set of skills for example ballet, but as opposed to just ballet technique these principals would be explored to add a new dimension to the companies own working knowledge as well as working language, allowing both performance and interpersonal relationships to grow within the ensemble. Types of Training Focus ~ Communicative/expressive relationship of per- former(s) to audience - This encourages individuals to be more sensitive to impulse and reaction, and, through that process of sensitisation, to become more subtle in interpersonal communication. ~ A focus on Actor Director relationship ~ Grotowsk was particularly focused upon developing his company through this training and through allowing the actors to relate to someone outside of themselves and the world created. While this was a relationship between actor/director as opposed to actor/actor this allowed the individuals capacity to be tested and played against that of others. Furthermore Phillip Zarrilli, also argues that relationship with other performers develops out of attention to the development of the self, advocating this actor/director focused training. ~ A focus on inter-performer relationship - This style pays primary attention to relationship between performers, to interrelationship within the emergent ensemble. Among those who identify relationship between performers as central to their training is Nicolas Nunez. He sees interrelationship as core to learning. This method favours group work as well as a strong sense of developing interpersonal relationships within an ensemble through shared training and experiences. ~ Psychophysical training - An integrative training, one that recognises that what one does and how one pays attention to it are intimately connected - and that both require training simultaneously. A psychophysical approach asks a performer to pay attention to her experience of her body's actions, and to the processes of thinking that underpin those physical actions. Through learning to manipulate this attention, she learns how to construct her performance. As a number of practitioners here suggest, training in ensemble - whichever route is taken - can eventually expand to include the audience. If one can learn to be open physically and emotionally towards a fellow performer, one can learn to be open to and with an audience. A focus within each of these training methods is being present in the moment, enabling the enable to react sensitively and really to the action onstage as of view it for the first time.
Rural Retreats Many ensemble based company for example Stanislavski's the Russian group Theatre as well as the unrelated but similarly named London Group theatre, believed that removing