The necessity to explore the Imagined Surroundings.

As much as your focus needs to be on the subject, animal or bird, it needs also to be absorbed in and absorbing the environment in which the subject exists. How can you look at what your subject is doing without at the same time taking in where it is? what surrounds it ? listen for sounds, take in scents, colours, textures, and temperature. 

When I decide to focus on a particular animal, I am as much focused on where it exists as I am in what it is doing.

This lagoon at Gialova, a wetlands paradise and bird sanctuary, hosts hundreds of migratory birds in the autumn and again in the spring.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzS9b0pyDyY


Take nothing for granted in your looking. The more material you have to bring into the rehearsal room, the more you have at your disposal. The world of the animal could be seen as akin to the world of the play. What you bring to 'The Empty Space' will feed your imagined circumstances. Indeed this is central to why you must look at your subject in the real as opposed to on footage. The surroundings give you much of what you need in order to commit fully to Transformation and Imaginative Improvisation.
The more you look and the more you absorb the more you will discover of the detail- both in the surrounds and then, once in the rehearsal room, within your imagination. It is this detail which will begin to unlock the human which is of course the beginning of the next stage of the work in this process.

Whilst Transformation and Imaginative Improvisation can and does expose the poor imaginations, equally it ignites those imaginations brimming full of wonders. When this happens, astonishing things can and do appear.

Photos- Jorgos Ziakas