ABSTRACT
Active Analysis (Deistvennyi analiz) is a flexible rehearsal technique that melds intellectual processes of analysis with embodied, hence active, analysis of performance texts. The ensemble works collectively through a series of études (improvisations), like drafts, with each successive étude coming progressively closer to the desired performance. Études are planned, using a systematic approach to storytelling that envisions performance as a chain of events, each of which occurs when an impelling action encounters a counteraction that alters its trajectory and causes the performers’ circumstances to change, inducing the need for a new action. This map of action-counteraction-event focuses the ensemble’s work and demands that individual actors choose and perform specific active verbs to pursue their actions and counteractions. Études are performed silently or verbally—using the actors’ or author’s words, or paraphrases of written texts (Carnicke 2009, 194–206, 212).
