It isn't easy, sharing your feet with strangers. So when we're asked to remove our shoes and socks and get in touch with the planet, the room is gripped by a mild electric shock, and you can see the wave of anxiety tumble around the assembled faces. Am I smelly? Are there horrible black fluffy bits between my toes?
Why, oh why didn't I lose the bronze nail varnish from last month's holiday in Corfu before I came into this room? A dozen and a half souls have gathered on a mild, wet Saturday morning in the Yeats Memorial Building in the centre of Sligo for a weekend workshop on the speaking of Yeats's verse dialogue given by the actor and director Derek Chapman. Ah, yes, you will be thinking. A weekend workshop. That's the one where you sit round drinking coffee until 11 a.m., chat awhile, wiggle your arms about a bit and then adjourn for lunch. Are you kidding? By 10.15 a.m. we're all flat on our backs on the floor taking deep breaths and chanting the alphabet in a low and lugubrious monotone, like Buddhist monks whose batteries are about to run out.
"Keep breathing!" cries the indefatigable Chapman, apparently undismayed by our performance so far. "If you don't breathe, you'll die!"
Derek Chapman knows why he is here: to share with us various techniques connected with breathing and posture which he has perfected over the years and which lead, if implemented correctly and practised religiously, to improved resonance and thus to enhanced vocal delivery. He intends to loosen our spines and get our vertebrae working individually. We will be liberating the centre of our bodies - he spins the centre of his in a fluid, graceful hula hoop - exercising our respiratory areas and developing a mind-set which will allow us to locate our voices not in our chests, but somewhere in the lower regions of our backs.
But why is everyone else here? Well, there's a vivacious teenager with an interest in drama and an auntie in the Yeats Society. There's a school teacher who reckons the classroom is a kind of a stage anyway. Somebody is about to direct and perform a Beckett play; somebody else wants to earn a workshop credit for his Eng Lit course at Pennsylvania State University, another is taking singing lessons and wants to find out more about theories of voice production. Two members of the group are appearing in a Yeats play at the Hawk's Well Theatre tonight and another says she came because she has never done anything like this before. A mixed bag wouldn't even begin to describe us.
Still, we chant and droop and stretch to beat the band and by lunchtime we've mastered the neutral position, which eliminates tension from the body, and cantered through a comprehensive series of what Chapman calls "isolating exercises", aka a shoulder-shrugging outbreak of Gallic dimensions and a slow-motion pelvic thrust which transformed us into a collection of geriatric Michael Jacksons. We are now, Chapman assures us triumphantly, half a centimetre taller - though he confesses that a) it won't last, and b) a good night's sleep would have had much the same effect.
After lunch things suddenly become more complicated. We're back on the floor again, but now the in-and-out rhythmic breathing is to be counterpointed by the presence of an imaginary straw between the legs - a straw, mark you, with a mind of its own. Breathe in and squeeze air out through the straw; breathe out and suck air in. The straw is merely a concept which will allow us to access our lower diaphragms, but for many of us, it seems ominously like the last straw. Even Eoghan, the unfazeable teenager, is finding it all slightly unnerving.
"Today has been really cool," he says, "but you see that thing with the straw? I nearly fell asleep." Eoghan took part in a drama workshop in Dublin earlier in the year, but says the present one is far more intellectual and considerably more focussed. "Mind over matter, that's what it is. Mind over matter." Though to be honest, if anyone should manage to climb up the majestic windows of the Yeats Building and catch a glimpse of us standing, feet splayed, gleefully yelling "mummy-mummy-mummy-mummy" at each other while waving our pelvises about, it might appear to be more a question of us having lost our minds altogether.
Thus far our struggling bodies must, to the same casual observer, have resembled Lewis Carroll's slithy toves, which gyred and gymbled in the wabe, far more closely than the balletic effortlessness of Yeats's dancer and the dance. In fact, apart from a brief coffee-break discussion of his interest in the occult and the failure of his anti-impotence operation, this Yeats Summer School workshop has been, thus far, remarkable for the almost complete absence of Yeats from the scene; but the master makes a magnificent entrance on the second day, when Chapman puts his techniques into practice on selected chunks from The Countess Cathleen, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, Purgatory, The Hour-Glass, Deirdre and King Oedipus.
Each person gets a chance to choose, then deliver, four lines; comments are invited from the group, then the mini-performance is repeated. It is a gruelling but cathartic experience - and the way people grow in confidence, try things they would never have dreamed of trying, uncover subtle rhythms and shifts and pauses is truly impressive. Is the First Merchant in The Countess Cathleen a seducer or a sadist? Is Deirdre exhausted and frightened, or passionate and vulnerable? "The answer is in the text," Chapman says firmly. "It's all in the text."
In the closing question and answer session Marcus Counihan, who works backstage, and occasionally acts, at the Hawk's Well, is brave enough to ask the question we've all been careful, for two days, to avoid. Isn't there is a view in theatre circles that Yeats's plays aren't - well, just aren't terribly good? It has been obvious, he adds, from Chapman's insightful and incisive comments that this is not a view to which he himself subscribes, but can he articulate his own view of the plays? He certainly can.
"I think that the notion of Yeats the poet as god, with Yeats the playwright plodding along behind, is a very sad one. It's just that Yeats the playwright has been very badly served. He was attempting to revolutionise a certain form of theatre, and his stage directions are wearisome and often, if followed to the letter, stultifying; but the texts themselves are immaculate and exciting.
"The method of putting them on is what has failed. We've become bogged down in `traditional' performances of Yeats's plays - which is ironic, considering that he was trying to break down `traditional' methods of theatrical performance! There has been a considerable improvement in recent years, of course. But I think theatre is only now catching up with how revolutionary Yeats actually was."
One way of measuring a workshop's success is to see how quickly people want to get away - and there is, though the rain has disappeared and Sunday afternoon has blown up fresh and sunny, a marked reluctance to break things up. Clearly, what Chapman somewhat disarmingly refers to as "this stuff" - in other words, his techniques, which combine elements of yoga, Alexander Technique, reflexology and the Japanese theatrical method known as Butoh with a wealth of practical stage experience - has fallen on receptive ears.
"I was pretty sceptical coming in yesterday, I must say, especially about the exercises; I thought it was all nonsense," says Joan Fitzpatrick, who first took an interest in acting when her school performance as Shylock drew laughter from her classmates and praise from her teacher, and is now an accomplished and highly experienced actress and drama teacher in Sligo.
"But in fact it was very good, that physical approach. It does really make a difference. In fact I'd say it has revitalised my interest in theatre." Bare feet? Huh. Bare feet wouldn't bother us now.
