1· Course in-class notes, from confusion to recording to reflection
In the first week of the course, we rehearsed and performed 17 versions of “Bank Robbery”. In the first few days, I was very confused about what intention, meaning, and purpose I actually wanted to convey to the audience, so I recorded the course content and conducted an initial reflection.
The teacher first spent a day and a half leading us to rehearse the initial version of “Bank Robbery”. Like traditional theatre, it included dialogue and action. Afterwards, the teacher guided us to brainstorm and gave this fixed script various completely different styles, including musical, modern dance, animal world, western, advertisement, etc…
I realized that this class leaned more towards improvisational performance design: first determine the style direction, and then based on this think about how lighting, music, and props assist in designing movement. In this process, performance replaced dialogue in traditional theatre, and the body, movement, and props turned into a kind of language, used to convey the speech, emotions between characters, and events happening on stage.
2· Physical Theatre Study – Association Based on an Oil Painting
After consulting materials, I realized that the core of this lesson revolves around Physical Theatre. As defined by Murray and Keefe in their book, physical theatre is a highly tense and innovative form of expression in contemporary theatre. It subverts the traditional theatre model that relies on dialogue to drive narrative, takes body movement itself as the core narrative language, and constructs story and emotional structures through actors’ postures, movements, spatial relationships, and rhythms (Murray & Keefe, 2016). Here, the body is not only an emotional carrier, but also “dramatic grammar” itself, by no means an appendage to dialogue.
As summarized by Mark Evans, the core of physical theatre lies in “taking the body and movement as the starting point for creative practice”, and presents “the dominance of movement over text and speech” (Evans, n.d., p.4). This kind of physical theatre is extremely attractive to me. It is like an oil painting, which does not rely on words to tell the viewer what happened, but expresses through a stronger, more sensory new language—the body.
More interestingly, the audience no longer relies solely on traditional textual narrative to experience, but perceives through intuition. Because the body often experiences emotions before our consciousness does: when we are anxious, the body will tremble involuntarily; when we are tired, language becomes redundant, and our expressions and postures will precede logic, honestly mapping out a low spirit.
In this context, the body is more honest than language, carrying those indescribable complex experiences. The audience relies on intuition and senses, directly touching that untranslatable tremor through the actor’s body language. This is precisely the moving power of physical theatre that transcends language and directly strikes the soul.
3· Viewing and Study of Physical Theatre Works
Kamoï Rei was a painter who continuously depicted the “darkness of the human world”, spent his life groping for his “true self” in the gap between ideals and reality, and ultimately ended his own life at the age of 57. Throughout his career, he painted countless portraits of drunkards, clowns, disabled soldiers, and old women—obsessively searching for himself among these departed souls.
The He Theatre Troupe uses the physical theatre piece Kamoï Rei as a vehicle to bring this painter, who groped in the gap between the “darkness of the human world” and ideal reality, to the stage together with the souls from his paintings. The stage abandons traditional textual narrative and instead practices the core concept of physical theatre: “taking the body as the starting point for creation”. The artist is heavily surrounded by the drunkards, clowns, and disabled soldiers he created, while the canvas in front of him, which should have carried everything, is in a completely blank and barren state.
The blank canvas, the surrounded painter, the tense and exaggerated physical staging… The actors use Corporeal Mime to externalize the painter’s psychological despair into a visual sense of oppression. This expression transcends the limitations of language, just as physical theatre theory emphasizes, its core lies in “taking the body and movement as the starting point for creative practice” and advocates “the dominance of movement over text and speech” (Evans, n.d., p.4). On the stage of Kamoï Rei, the body is more honest than language; it is no longer an auxiliary to the narrative, but carries the painter’s unspeakable despair. Every twisted tremor and every loss of balance and fall in the actors’ bodies is the concretization of the painter’s unspeakable despair in physical space. The audience is no longer a passive “spectator”, but through intuition and senses, directly touches the painful tremor left by that real life, which cannot be retold.
Reference
Murray, S. and Keefe, J. (2016) Physical Theatres: A Critical Introduction. 2nd ed. Abingdon and New York: Routledge
Evans, M. (n.d.) A Concise Introduction to Physical Theatre [PDF]. Digital Theatre+. Available at: https://edu-digitaltheatreplus-com.arts.idm.oclc.org/content/guides/a-concise-introduction-to-physical-theatre(Accessed: 7 October 2026).