THEATER : East Meets West in Quest for Brecht’s Vision, Vigor : The Suzuki method of training helps the cast of ‘The Caucasian Chalk Circle,’ which is being performed at UCI’s Fine Arts Concert Hall through Saturday.

To taped Japanese music, 23 UC Irvine actors stamp heavily in military marching style, their knees slightly bent, their torsos rigid.

“Knees higher!” shouts Kent Kirkpatrick, who joins the stamping throng and demonstrates a few steps. One or two of the 46 knees lift a little higher. Mostly the faces close in more tightly with the effort of extreme concentration.

Kirkpatrick is training these actors in the Suzuki method for their performances in “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” by Bertolt Brecht, which continues tonight in UCI’s Fine Arts Concert Hall. They’ve been working as a company every day for about six weeks, with Kirkpatrick, with Eli Simon, the show’s director, and with Paul Hodgins, a resident UCI composer who created an original score for this production.

The entire creative ensemble stayed on campus over the four-week Christmas vacation, working out and rehearsing. A typical nine-hour day included 1 1/2 hours of Suzuki exercises, musical rehearsal, mask construction, and work on the play itself.

The Suzuki master’s few demonstrative steps reveal the strength and grace the students are striving for. His pelvis seems to be independently suspended. His legs pump as smoothly and powerfully as pistons. And he makes it look easy.

Kirkpatrick, just completing his first year as a teacher of movement at UCI, has been working with the rigorous physical training techniques of Tadashi Suzuki, the acclaimed Japanese theater director, since 1983.

Kirkpatrick was a graduate student in a class that Suzuki taught at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. That summer and the summer after, Kirkpatrick studied with Suzuki in Japan as an invited member of his celebrated theater company in Toga. He is one of three Americans whom Suzuki has chosen to certify as Suzuki instructors.

The stamping has been going on for about 10 minutes when the music stops suddenly and everyone collapses. They lie still on the stage floor, breathing heavily. A shakuhachi pipes over the sound system. Rising, each in his or her own tempo and style, the actors approach the edge of the stage slowly, an uneven line of unbroken concentration.

“OK. Good.”

Kirkpatrick gets a drum, and after giving a few instructions laced with Japanese terms, he leads the company in another series of strenuous physical and vocal exercises. Finally, the actors warm up musically in a more traditionally Western style. The arpeggios seem quaint and delicate after all the exotic sound and fury.

Just what is all the stamping about?

In this case, it’s about the efforts of Simon, Kirkpatrick, Hodgins and the actors to bring vigor and vision to their production of Brecht’s play, a vision fueled by the intense, expressive, stylized movement emphasized in the Suzuki training.

A little over a year ago, Simon observed some of Kirkpatrick’s classes. “I was floored,” he says. “As a director, my wheels were turning about what I could use it for.”

“The Caucasian Chalk Circle” was chosen as a collaborative project. Simon believed that the presentational style of Suzuki’s movement suited Brecht’s famous “alienation effect,” the anti-naturalistic, epic storytelling in which signs pop up and actors talk directly to the audience. Both Brecht and Suzuki are masters of the theatrical, and for a year now, Simon and Kirkpatrick have been working on how to put it all together.

“We didn’t know how it would come out,” says Simon. “We decided to just start with the training every day, and then go for the scenes.”

At first, even the students familiar with the disciplines from Kirkpatrick’s classes “were fish out of water when it came to applying it to a play,” he said. Simon agrees. “They were confused, off-balance--which is a good way to be when you’re doing art. And we had the time to work it out.”

Everything happening in the theater attests to how exciting and involving “working it out” has been. The back wall of the set is lovingly dressed with the archetypal paraphernalia of modern man: wagon wheels, barrels, rocking horses. Their arrangement seems to hold deep and secret meanings. The stage is flanked by percussion instruments.

Simon is a trained percussionist, and Hodgins’ score relies heavily upon drum rhythms, just like the Suzuki exercises.

The stage floor is wooden. The actors perform in tabi (bifurcated socks), without shoes, to enhance their sense of connection with the ground, the Earth.

Ultimately, Suzuki’s training is for the soul as well as for the body. “As an actor, you are in a spiritual condition of presenting the best of humanity to God,” Kirkpatrick explains. “The stamping is a purification of the space and the actors. It chases away evil spirits, and when the actors collapse and rise again, they take in the energy that is left, the good energy.”

Simon adds that everyone has grown. “This has brought them out, made them bigger. Because of the way we have integrated the Suzuki method into the production, the actors are empowered to perform this play.”