Final performance

We spent our last Tuesday lesson perfecting our class pieces and making sure they were clean. We went through it multiple times so that people could clear up any doubts, and so everyone knew where they were and when they were there. We also neatened up particular things such as the strong exaggerated scientists physicality and the shuffling making sure that this was at a 10 not a 6/7.  We needed to be confident with our class piece as it would not be performed in the space we had been rehearsing in, so being confident meant that we could easily transfer the performance to the new space without wasting much time.

Performance

In our final performance I believe that it was an extremely successful show. Every individual was fully committed mentally and physically throughout, which gave raw and natural emotional impact to the audience evoking thought about what they were seeing rather than relaxing and just watching a piece of entertainment. This was mainly achieved through the immersive nature of the piece as this allowed the audience to be In charge and experience the small cabinet of curiosities group pieces as they chose. This also meant that they felt more involved rather than them being separated into actor and audience.

My duet in the exhibition went well and was successful as we responded thoughtfully to ‘The Pikes’. We picked a prominent theme and we devised a more visual and thought provoking piece that was achieved through our physical and vocal choices like Artaud’s work. We had taken on the feedback from our peers and made our performance stronger in all aspects. There were a few things we did change last minute such as costume and the staging. Our costumes were originally all black with tights masks but we changed this so that I was the only one wearing a mask, we agreed that this would push the gender inequality theme more as I had no identity, whereas Josh remained his normal self. The staging changed slightly during the performance due to spontaneity, Josh would run of with his ball at the beginning and I would chase him or he would push my building blocks to the other side of the room which I would have to go and get. This all was natural response to each other; if one of us decided to change something up slightly we just went with it. I think this worked as we where honest with our movements and choices and I think this came across in our performance.

In our class piece I believe that we really thought about our theme of Nature/Nurture and projected this clear narrative to the audience making it a thought provoking piece. Our piece juggled humour and serious drama in a professional manner that made the audience laugh in parts and really listen and think about what we were saying in others. We moved the audience around the space as it was an immersive piece; I feel that we were very considerate and careful when moving the audience around resulting in them feeling more relaxed and comfortable. I think our piece wouldn’t have been as successful if it wasn’t immersive, as we put the audience in certain scenarios that forced them to think not just watch. On the negative side the experimental nature of our piece meant that the audience might not have understood certain parts of the piece but that added to Artaud’s methods in the respect that we had the audience working out things for themselves and questioning things.

At the end of all the pieces we all joined together and began to do some chanting in response to Butoh. I felt like this was very un rehearsed and did not feel like an appropriate and meaningful end to our piece. I would have liked to end the piece in a stronger and powerful way as I feel that the ending we picked was rather slap dash. This was due to lack of time and if we had had more time we would have come up with something more completed.

Joining Together

All 75 of us gathered together to create the ending of our Cabinet of Curiosities piece. As all three classes have taken on a more physical based response our teachers decided that the ending should also be physical. To get us into the zone we started to explore each other’s bodies in pairs, we explored special proximity, touch and sensations which got us to give of natural emotions and responses. While we were working in pairs we were all very physically and mentally free. This was interesting as we were never sure of what was going to happen or where we would end up it was just pure natural response to each other’s movements.

We were then asked to physicalise in pairs ‘what was the last thing that make you laugh’ I didn’t think of a particular thing that made me laugh but I immediately began to open my mind to my surroundings, seeing what other people were doing made me laugh making me bounce and feed of other peoples emotions and movements. This also brought about the natural emotion of laughter. I found physically responding to questions a very insightful task and personally felt more honest and free with my answers than I would have if I just vocalised it.

After doing partner and smaller group based work we joined together , we were then told to physicalise responses to a word or sentence that was said. Our first word was ‘sunset’ I think everyone had a similar idea of what a sunset was as immediately there where loads of arms reaching up towards the sky with spread fingers that started to slowly move down towards the floor.  This was really interesting as not only were we physically responding to and with other people but we all seemed to be in the same mental headspace.

When we responded to ‘Ocean Waves’ we included vocal sounds such as whooshing and crashing noises, as well as making the same slow but violent halt movement. This was just a visual experiment to test out endings. We moved on to more questions rather than words, particular people were asked to stand up and independently respond to a question, this was inspired by Tim Etchells Quizoola, where actors were asked spontaneous questions by audience members and instinctively responded whether that be a funny, jokey or a serious response.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7naFehT5DEM

One of the questions  ’what is greed’ was asked of Ella, she started to make grabbing movements and started to stare at her hands, we all independently but as a group started to do varied versions of the same movements together using different levels. Sometimes with the individual responses, they would end up resulting in clumpy similar movements and for that I did not think it was as visually interesting or enjoyable as the responding to words or sentences as a group was.

Sounds and Lights

In this week’s lesson we continued to add more to our class piece we particularly focused on working with lights and sound. This was used in the Hold On piece which is based on mother and son relationships, our baby in the womb piece and our Childs play piece. In all three of these parts we use light to represent innocence and new life. In the hold on part of our group piece the sons turn their lights of and the mothers keep theirs on this is to show the desperation mothers have to keep that light with them and how reluctant they are to imagine life without that light in it. I really like the use of the light here as I think it responds really well to the Nature and Nurture theme and works really well with the material we have already for our class piece.

The music that we use for the hold on part motivates our performance; it is a lot like what we were doing in the first couple of lessons, when we were pushing ourselves to extreme limits in response to objectives and music. The mothers and the sons are both trying to reach those objectives and the music is helping to push us to meet those objectives through the loudness of the music to the strong and heavy beat of the music. The music in the womb and Childs play part is a lot more magical and light, it is reflective of what we are trying to portray which is magic and innocence. I really like the music aspect of our piece thus far.

We had to devise two small pieces to go into our overall class piece this lesson. One of the pieces was based on the synopsis of growing up, this piece was made by two groups (half and half of the class) my group decided to pick Will as the person who would be growing up , we played with levels, and themes of growing up such as comfort, love, neglect and independence. Kim wrote a poem that she read out while we were performing what we had made, and it was really nice to see how nicely the poem and our devised piece worked together, there was a part in poem where she said ‘ fire burns and dogs may bite’  and it corresponded really nicely with a particular part in our piece as we were physically showing hate and anger towards Will, so that worked really nicely.

The second piece that we had to devise was a small piece based on the stimulus of a picture. The picture we responded to was of a woman being helped by a man after the 7/7 attacks.

 The music that was played was a mix of people speaking about different events that had happened such as a news reporter talking about 7/7 and a news reporter talking about GCSE results mixed with quite a sad, slow paced piece of background music. This created a heavy sad atmosphere in the room that helped create our piece as we were able to feed of the natural emotions we where feelings.  Our small devised piece responded to Nature/ Nurture in a positive and negative way as although in the beginning you see Mateus and I going in as bombers, you see the aftermath of people helping and saving others around them.

Child of rage

I watched the documentary Child of Rage  which is ultimately about Nature and Nurture. Beth Thomas was abused when she was very young by her birth parents, they would not feed her and left her and her brother almost to fend for themselves when they were just a couple months of age. Beth had endured serious neglect as a child, her mother died at 1 and because of this she never developed a sense of love or trust for anyone (nurture). She received sexual abuse from her birth father and this lead on to her exhibiting sexual behaviour particaularky towards her brother, this also lead her to start molesting her brother and regularly masturbating. Because of the early abusive and violent nurture Beth endured this shaped her into a severely angry and monstrous individual even though this only happened for around 2 years of the beginning of her life. The nature of her fathers sadistic ways could also be said to be passed down to her through genes. This documentary is extremely interesting in response to Nature/ Nurture, as it just shows how important it is in shaping a person, it also responds to the nature nurture debate, as you could be born with certain traits or genes but the environment you grow up around ( in Beth's case abuse and violence) can bring these traits that might not necessarily ever be acted upon, to the surface.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g2-Re_Fl_L4 

Feedback/ Nature Nurture

To start the lesson we performed our small group pieces to the class, this was so that we could get some feedback from the class that would ultimately help perfect the pieces. Josh and I had already come up with most of the piece, and felt quite confident about it. But when showing it to our peers we realised through their comments that there was a lot more to be added and developed, such as:

·         pushing our physicality’s more

·         playing with the levels more

·         using the chosen props in a more constructive way

The feedback in general was positive, they liked our costume; this was all black with tights over heads, this had cut out eyes and a mouth inspired by the artwork The Pikes that we were responding to in our piece. They also liked our use of only three props; the ball, the book and the building blocks. From receiving their feedback Josh and I have decided to use the props to symbolise more things such as the ball when used by Josh will represent a toy but when I have the ball it will  represent a child/baby.

After viewing each others small group pieces, we started to work on our class piece which is based on nature and nurture. To start of with we were each given a question in pairs, my question was ‘are the traits we are born with influenced by the environment we live in’ we where then told to make this question our own through voice and physicality, Zoe and I decided to make it quite teacher based, we then put this on its feet and were told to physicalise an exaggerated scientist and fit this with the question. As we say our question the others take a different level, whether that be sitting down, leaning back or to the side. We responded to Artaud as after each pair says their question we all as a collective begin to mutter in gibberish, this is like Artaud as he believed that text was unnecessary and believed more in his performers making more natural emotive sounds such as screams and grunts.

We continued to devise the class piece looking more at the nature side of nature nurture, with the sperm and the egg. We looked at the natural production of a baby, through some of us becoming sperm and some of us becoming eggs, we then went to the birth of the baby. This is all looking at the natural aspects of the beginning of a life, with the main question ‘can some people born bad?’. Our piece is mainly in response to Artaud as it is a very physical and naturally emotive piece without much text; it also carries a shock factor for the audience, which compares to Artaud as he ‘believed that theatre should be shocking for the audience. And it should not be something that they sit down and enjoy’. Although I think that the audience will enjoy our piece, it will be more of a thought provoking performance than one of pure entertainment.

Pictures

We started Tuesday’s lesson looking at pictures. We were each given 5 pictures to look at and create a story from, we then shared these stories in groups of 4. When telling our stories I noticed three prominent factors

1.       They were all imaginative

2.       The pictures where all connected well, and the stories made sense

3.       The story was told in 3^rd person, it was an outsiders perspective

From this I gathered that we all told stories in a similar way and that gave me the idea that a lot of people in the class would probably have adopted this prominent style in their storytelling. I also gathered that this style was easier to understand, as when we put ourselves in the story it sometimes can become complicated and tangled whereas when you are telling the story from an outsider’s perspective it’s a lot clearer.

We then had to join with another person, to create partners and add both of our 5 pictures up into 10, we then had to create a story out of these 10 pictures together. I was with Esme, her story was about a girl falling from the sky into an upside down world. A lot of her pictures where of streets and architectural features of places so she used this as a part in the story where the girl character was discovering new things in this upside down world.  We had to add the stories together and the story we ended up with was Esmes story but with a few added elements of mine, such as the city element and the horse.   We then had to act the story out, so we started to put it on its feet, we went with the more physical approach without text. We lay out the pictures into a line that Esme then walked along as the girl, this allowed her to clearly respond to the pictures. We felt like the physical approach fit more with the story and was also an effective way of portraying what the story meant leaving room for interpretation by the audience.

For the second half of the lesson we paired up into twos to start work on our cabinet of curiosities group piece.

Annette Messager 1943- The Pikes 1992-3

We decided to work on The Pikes a piece Influenced by Surrealism, power in relationships between male and female, nature and culture, vulnerability and aggression. Josh and I decided to focus on the relationships between male and female because we thought being different sexes might be a visual aid to the concept, and the topic of equality between male and female is a very current and broad subject  at the moment. We did a quick brainstorm of ideas that we got down to 3 points we could explore:

·         Colour

·         Levels

·         Jobs/ Work

After just putting on some music and exploring those points with our bodies, we decided that we could incorporate all of the points into one physical piece.  We decided on doing a physical piece as we believed this was more fitting with the chosen subject and we enjoyed physically exploring  this more with bodies than through voice. We decided that levels and jobs could go hand in hand as men always seem to be on a higher level than women in the working world (averagely). The point of colour could come as a visual aspect with costume and props. These are the main ideas we had during Tuesdays lesson, I have learned that devising is easiest when having a clear subject matter in the chosen stimulus. As the artwork chosen had an overriding theme of inequality we where able easily brainstorm ideas around that broad subject and continue to experiment and build up our group piece.

The Tate

Joseph Beeuys 1921-1986- Lightning with Stag in it's Glare 1958-85

Suspended, bronze triangle embodies the energy of a powerful flash of lightning, which illuminates a group of half-formed creatures. 

Ideas

Physical theatre piece, very abstract where we represent different ideas and creatures with just a still position 

An object based piece where we look at different objects and perform what they mean to us or what they symbolise and resemble. 

The colours in this piece are quite plain and bland so we could do a peice on colours and how they represent different emotions. 

Roger Hiorns 1975-Untitled 2006 

Hiorns uses chemical or mineral processes to explore ideas growth and charge and the tensions between the industrial and the organic, the functional and the functionless. 

Ideas

Physical growth in the life cycle or growth in illness or pain. 

Tensions between people in different situations. Physical and naturalistic piece.

Lynda Benglis 1941-Quartered Meteor 1969-1975

This work was originally made by pouring polyurethane foam into the corner of the gallery. While many artists were interested in the literal properties of materials, Benglis wanted to suggest bodily and geological flows. Here the title also indicates a divided astral mass. 

Ideas

Layering of bodies, ideas, thought processes and dreams overlapped 

Shine, what does it mean to shine literally? And mentally? 

Annette Messqger 1943- The Pikes 1992-3

Influenced by Surrealism, power in relationships between male and female, nature and culture, vulnerability and aggression. 

Ideas

There is a lot you could do with this peice ...

Surrealism, creating abstract and experimental work with sounds and physical theatre 

Equality between men and women, power, a particular aspect so jobs or competitions.

Children's play, games and the difference between children and adults mentally and physically.