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.

 

Impossible tasks

The first exercise we did involved us getting into pairs, were we where then labelled A and B. A had to imagine they were in a box and B had to tickle them. From this exercise we where to look at the physicality of the person being tickled (A). At first I was B the tickler, and Tyler was A the person being tickled, he did very big gestures and was very extravagant with his gestures, he was very physical with his movements, and vocal. He would try and escape from me and had sharp and jolted movements. We then swapped and A became the tickler and B became the person being tickled. When I was being tickled I noticed that I was quite opposite to Tyler my movements where quite minimal, at most my movements would consist of a head to the shoulder or my back bending slightly, the odd sensitive part of my body I would react to but all in all I was quite still. We then had to rein act our partners reaction to being tickled and our own, when performing my own I realised the difference between my partners movements and my own. Tyler’s expressive and over the top movements contrasted with my small minimal movements really nicely, It was really interesting that I had a partner who’s reaction was so different to mine because some people had partners who reacted the same to them and this meant that when they were asked to change from A to B’s reaction they were doing more the less the same thing, whereas as my body, face, mentality where completely different when rein acting A and B’s reactions. 

 

 

The second exercise was to write an impossible task on a sticky note, which was then collected and distributed randomly, so that people would receive someone else’s impossible task, I wrote down the impossible task of eating your way through the wall to the French class room on the other side of the wall and the impossible task that I received was to eat my way through the wall to Australia. This was a task that evoked us to use our full physicality’s, and incorporate the theme from last week of limits and pushing ourselves to our absolute limit. Although it was impossible for me to eat my way to Australia, I had to leave my rational and literal mentality behind, and just fill my head with the one objective of the impossible task. So I immediately began to eat the wall and use my hands and my legs and my mouth just to complete the task, this included picking of bits of wallpaper and eating it and physically trying to get my teeth into the wall, I had left myself behind and was just fully embodying the task, the music that was played was very upbeat and pushed me to get to Australia faster and to work harder, Sarah kept screaming ‘work harder, work harder!!’ and this was very frustrating because at most times I felt like I was pushing myself extremely hard, but I realised there was more that I could do and I could push myself harder if I wanted to.

 

After that, we sat down and discussed the difficulties and successes of the task, but while we were discussing this Sarah set us three different tasks; this was three pieces of music being played at different times each having a different objective the first being to perform the act of you being tickled by your partner the second being to perform the act of your partner being tickled by you and the third being free and exploring movement. This was really interesting as this involved us switching from one mentality to the next, there was the listening and thinking mentality of people sharing their opinions and thoughts on the task contrasted with the movement and objective mentality, leaving our personal thoughts behind and just thinking of either a person’s reaction, your own, or just acting of impulse, I found this quite fun as it was very game like ( musical chairs) where the music just started and we had to know which movement or objective went with what song and just be open to that jumping of different mentality, this was an engaging and active way of getting us to think about our body’s and our limits.

 

Anton Artuad

I read this article on Poetry Foundation http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/antonin-artaud. And found it extremely interesting and informative about Anton Artuad. The most interesting fact i found out was that Artaud's creative abilities were developed as a means of therapy during his many hospitalizations for mental illness and that while being treated in a hospital by Edouard Toulouse, Artaud was encouraged to express himself in poetry that was later published entitled Demain. As we are studying Artaud this Term its nice to have basic knowledge and understanding of the practitioner, now i can continue to build on this understanding throughout the term.

Article:

Considered among the most influential figures in the evolution of modern drama theory, Antonin Artaud associated himself with Surrealist writers, artists, and experimental theater groups in Paris during the 1920s. When political differences resulted in his break from the Surrealists, he founded the Theatre Alfred Jarry with Roger Vitrac and Robert Aron. Together they hoped to create a forum for works that would radically change French theater. Artaud, especially, expressed disdain for Western theater of the day, panning the ordered plot and scripted language his contemporaries typically employed to convey ideas, and he recorded his ideas in such works as Le Theatre de la cruaute and The Theater and Its Double.

Most critics believe that Artaud's most noted contribution to drama theory is his "theater of cruelty," an intense theatrical experience that combined elaborate props, magic tricks, special lighting, primitive gestures and articulations, and themes of rape, torture, and murder to shock the audience into confronting the base elements of life. Les Cenci, Artaud's play about a man who rapes his own daughter and is then murdered by men the girl hires to eliminate him, typifies Artaud's theater of cruelty. Les Cenci was produced in Paris in 1935 but was closed after seventeen dismal performances. Another example of Artaud's work is The Fountain of Blood, a farce about the creation of the world and its destruction by humans, especially women. Like many of Artaud's other plays, scenarios, and prose, Les Cenci and The Fountain of Blood were designed to challenge conventional, civilized values and bring out the natural, barbaric instincts Artaud felt lurked beneath the refined, human facade. Of The Fountain of Blood, Albert Bermel wrote in Artaud's Theater of Cruelty: "All in all, The Fountain of Blood is a tragic, repulsive, impassioned farce, a marvelous wellspring for speculation, and a unique contribution to the history of the drama."

Although Artaud's theater of cruelty was not widely embraced, his ideas have been the subject of many essays on modern theater, and many writers continue to study Artaud's concepts. Author George E. Wellwarth, for example, in Drama Survey, explained the theater of cruelty as "the impersonal, mindless—and therefore implacable—cruelty to which all men are subject. The universe with its violent natural forces was cruel in Artaud's eyes, and this cruelty, he felt, was the one single most important fact of which man must be aware. . . . Artaud's theater must be ecstatic. It must crush and hypnotize the onlooker's sense." Another description of the theater of cruelty was offered by Wallace Fowlie in an essay published in Sewanee Review. Fowlie wrote: "A dramatic presentation should be an act of initiation during which the spectator will be awed and even terrified. . . . During that experience of terror or frenzy . . . the spectator will be in a position to understand a new set of truths, superhuman in quality."

Artaud's creative abilities were developed, in part, as a means of therapy during the artist's many hospitalizations for mental illness. While being treated in a hospital by Edouard Toulouse, Artaud was encouraged to express himself in poetry, which Toulouse later published in the journal Demain. Artaud's life and his work, despite the efforts of psychotherapy, reflected his mental afflictions and were further complicated by his dependence on narcotics. At times he expressed faith in God; other times he denounced the Church and deified himself. He was also obsessed with the human body; he loathed the idea of sex and expressed a desire to separate himself from his sexual self.

In Antonin Artaud: Man of Vision, author Bettina L. Knapp wrote of the theorist's mental illness: "Artaud was unable to adapt to life; he could not relate to others; he was not even certain of his own identity." Knapp commented that "Artaud was in essence constructing an entire metaphysical system around his sickness, or, if you will, entering the realm of the mystic via his own disease. The focal point of his universe was himself and everything radiated from him outward." Referring to Artaud's The Umbilicus of Limbo, Knapp indicated Artaud "intended to 'derange man,' to take people on a journey 'where they would never have consented to go.'" She further explained, "Since Artaud's ideas concerning the dramatic arts were born from his sickness, he looked upon the theater as a curative agent; a means whereby the individual could come to the theater to be dissected, split and cut open first, and then healed." Knapp also offered an explanation of Artaud's popularity long after his death: "In his time, he was a man alienated from his society, divided within himself, a victim of inner and outer forces beyond his control. . . . The tidal force of his imagination and the urgency of his therapeutic quest were disregarded and cast aside as the ravings of a madman. . . . Modern man can respond to Artaud now because they share so many psychological similarities and affinities."

Similar words were issued in a Horizon essay by Sanche de Gramont, who wrote of Artaud: "If he was mad, he welcomed his madness. . . . To him the rational world was deficient; he welcomed the hallucinations that abolished reason and gave meaning to his alienation. He purposely placed himself outside the limits in which sanity and madness can be opposed, and gave himself up to a private world of magic and irrational visions."

Artaud spent nine of his last eleven years confined in mental facilities but continued to write, producing some of his finest poetry during the final three years of his life, according to biographer Susan Sontag. "Not until the great outburst of writing in the period between 1945 and 1948 . . . did Artaud, by then indifferent to the idea of poetry as a closed lyric statement, find a long-breathed voice that was adequate to the range of his imaginative needs—a voice that was free of established forms and open-ended, like the poetry of [Ezra] Pound." However, Sontag, other biographers, and reviewers agree that Artaud's primary influence was on the theater. According to Sontag, Artaud "has had an impact so profound that the course of all recent serious theater in Western Europe and the Americas can be said to divide into two periods—before Artaud and after Artaud."

A spurt of blood

 

A Spurt of Blood

In my group we decided to do a quick slightly improvised version of A Spurt Of Blood

CHARACTERS
A YOUNG MAN
A WET-NURSE
A YOUNG GIRL
A PRIEST
A KNIGHT
A COBBLER
A BEADLE
A PEDDLER
A BAWD
A HUGE VOICE
A JUDGE


YOUNG MAN: I love you and everything is beautiful.
YOUNG GIRL: [With quavering voice] You love me and everything is beautiful.
YOUNG MAN: [In a lower tone] I love you and everything is beautiful.
YOUNG GIRL: [In an even lower tone] You love me and everything is beautiful.
YOUNG MAN: [Leaving her abruptly] I love you. [Silence] Face me.
YOUNG GIRL: [As before standing opposite him] There.
YOUNG MAN: [In an exalted high-pitched voicej I love you. I am great, I am lucid, I am full, I am dense.
YOUNG GIRL: [In the same high-pitched voice] We love each other.
YOUNG MAN: We are intense. Ah, how beautifully the world is built.

 

Kim and Tyler played the Young girl and man, they improvised this part and picked up certain stage directions in parts, but mainly went of impulse.

 

[Silence. There is a noise as if an immense wheel were turning and moving the air. A hurricane separates them. At the same time, two Stars are seen colliding and from them fall a series of legs of living flesh with feet, hands, scalps, masks, colonnades, porticos, temples, alembics, falling more and more slowly, as if falling in a vacuum: then three scorpions one after another and finally a frog and a beetle which come to rest with desperate slowness, nauseating slowness]

 

For this part we all as a group began to run around the space in between Kim and Tyler blowing air and bumping quite violently into each other we felt like this showed a hurricane quite clearly. We didn’t do the stars, scorpions and frog part as this was quite impossible and we didn’t see this as a fundamental part that needed to be shown.

 

YOUNG MAN: [Crying with all his strength] The sky has gone mad.

[He looks at the sky] Let's hurry away from here. 

[He pushes the Young Girl before him]

[Enter a medieval Knight in gigantic armor, followed by a Wet-Nurse holding her breasts in her hands and puffing because her breasts are swollen]

KNIGHT: Let go of your tits. Give me my papers.
WET-NURSE: [Screaming in high-pitch] Ah! Ah! Ah!
KNIGHT: Damn, what's the matter with you?
WET-NURSE: Our daughter, there, with him.
KNIGHT: Quiet, there's no girl there.
WET-NURSE: I'm telling you that they're screwing.
KNIGHT: What the Hell do I care if they're screwing?
WET-NURSE: Incest.
KNIGHT: Midwife.
WET-NURSE: [Plunging her hands deep into her pockers which are as big as her breasts] Pimp. 

[She throws his papers at him]
KNIGHT: Let me eat.

[The Wet-Nurse rushes out] [He gets up and from each paper he takes a huge hunk of Swiss cheese. Suddenly he coughs and chokes]

KNIGHT: [With full mouth] Ehp. Ehp. Show me your breasts. Show me your breasts. Where did she go?

[He runs out] [The Young Man comes back]

 

This part of dialogue was between Josh and Oscar, Josh played the Wet Nurse and put on a camp and comical façade, and Oscar didn’t really change his persona to fit the character but slightly changed his posture. Our approach to the play was not to act it truthfully as Sarah had told us earlier that Artaud was  more about the visual meaning and physical actions, so taking this on board we delivered a more impulsive performance that tried to portray visual meanings and natural delivery of lines and atmosphere.

YOUNG MAN: I saw, I knew, I understood. Here on a public street, the priest, the cobbler, the peddler the entrance to the church, the red light of the brothel, the scales of justice. I can't stand it any longer!

[Like shadows, a Priest, a Cobbler, a Beadle, a Bawd, a Judge, a Peddler, arrive on stage]

YOUNG MAN: I've lost her: give her back to me.
ALL: [In different tones] Who, who, who, who.
YOUNG MAN: My wife.
BEADLE: [Very fat] Your wife, you're kidding!
YOUNG MAN: Kidding! Maybe she's yours!
BEADLE: [Tapping his forehead] Maybe she is.

[He runs out] [The Priest Ieaves the group and puts his arm around the neck of the Young Man]

PRIEST: [As if confessing someone.] To what part of your body do you refer most often?
YOUNG MAN: To God. 

[Confused by the reply the Priest immediately shifts to a Swiss accent]
PRIEST: [In Swiss accent] But that isn't done any more. We no longer hear through that ear. You have to ask that of volcanoes and earthquakes. We wallow in the little obscenities of man in the confession-box. That's life.
YOUNG MAN: [Much impressed] Ah that's life! Then everything is shot to hell.
PRIEST: [Still with Swiss accent] Of course.

[At this moment night suddenly falls on stage. The earth quakes. There is furious thunder and zig-zags of lightning in every direction through the zig-zags all the characters can be seen running around bumping into each other and falling then getting up and running about like crazy. Then an enormous hand seizes the Bawd by her hair, which bursts into flame and grows huge before our eyes]

 

We focused a lot on the stage directions, and physically showed close to what was written.

HUGE VOICE: Bitch, look at your body!

[The Bawd's body is seen to be absolutely naked and hideous beneath her blouse and skirt, which become transparent as glass]

BAWD: Leave me alone, God.

[She bites God in the wrist. An immense spurt of blood lacerates the Stage, and through the biggest fiash of lightning the Priest can be seen making the sign of the cross. When the lights go on again all the characters are dead, and their corpses lie all over the ground. Only the Young Man and the Bawd remain devouring each other with their eyes. The Bawd falls into the Young Man's arms]

 

I was the Bawd in our performance and took quite a comic approach to the character not intentionally, but I found that this came naturally as the play itself is quite odd and funny.

 

BAWD: [With the sigh of one having an orgasm] Tell me how it happened to you.

[The Young Man hides his head in his hands. The Wet-nurse comes back carrying the Young Girl under her arm like a bundle. The young Girl is dead. The Bawd drops her on the ground where she collapses and becomes flat as a pancake. The Wet-Nurse no longer has her breasts. Her chest is completely flat]

KNIGHT: [In a terrible voice] Where did you put them? Give me my Swiss cheese.
WET-NURSE: [Boldly and gaily] Here you are.

[She lifts up her dress. The Young Man wants to run away but he is frozen like a petrified puppet]

YOUNG MAN: [As if suspended in the air and with the voice of a ventriloquist] Don't hurt Mommy!
KNIGHT: She-devil!

[He hides his face in horror. A multitude of scorpions crawl out from beneath the Wet-Nurse's dress and swarm between her legs. Her vagina swells up splits and becomes transparent and glistening like a sun. The Young Man and Bawd run off as though lobotomized]

YOUNG GIRL: [Getting up dazed] The virgin! Ah that's what he was looking for.

Artaud was very dependent on drugs which resulted in his work being very explicit and surreal. The way this is written allows the performers to be as free and crazy as they please, which is something I really liked about the play. We were allowed to just read it and naturally respond freely being instinctive when performing. We did an exercise after the play where we made an immersive performance based on one of the scenes or events from the play, our performance was very atmospheric, delivering on the Artaud style. We created this stage direction in our performance:

[Silence. There is a noise as if an immense wheel were turning and moving the air. A hurricane separates them. At the same time, two Stars are seen colliding and from them fall a series of legs of living flesh with feet, hands, scalps, masks, colonnades, porticos, temples, alembics, falling more and more slowly, as if falling in a vacuum: then three scorpions one after another and finally a frog and a beetle which come to rest with desperate slowness, nauseating slowness]

 

We turned the lights off and played some really sonic and heavy metal music to match the discombobulated atmosphere, I learned how incredibly paramount music is in theatre and how it doesn’t just add to a performance matching a scenes atmosphere with a track, it influences the performers mental and physical actions and the pace at which they act.

 

Exercises 1

Grid work was our first focus in the lesson; this consisted of following imaginary grid lines on the floor. The objective at first was just to walk on these lines making sure not to fall of them, and to continuously fill empty spaces and make strong conscious decisions. Music accompanied us in this exercise, Sarah would repeat the beginning of the tracks again and again (heavy bass tracks from an album by Flume), this evoked a mental and physical urge to move my body faster and in time with the fast pace of the track. I noticed certain things about the way I responded to the music, such as making a sharp turn when the music dropped, or dramatically changed. I noticed this in others around me as well as we would turn at the same time and bump into each other, I found this similarity in the effect the music had on me and others really interesting. A new objective was then introduced this was to imagine an object, a human or a thing that you really wanted, and that was what was at the end of the grid lines. I instantly picked up the pace and started to walk with more energy and purpose, causing me to get physically tired the words ‘ you are not working hard enough’ and ‘push harder’  where repeatedly shouted, which in hand with the music was very hard hitting, this pushed me continuously further then I had previously been working. This exercise definitely warmed us up in all aspects as I felt more alert, more open and definitely warmer.  This grid exercise related to Artaud in the respect that as a practitioner he was not structured and select and many of his exercises prime purpose was to get the actors to open their minds and be more broad with meaning, his work was very free which acted as a disadvantage at the time as this made his work unpopular.

The knee game was physically gruelling, constantly I was twisting and turning my body to try and hit my partner Esme behind her knee. I found this really difficult as I was already exhausted from the previous task , but was still pushing myself harder and at a faster pace. The objective was clear and achievable therefore I felt more confident in achieving it this gave me more physical and mental power. I thought this task was successful in the respect that it got me working hard and thinking solely about the space and the objective, I also felt more at one with my body as I was working instinctively. The music again made me move faster and mimic its rhythm and beat. The fishing game followed after this, where a two partners stand either end of the room. One is the hooker and one is the hookee ( the thing being hooked). When I was the hooker I had to believe that I was really pulling the hookee in, that meant a strong throw of the hook and vigorous pulling of the imaginary rope or string. My arms and face where working the hardest here, my face showed strain and determination and my arms where strong and tense as they worked hard to bring my partner in. When being the hookee all body parts where working hard as I had to spontaneously move my body as if I were being pulled, my legs where kicking, my arms where  tense and scratching at the floor and my head and face where reacting to the harsh jolted pull on my body. The music again created a harsh and heavy atmosphere that matched the exercise.

Stopping your partner from leaving was the most physically challenging task in the lesson as between two partners the only objective was for A to stop B from leaving by any means possible. I was A to start with this consisted of me throwing myself on my partner Tyler and doing whatever it took to keep him from leaving me. Doing this cleared my mind as I became completely involved and infatuated by Tyler , my objective became my soul purpose in life therefore I threw my whole being into stopping Tyler. When I was B I felt oblivious to Tyler and my only objective was to keep walking no matter what, my surrounding became very minimal and I was only focused on walking to whatever was in front of me.  This task was insightful as I found the lengths I would go to to stop someone and how easy it was for me to block someone out and focus on one thing. Working in the dark was a new thing that was introduced this lesson, closing your eyes and the ability to not see gave me stronger senses and quicker instinct, this exercise was solely based on natural instinct and personal decisions. The music was turned on and we where to start moving naturally, feeling the music and responding to it. This task allowed me to connect my body and mind with music, the beginning of the track was slow and built up so my body started with a little bop and then progressed to more jumpy and violent movements. We did this exercise for around 40 minutes so after a while ( around ½ hour)  I was not able to make my body do what I wanted it to because it was so physically drained and tired, I had pushed my body to a limit it could not pass. My body felt chemistry and at one with the music and the lights off helped to strengthen the connection and made me personally feel more susceptible to anything that I felt like doing.