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.