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.