30.09.2014

The Cost Of Living

   DV8 created a short film that uses dance, dialogue and physical theatre to tell their story about "two performers and their interaction with other performers". It really explores the life of a disabled performer and how their life can be sometimes like in a circus, with close minded people treating them wrongly. The movie also addresses feminism briefly, and how a person that on the other hand treats his disabled friend well and like any other person, but then women to him are more of an amusement. This film really inspired everyone to try out different approaches to our devising, but also to think how they had created the movements and connected it to the story. In many occasions, like when Eddie, aggressive and misogynist main character, is at the club dancing, his head bobbing was over done and almost silly looking, but it created an interesting take on club dancing, and also gave insight to his character. I personally also liked the relationship between two of the more minor characters, who had contracting personalities. One, very shy and quiet, didn't really do any sort of movement at all at first, but then slowly came out of his shell to become a somewhat awkward but endearing character. His crush, a hola-hoop performer on the other hand was a confident woman who's movements were smooth and large, the hoops making her seem even more dominating. She also used the hoops to protect herself from other men later on in the film, which also tells that she is very protective of herself and perhaps used the hoops as a bolder. I thought this was a very interesting movie to watch, and it will definitely help us to explore more common objects and gestures to create our movements from.

   After the film we were divided into our final groups for the pieces. I got into a group with Chloe and Jenny. We also went around college looking at possible spaces and discussing different factors we have to take in consideration when choosing them. For example, if we wanted to have the piece outside, how would the weather affect to it? How would we arrange light and sound? Also, in other spaces, especially small and cramped ones, we had to think is it was safe. Moving the audience from different spaces to another was a topic of discussion. Could there be smaller performances to lead the audience to the right direction? Or should some pieces connect or start from one place just to end in another? or would using stewards be the best choice? All these things are something everyone needs to think about when we are choosing our sites, since we still want the entire experience to be smooth and amazing, not just the individual performances.

26.09.2014

   The main thing about today's class was our stimulus, the apple. We started off by simply writing our first thoughts that came in mind about an apple. I feel like I missed out on the most obvious things, fairy tales, 'The Big Apple', pies or even Adam & Eve, because I had a personal story to connect to it. My mother was diagnosed with cancer two years ago and me and my family had to witness her shrivel away into a tired and hopeless person. But then my father bought five apple trees for her, something my mother had always wanted and five because each tree represents a member in our family.  Long story short, the trees gave my mother joy and hope for a better future and now my mother has fully recovered and the apple trees are blossoming, giving us more apple every year to come. For me, apples and apple trees symbolize hope, but also family and giving. After this we gathered around and shared our ideas and stories on apples. Isaac Newton and him discovering gravity was mentioned as was apple bobbing and alphabets.
   Then we moved on to an exercise where, in partners, we had to give the apple to the other by discovering different ways to do it, and keep the apple as the focus. This helped us explore travel and how does distance affect the relationship. It does tell of a different dynamics of two people if they hand the apple to each other right next to each other, or from a distance. It brings across the actors thoughts and feelings

Today we were also introduced to our stimulus for our site-specific performance; an apple, but first we explored a new practitioner; Yoshi Oida. He is a Japanese born actor and director who blends oriental tradition of supreme and studied the Western way of performer personalizing characters and showing all the depths of emotion. He believes that the audience shouldn't ever see the actor, just the performance, or the magic of theatre will die. We started the class by exploring Oida's different exercises, like the simultaneous clapping exercise to raise complicity and focus. This also help with keeping up the same rhythm and Oida believed that understanding rhythm helps an actor to deliver their emotions and structure their feelings and actions. "Jo-Ha-Kyn" is a technique he uses to practice this rhytmh and later on in class we had an exercise with this technique. "Jo-Ha-Kyn" roughly means the beginning/opening, the break/development and the climax and we explored this by each improvising a short silent scene with the apple. The idea was that we were going to give the apple to someone we love, and show this with only our actions and expressions. To help us do this, we had to use this rhythm to convey the feelings we wanted to, whether it was joy, doubt or sadness.
    

 

24.09.2014

In our earlier class, we had had a look at Frantic Assembly's Chair Duets, but with poor results. So, today we started to try it again, with new partners and watching a short video first to give us an idea of how the exercise should look like. Last time, we had almost automatically added a narrative to our gestures, which wasn't the point of the exercise, but rather create a movement piece with simple gestures and then expanding them.

   We started off by looking into some exercises we've done last year, to really get us in that focus and complicity we need to master the chair exercise. These exercise also explored Minor and Major, and self-awareness. Using complicity, we had to stop and start walking all together, without talking and after that we trained minor and major, by having to do the same exercise, but instead of everyone stopping or going, only one person moved at a time. We also changed this exercise a bit, by having someone start without telling, making the person walking before stop.  As I said, we have used both of these exercises many times before, but it is always good to keep doing them, since they use very important parts of ensemble work and bring up the focus. After this we explored working with the chairs on our own, by having to make four different situations with the chair. Then, in the musical chairs-style, we created a game where the one person without a chair would choose someone to start a improv with, to get the other one give the chair( or what ever object it happen to be in the improv) to them. This really helped us as a group to let go of thinking too much, or trying to create a sensible narrative, which we tend to try and do.

   Stage Craft was also something we took a look at during our class, discussing the different elemnts needed to perfect your performance. Stage craft is simply the work of an actor, how you do your work. The different parts of stage craft we talked about were:

• Complicity
• Self Awaremess
• Spatially Aware
• Physically
• Emotionally
• Level 
• Shape
• Split Focus
• Balancing The Space

We didn't go too deep into discussing these, but I am sure, that int he future as we use each of these elements, we will learn more about them. We did do an exercise on balancing the space with the plate game. Simply, in the middle of a circle one person would more around and the other person had to mirror the movement and be aware of the space to keep the balance on the plate and 'prevent it from tipping'. This was a very fun game, and it also really helped me to see how much balancing the stage can affect the mood of the seen and the relationship between the actors. It also can be quite hard to do just on the go, without too much thought into where your counter partner is.

23.09.2014

Michael Chekhov isn't exactly a new acquaintance for us, since we have explored his technique of radiating, but today we looked at other theories such as Moulding, Floating and Flying. These help the actor to be within the characters and be able to "translate their inner thoughts into an outer movement". We started working with these ideas during an earlier class, using a jacket and a stick or two with a small group to explore each way of moving by observing the way the jacket moves. Moulding is sort of a slower movement and imagining that you are moving in thick mud or imagining mocing in water helped a lot to create that heaviness to each movement. Floating, on the other hand, is a lot lighter and an airier movement. Flying is a strong, sharp and usually quite fast movement.

  We explored these techniques further by creating our names as a continuous movement. My names letter H E T A, do not feel very flowing to me, so it was a challenge for me make different kind of movements for each letter. I decided to use my whole body to create the letters, rather than just drawing them to the air with my hands and so create movements including my whole body. Then we were divided into pairs that we had to teach our piece to. After this we were then combined with another group that we did a full piece with, learning each others pieces and creating a complicit piece, using the space to our advantage and exploring different ways to make it more effective.
   We had to do this all in silence, which has been a common rule with a lot of our exercises. I personally feel it helps us as a group to focus, since we end up chatting to each other way too easy, taking the focus from the work we are supposed to do.

19.09.2014

I thought today's class was very exciting, since we were introduced to Frantic Assembly's and the chair duet. This exercise is a lot about improvisation with movement, but also not thinking about what you are doing or what you are supposed to do, Also trust in your partner, or in my case partners, is important, since you need to let them show their ideas, receiving their offer and then offering something to add to it. Unfortunately, most of us did not really get the main idea of this exerciser, creating a movement piece without a narrative, but rather all of us seemed to have some sort of narratives in our pieces.
    The instruction was to have natural movements you would do sitting on a chair or sofa, which is what I think confused many of us. After showing the pieces to others, and getting some notes from Siou, we tried doing the same movements without expressions on our faces. This did help, but many of the movements still created a narrative, especially my groups that just seemed like a love triangle.
   After the class, I believe everyone really took with them the fact, that you just need to let go sometimes and not think about the movements too much, but also be brave enough to try out things and do some unusual movements. I'd very much also like to corporate some kind of chair duet in the site-responsive performance we will be working on, since I think it is a very innovative and interesting way to do movement.

I found this very inspiring video that is a version of Frantic Assembly's Chair duets and just thought it would be interesting to share!

16.09.2014 - Research: Radiating

   We started today's class with some skills we had explored before, like working with the bamboo sticks(LeCoq, among other practitioners) and going further into pulling and pushing, deepening our knowledge about relationships. In the exercise you simply shared a stick with your partner, each having one finger on one of the ends of the sticks to balance it between you. Then you just had to start experimenting with different movements and how you could move the stick between you to create something interesting. We especially talked about major and minor, and how you had to either lead or follow for the exercise to work, but changing the roles. This wasn't something you would agree on with your partner, but rather follow your instinct and trust your partner to either follow your lead or take control.

   Next we started to discover one of Michael Chekhov's techniques called Radiating. We have done an exercise like this last year, which we called 'Just Be', but rather than just standing in neutral, in radiating we had to give out a certain welcoming energy out to the room and the audience. We tried in couple of different ways, with and without sticks to expand our arms, getting small notes from our tutor, how to relax your body or how to radiate the energy. I honestly felt more comfortable doing the radiating without the sticks, even though they made me feel more powerful, it was harder for me to relax using them.

   After the class, we were asked to look into one of the things mentioned in class, like site-specific or -responsive theatre, epic theatre(Brecht) or pushing and pulling. I decided to look into radiating more, since I really wanted explore the background of it in more detail.


Radiating: Michael Chekhov

• It is the ability for an actor to willingly send out their thoughts, feelings, or qualities. 
• Invisible energy
• The actor is to become attuned to the direction their prana
• Prana: similar to chi, sanskrit word for "life force", universal energy drawn into the body through breath
• It was inspired by eastern philosophy, particularly Buddhist and Hindu spirituality
• Receiving: actors ability to take in the atmosphere, the audience and information from other characters(including what they may be radiating)
• Acting is the energy which is created by the two performers and exists in between the two and the space the bodies live in.