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.