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.