01.10.2014

   We focused on the bamboo stick at the beginning of the class, with an exercise that challenged us to be precise and thoughtful of our actions. Starting the exercise, we had to walk around the room, keeping the space in balance, and have the sticks around 10cm of the ground, making sure the distance would stay the same. Then we moved on to our groups to move together and slowly start making movements with the stick, in unison. Of course, someone had to lead, but the point was that it wouldn't be visible for others, who was leading, but let the others lead naturally and taking lead when you felt the moment was right. The movements had to be completely improvised, in the moment, and then mimicked by the other group members. This exercise really helped with spacial awareness, precision but also focus and complicity.

   After this exercise we were told to go in our groups and go around college, looking for possible sites for our piece and throw around some ideas. My group already had some ideas from our previous round and so we headed first to the long hallway near the painting rooms.

 

The first time we came here, I had this image in my head of the audience been gathered around the either sides of the hallway, and have one of the performers run from the other end of the hallway towards the audience, to fall down in front of them with flashing lights around them. I discussed this with my group, and they thought it was a pretty good idea, but also we felt that the hallway might be too restricting with the size, but also because a lot of the other groups were planning something either along the hallway or very near to it. We decided to kind of leave this as our back up plan, or have a start for our piece here, then to follow our story else where.

 Then we headed to the large empty room at the end of the hallway, near to the exit towards the mechanics area. Unfortunately we weren't able to get inside the room, but by looking inside from the large windows, we already got plenty of ideas. For example, one of the good ideas were that, since the space is so large, it would be interesting to play around with the audience and how they will be interacting with the piece and the space. I thought of having the audience scatter around the space, as in trees in a forest, and have the performers travel around the space and in between the audience.
 

    We also explored a completely different kind of relationship between the audience and the performers, with having them be in two different rooms. We floated around an idea for a bit that we could have had the audience watch the performers do their piece from inside the drama studio, whilst the performers would be outside. This could have been a very interesting project to take on, but after taking pictures and some video, we discovered, that the distance between audience and the actors is too large for such small group of performers, since there is only three of us. It could have worked in some sense, but we felt that we wanted to be ourselves more in contact with the audience, rather than just performing for them.