Introduction to Devising theatre 5th october

During these lessons we went into further detail on individual practitioners who used different forms and genres in their pieces and had different performance styles. The essay we are producing will be based on one of these practitioners.
We began on critical theory in order to write our 3000 word essay
The practitioners we are studying are:

Forced entertainment
Peter Brook
Jerzy Gratowski
Pina Bausch
Guillermo Gomez Pena

creating devising and developing drama

After researching on some of the practitioners we would have to compose an essay and devise a play. For my year two development i would have to be able to:


-self reflect- in an analytical style.
-write chronologicaly
-heighten language

I Chose to write about Gomes Pena.

Being an influential and pioneering practioner by working with minorities and pushing boundaries and breaking down cultural barriers. After reading about him, i liked his eccentric styles and found it compelling and fascinating to learn more about him. His work dealt with issues which i also feel passionate about so reading about how he used these issues to create drama and adress audiences was inspiring as i know he also took a lot of risks and had strong ideas. In watching one of his performances the audience indirectly experienced the freedom, cultural risks, and utopian possibilities that society had denied them.

His acting styles were often dubbed as bizzare and what not always understood by everyone i liked this as it showed me he was keen to exert his own ideas and be original with it and he did not think too much about the reactions of individual, he was a performance artist and his job was to push things to extremes. His shows normally carried out strong political messages and had underlying subtexts, his work was influencial to me because he incooperated current issues and affairs and the bigger picture in to live shows. He didnt seem to hesitate and think' this could be too much' he just went for what he felt strongly about and expected mixed reactions. His art was transgressive.

working on ten minute directorial projects

For this project in partners our aim is to come up with a concept for a short ten minute show and direct it. We can chose up to 4 actors of our choice to act in it.
After looking at different acting methods and stylistic pieces i decided that i would like to focus on something that would be quite traumatic for the audience to watch. I wanted to base it on the theatre of cruelty, using severe noises and making the experience as uncomfortable for the audience as possible. My partner and i decided on a concept of domestic violence in a household. However we felt as though this issue was often touched upon with the man abusing the woman so we decided to put a twist on it and reverse the roles to add an even more effective and dramatic impact.
A few general ideas i had for making the audience feel uncomfortabe were:
-scratching chalk board noises and screaming
- the male actor reaching out to an audience member whilst being attacked
- fake blood
-breaking the fourth wall

To make our piece have a specific style. We wanted to start the piece in reverse order, from what happens at the end. The image we start on would be the man laying in the arms of his wife under a red spotlight. To give it a dramatic opening.

working with community focus

meeting community focus initially was quite a overwhelming experience. Before working with them we played a few games and got to know eachother better and did a warm up. The experience on a whole was challenging and rewarding at the same time. As the class became more aquainted with community focus and became more used to working with them we became more aware of how to work with them as individuals and what each of their strengths were.After working through scenes with community focus clients we became less guarded and began to understand how to work effectively with them as part of our team. The experience as a whole was something very new to me , but i found it very refreshing and rewarding to have this experience and put myself in the position of a teacher.

filming our scenes

During the process of this class i noticed the differences with fiming and stage acting, because the space was more refined we had to define our movement more in a small area, our facial expressions were more important and whereas on stage we could like down and away it did not look as effective on camera. Filming involved shooting at different angles and levels to make it more effective. On the stage whether we were shouting or whispering we still had to project our voices well for the auditorium to hear, whereas on camera we could use our normal everyday voice. The procedure on a whole was quite tiring and repetitive, it allowed us more leeway to experiment though as we could take scenes again and try out new angles to gain he most effective shots as possible, however the acting on the stage felt more real and live and relied on adrenaline and well rehearsed lines to pull through so it was more rewarding to see the results as an actor and challenging, the work we did relied on being proffesional and pulling through without stopping whereas on film there was not such obvious pressure on the actors although we did get put on the spot at times.

The show

Before the show we did a dress run for the national diploma drama students, we manager to get through it succesfully , but i personally felt disatisfied with my scene as i missed out some lines and did not feel 100 percent confident with the way i was moving on stage, thankfully though when the audience came in for our big final performance I felt that after my scene with Aaron i was alot happier and we managed to get through it without any blips. I enjoyed it and the adrenaline spured me on to show the emotion that my character 'Abigail' would have been feeling in scene 1. Our largest scene as a group was scene 3. I also felt scene 3 went quite well and the energy level through out varied in intensity making it effective, as The scene went from being quiet and slow to fast and full of action. I think that everyone managed to stay in character ( i should hope so anyway as our teacher was zooming in whilst filming catching every single facial expression) i personally felt very much in character as one of the girls and managed to finally get in my zone on the night and remeber not to break the fourth wall with the audience, which was something siobhaun had noticed i was doing in the rehearsals. All in all i think we just about pulled it together as a team, but i think that next time we have a show we will definitly be more organised and pace ourselves better, because as a group the stress we all went through in the last week could have been helped if we had been more on the ball. Since it was our first show i think it taught us a very valuable lesson about how we have to all support eachother.

rehearsing for the show

During the 6 weeks preparation time for the show we worked on blocking our scenes in order to make them as effective as possible. We worked on our character buliding and worked using the magic if to help us learn why our character would move or speak a certain way. This was one of the exercises we used to create naturalistic acting. We thought about our costumes. The majority of us were purtians in the performance so we would be dressed in simple and plain clothes and be very demurely dressed and covered up. We though about how we could use the lighting to be more effective in certain scenes and we thought about the props we could use to help reinforce the time era we were showing.

For the Brecht poem we worked on a completely opposite style of acting. Non naturalistic acting invovled outbursts of songs , instruments , breaking the fourth wall with the audience and interacting with them. We rehearsed some tablos of life in Brechtian times and rehearsed it with me playing the piano alongside Sammy and Dan playing the drums. We recited the poem of Marie Sanders. The style we performed it in was almost like slapstick drama and was exxagerated and comical. We wanted the contrast of the naturalistic acting in the crucible and the Brechtian poem.