Plastiques

Jerzy Grotowski was a Polish theatre director, his method to acting had a new fresh approach to other practitioners, he believed that the actor was 'holy' and that when they were on stage their body was publically offered for the audience. His work was expressive and created new dimensions in theatre.

His training methods were some of the ones we began to use in lessons to push our bodies physically, his exercises had influences from yoga and pilates and aimed to get control over every part of the body, iscolating every limb so the actor never forgot how to use certain parts of their body, the exercises were extremely acrobatic and challenging.

"When we're small children, our voice and body express together. When babies laugh, they laugh with their whole bodies. But as we get older, language becomes, as Wangh says, a substitute for physical expression. By the time we're adults, we've totally divorced our words from our bodies. We also shy away from variations in pitch and volume. We do this because it's the acceptable thing to do." ( jill place 2005)

but as actors we have to be able to tap back into that and begin to use our whole bodies again, in order to connect with our emotions our whole body needs to feel it, our voice needs to go to new extremes of projection.

Some of his relaxation techniques were influenced by practitioners like Stanislavski who we had previously looked at before, both of the practioners wanted the actors to be 100 percent engaged focused and commited in what they do and in order to do this their mental and physical exercises were to get us in the right frame of mind.

Growtoski

A lot of growtoskis work used montage where he used several aspects of different things to fix all together, he wanted to use maximum energy for a minimal effect for intensity. aimed to achieve a state of 'trance'. His methods were very ritualistic.
"An example of an exercise practiced in the Laboratory Theatre is one where the students were instructed to choose an animal and attempt to express its physicality by employing the impulses of the body. They would be asked to include the voice or soft humming of the text (111). Throughout the execution of this exercise they were also instructed to avoid any means of traditional illustration of stereotypical behavior." His work often involved the audience and surroundings to the full potential.
A significant factor Grotowski dubbed as ‘unnecessary’ is a script. Literature, according to Grotowski, is an addition to theatre and does not define it.
We have looked at Gratowski and his methods of plastiques. We were shown some simple plastiques and learned the extreme discipline it required.

He wanted theatre to transform his audience, his intense performance styles was something we wanted to incooperate into our performances.

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.