Ideas, characters and workshops

We did several workshops throughout the next few lessons we worked on human body language and social theories. We workshopped complete juxtapositions of what was already obvious in society, ideas began to stem from this as we realised what we were working towards was a piece of work about unconventional social behaviour attitudes. We wanted to evoke some emotion and turn things on their heads for the audience to have different persepectives and respnd analytically to our work.

we worked on scenes of women acting like men and without seeming like the cliche 'tomboy' we wanted to tap in to the differences of mens behavioral tendancies to women. In our particular scene we wanted to tap into that anamalistic alpha male egoistic characteur. We wanted to erase that women 'bitchy' mentality we were used to and become more vicious in a manly way. We also played around with ironic idea's such as news reports on something serious made humorous and ridiculous to contradict what the media is saying to us.

my group's particular scene was promoting the craze ' happy slapping' and was an ironic and comical piece to watch as it basically dealt with the underlying issues with the mass media and how they can promote things even if it is in a negative way.

My manifesto

My manifesto had no paritcular theme, it was about life in general and i choose to write it in a poetic and stylistic way.

I lice for laughs deep from my stomach, i alugh so hard i often cry, cry so hard sometimes i laugh at what i might look like, mascara splasing down my face. I live by that saying by Marilyn Monroe ' If you cant handle me at my worst you definately arnt worthy of me at my best'

Im insane in your eyes when i bounce of the ground and go from excruciatingly happy to intensly passionate and then devistatingly upset.

My heads still attached to my shoulders and my feet firmly on the ground , i act ignorant at times when its easier not knowing, ignorance is bliss, yet sometimes i crave that knowledge , that desire to learn, i frustrate when failing, i aim higher so im always so far up in the clouds that you cant even see me. I emerse myself in self pity and chaos when i surround myself with positivity in hope to smile. Im a free spirit yet i feel opressed. Im simple, i like walks , cheap take away and the sky and stars, im complicated sometimes i walk and i dont know where im going. Im confused , im laid back. I am a contradiction. Im an indivdual and im a team player, i feel like the guy in the Trueman show, conspiracy theories , lies mental dillusion. Im growing, striving and learning though i dont ever think ill ever fully understand and i dont know if i want to....

The manifesto i wrote was completly at random , it was a random trail of though which became in some ways personal to myself, after i had read it our tutor Siobaun pointed out that it seemed like it was coming from my perspective and was quite personal to a certain extent and to be honest i hadnt really thought of it like that because i assumed it was jus a piece of random writing that had somehow managed to spiral out on to a piece of paper from my imagination.

Transport and manifestos - deivising

whilst begining the devising process we had a blank canvas to work with , we were all told to go home and write manifestos on anything we wanted. We could write them in a creative and artistic way or as a matter of fact report, it could be stylised or naturalistic. We were thenm asked to read it to the class, from these manifestos we gathered idea'sto work with and put the manifestos in to different kinds of situations and scenes in order to expand the ideas we had already. Many of the manifestos stemmed from themes of social behaviour and psychological analyisis's of humans in a social environment. We looked at peoples behaviour on transport and their reactions to other humans because this proved to create a visually effective scene which was humorous due to the irony in it and, one of the scenes that came out of the manifesto for transport was created by putting the audience in two parellel lines formatted like a train carriage and the actors were in the middle of us causing havok either spillling water on us in the middle of the busy hustle bustle of the train journey or blaring their music in our ears, because the actors were so commited to what they had been told to focus on i.e their mp3 player or portable game console it became a dramatised scene of real life situations of how engrossed people are with technology and how ignorant and oblivious others can be on public transport. It was comical due to the fact it was a reality of what occurs around us and the interaction with the audience as part of the scene proved to work well as a dramatic device for this

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.