Acting: Antonin Artaud/Universal language of Theatre Lesson 11

12/5/2015

We had our acting assignment this week. We practiced in the week before so we felt strong about our piece.

We performed our piece, I feel that it went really well because when we had the cake section we went a little over board.  This was effective because Artaud’s work was larger than life so we could have got even crazier with the cake section.

Performing our piece went well the only issue was that the audience didn’t sit where we wanted them to sit so we didn’t feel the audience was as involved as we wanted them to. We tried to make up for it when we weren’t sitting in a circle. I felt I wasn’t as nervous to go in to the audience as much as I thought I would be, I felt as I was performing I was thinking less about what I was doing and more about what I was feeling so I felt I was channeling the raw emotions in myself.  

My strengths from the performance was that I channeled my raw emotions and wasn’t scared of going in to the audience.

My weakness from the performance was that I felt I was getting nervous so I stepped out of character at some parts.

I felt that the group worked well together and performance well together. As a group we find it easy to come up with ideas and developed ideas too.

Acting: Antonin Artaud/Universal language of Theatre Lesson 10

Acting 5/5/15

This week we worked on our own scenes which was helpful as we weren't sure about what we're doing because we were talking about what we wanted to do but we felt we didn’t understand the play enough to create a piece of theatre. We worked on making our idea solid and developing the ideas we had from last week and the new ones we thought of.

We came up with using "putting on a t-shirt" to symbolize giving birth. We found that we would use our sound scraping to show the steps toward having a baby, we wanted to make the audience uncomfortable with hearing sexual noises. We then looked at what we could do with a baby grow, our first thoughts were that we could use fishing wire to make it like a puppet. We start by making it move around then dropping it suddenly to show that the baby has died. We wanted to Chance the buzzing to not just us saying buzz all the time so we decided to use chalk and drawing on the floor so we would look like we are mad because we hear this buzz.

We had a rehearsal this week and we developed some of our ideas, for instance we chance the part with the baby grow and we find that find that we improved the section because we started to reach in to touch the baby grow that was in the middle of the circle, and reacted like we have been burnt and found that doing this works better for the feel we wanted.

The theme we wanted for our piece was a ritual because we start in circle that has a pile of stuff in the middle. We know a ritual feel would work as artuad was influenced by ritual, like the Balinese dancers he once saw.

The strength of our work this week would be that we work together really well. We feed off each other ideas and listen to each other when we have ideas. I feel this group is strong in the way that we can say a really crazy idea and the group would just develop it, making it better.

Acting: Antonin Artaud/Universal language of Theatre Lesson 9

28/4/15

We got on with our script work. We are using sound scaping for some of our piece but it’s quite hard to devise our scene because it is relying on audience participation and we can’t anticipate what they’ll do. In one section we will have candles that we’ll blow out to represent how the character is annoyed and confused at someone’s age. We are trying to devise the scene but it’s quite hard to make sense of the text which is actually what Artaud wants. He doesn’t want the audience to be trying to make sense of it or follow a story, he wants the audience to feel emotions and have a strong reaction.

We’re planning to use audience participation a lot – for example wrapping them round with cling film to make an incubator feel for them. We want the audience to feel uncomfortable watching our scene because it’s about a woman being born too early and being abandoned by her parents. We’re going to use sound scapes to unnerve the audience by making awkward noises, during the birth scene the noises will be sexual to represent both making a baby and having a baby.

The strength of our work is that we have a lot of ideas for how to stage the text and how to include Artaud’s ideas. But it is also difficult to predict how the audience will react so we can’t devise everything in detail.

Another strength is that we do work well as a group and together we bounce off each others ideas. 

Acting: Antonin Artaud/Universal language of Theatre Lesson 8

21^st April

We got our sections of the Not I play- my group is page 20-22. We started by analysing it. We found after reading through it different people had different views of what it means. We thought the first section was about her giving birth and it was a miscarriage or still-born. We also felt she was guilty of something, like giving a witness statement. We also found a section where she could potentially have been in a mental asylum. Here are the notes I have made:

We then had to have a conversation with someone who wasn’t there. We sat in a circle and talk to someone who wasn’t there but we had to not make it obvious. My group used stimulus from the audience to decide what we would talk about. I was telling a story and the others would suddenly interrupt me and say something to someone who wasn’t there, they would pick up what the audience was doing like fiddling and respond to them but not directly to them. We thought about using this technique for our section of the script. At this stage we are thinking about analysing it and figuring out what we think our section means before we start to block it.

Another technique we could use is sound scaping. We had to choose a small part of our section that we could make a sound scape from. We chose when the speaker is talking about the baby and how she was being abused by her husband. For our sound scaping we started with Nadine making sexualised noises and then I made punching noises and Pakize made the sound of the punch making contact with her. We then had a baby noise and the sound of a hospital monitor changing from regular beat to continuous tone. We enjoyed sound scaping because we could use Artaud’s technique of making it larger than life so the audience feel uncomfortable.

We then did freeze frames from our section. We chose the part where mouth is in court. We devised it so it was a metaphor for a hierarchy, so the judge was at the top and then the lawyers for the prosecution and defence, then the witness. We found that this worked but not in the way Artaud may have wanted because I don’t think it had much effect on the audience.

Acting: Antonin Artaud/Universal language of Theatre Lesson 7

14^th April

This week we focused on theatre of Cruelty. We worked on using stimulus to create a piece of theatre of cruelty. The stimulus we had were two pictures, one of a woman pulling an ugly face and another of a woman tied to a chair. The idea we took from the pictures was about how society and the media manipulate girls into thinking they have to behave and look a certain way. We talked about how some girls who are famous are made to look a certain way. So we created a piece that focused on manipulating the image of a woman to look more sexualised even if what she’s doing is not sexual. We filmed a clip of Emma being sexually provocative and we shoved this in the audience’s face whilst Emma lay on the floor. This was to show the gap between the sexualised images we see and who the person actually is. Our piece related back to theatre of cruelty because it forced the audience to feel emotions such as feeling disgusted at how we were manipulating Emma.

Then afterwards we read through the script we have been given for our final assessment and were given particular sections to do in our groups. We got the play Not I which is one monologue and I find it a bit frustrating to read because I’m not sure how to make sense of it which is sort of the point. It was interesting to hear everyone’s point of view of what it was about. Some people think the speaker has dementia, I think the speaker is talking to something, like the mouth talking to the brain. Researching into the play I found that it is about a 70 year old woman who in the first minute of the play moves from talking about birth to death and we also learn the girls parents are vanished. It is clear that the mouth speaking is completely disconnected from the world around them and is trying to make sense of it in real time, as they go along. There is an incoherent narrative that we try to follow but we never hear who mouth is responding to, we only ever hear mouths side of the narrative. This means the text is broken and fragmented.  

It will be interesting to see how my group decide to put our section together.

Acting: Antonin Artaud/Universal language of Theatre Lesson 6

7^th April

We started with Wink Murder where we all had to die really dramatically. We played this as a way of warming ourselves up. This week we had a workshop to help us get to know our new teacher. We divided into groups and developed the wink murder game and came up with a scene of one murderer that the audience wouldn’t know and had to guess. Then we would carry on with the scene until to see if the audience guess was correct or not. This was a good activity to develop our devising skills.

The last game we played was a big improvisation game where one by one we were picked to join the scene and make it bigger gradually with more and more people. We’ve often had trouble improvising as a whole group because the action changes too quickly without letting an improvised bit play itself out. So we need to work on listening to each other as a group.

Acting: Antonin Artaud/Universal language of Theatre Lesson 5

Tuesday 24^th March 2015

For our warm up we worked with greetings and with disgust. The greeting exercise was easier than showing disgust. I found it hard to show disgust because I felt I was doing the same action when I could have explored different ways of showing my disgust but I feel it was a good starting point because we haven’t explored negative greetings before.

We worked in groups and had to think of a ritual to do which was fun. We had to think of a ritual like a wedding or birthday party. In my group we did a wedding, and we had to perform it naturalistic first and then we had to do it as Artaud would have wanted. The techniques we used were exaggerating the emotions we felt and the actions we did. We also exaggerated the movements of walking down the aisle, doing really big steps. Doing this exercise it gave me a clear understanding of how Artaud wanted his actors and audience to start scavenging under the skin, feeling raw emotions.

One group did Christmas as their ritual. They started off sleeping, then woke up and sang chirstmas songs. Then they sat and looked at us as if we were a present that they were waiting for permission to unwrap. We started to feel self-conscious, as they watched us. It was quite off-putting. So I was starting to feel like an Artaud audience member. This piece was interesting because it made me feel happy but in an uncomfortable way, which is how Artauf wanted his audience to feel he didn’t want just happiness he wanted uneasiness as well.

We then worked in groups and looked at symbolism and surrealism. We asked ourselves does the visual add or detract from verbal linguistic words? I think it depends on what you’re trying to get across. Sometimes it’s nicer for people to imagine themselves, but in other ways Artaud’s work needs to also been seen to understand it.

Then we got into groups and we were told seven words and we had to think of what they symbolise to us. The words were: horizon, tree, water, seed, sea, flower, and cloud.

Horizon makes us think of sunsets, morning, destiny and tranquillity. Tree- purity, naturalism and stability. Water- lifesaver, refreshing, purity and nourishing. Seed- growth and the beginning. Sea- summer, happiness and soothing. Flower- colour, pleasant smell, positivity and death. Cloud, rain, imagination, dark, death and unstoppable.

We looked at these words and we found that actually they symbolise something different for al l of us. They are not taken literally, they can be metaphors. The first words we I think took literally and then we started to think about it more deeply and think of what we feel when we think of these words. Then we got given five words of emotion and we needed to come up with a still image of each words. The words were anger, sympathy, despair, boredom and loneliness. We came up with really good ideas for the words. For despair we looked down at the back of the wall and people interpreted it differently, some thought it was boredom or loneliness which was interesting because you could see different people’s reactions to the images and how they interpreted it.

Lastly we had to create a still image of short phrases. Which was difficult because the phrases were quite complex like ‘captivity followed by liberation’.