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’. 

Acting: Antonin Artaud/Universal language of Theatre Lesson 4

Thursday 17th March

Today we started with some warm up exercises that encouraged us to communicate without words because we are learning about Artaud’s Universal language. Then we talked about Artaud and how he witnessed a performance by Balinese dancers in 1931 in Paris, which inspired him to create his own theory of theatre which was Theatre of Cruelty.

Artaud thought that words were limiting and also he felt that all the subjects that other dramatists were talking about were limiting too, and didn’t mean anything to him. He wanted to break away from the realism theatre at the time and use symbolic language with images and gestures, sounds and movements. He wanted to make the subject matter universal so that if he took it to another country everyone would understand it.

Then we talked about significant moments in our lives and we had to observe each others body language like their facial expressions and their breathing and face and eyes. We had to do this instead of listening to their words. Then the storyteller had to tell the story again but without words, just using gesture and movement. This exercise helped us understand what Artaud wanted from his actors- he wanted them to be trained so that everyone can understand them.

We did another activity were 2 people would go out of the room and we would get a number relating to the level of the emotion Love. We also got a social status number which determined how we would behave. We would have an activity to do such as fishing and we would have to act it out how our social status was. The group had to guess our numbers of social standing and Love.  We had to try hard to show our emotion and social status through movement and gestures but no sounds.

In one activity we discussed how turning stories into movement and gibberish and gesture and having other people speak over another groups scene with dialogue, showed us how visual images have the power to get emotional responses from us even if we’re not saying anything.

All these tasks today helped us to understand Artaud’s attempt to create a theatre of cruelty that used symbolic, universal language to allow everyone to access the material.

Acting: Antonin Artaud/Universal language of Theatre Lesson 3

Tuesday 17^th February

We started with a warm up where we had to imagine we were giving birth to an alien, and then looking under a door at someone on the toilet, and we had to be a vegetable in a blender. We also had to be a caveman going on date. I found it enjoyable and relaxing to do weird stuff.

We went into our groups from last week and created our theatre of cruelty piece about nightmares. We only had 10 minutes, so it would have been nice to have longer time to develop our ideas. The piece we came up with was good because it broke the wall between actor and audience, the fourth wall. We started the audience outside the room and walked them in a line, with eyes closed, we then lined them up in the room and made horrible noises in their ears and breathed down their necks. This brought out the audiences raw emotions because we made them feel scared and vulnerable with their eyes closed. This relates to Artaud’s theatre of cruelty because we used noises instead of text, and we made the audience feel uncomfortable.

We then let the audience open their eyes, and we crawled through their legs in a grotesque way. Then one of us was the subconscious and another person was the conscience. The conscience was sleeping and peaceful, and the subconscious would try to wake conscience up. The two grotesque monsters from before would pull the conscience away. We would try to get conscience to turn into a monster too to show that nightmares can change you as a person.

This exercise links to Artaud’s techniques because we got the audience to feel scared and terrified and uncomfortable. We used grotesque noises to show nightmares that anyone can have, so the audience experienced fear together as they had a collective nightmare.

I really liked this exercise and had fun with it because you could really use your imagination to show nightmares that anyone can relate to. The warm up exercise was enjoyable because people had such different responses to how to give birth to an alien. It was interesting to see the different performances about nightmares to see different groups responses.

Acting: Antonin Artaud/Universal language of Theatre Lesson 2

Tuesday 10^th February 2015

This week lesson we carried on looking at antonin artaud we came up with our own work ups for the class in groups using the techniques we learnt last week. We follow on with coming up with a short piece from nursery rhymes where we couldn’t use words. Next we talked about theatre of cruelty.

We came up with our own warm ups in groups to use in a class warm up, using Artaud’s techniques. We did basic movements but pushed ourselves to keep going to the point where we couldn’t do anymore. My group had two circles of people and one person started with showing an emotion and the next person in the circle would build on that and it would grow and grow round the circle. Another group had the idea of being a frozen strawberry in a blender, so we had to spin round and get faster and faster and make noises, not using words. Another exercise was one person was a fish and the other was a fisherman and the fish had to resist the fisherman and the fisherman had to keep trying to catch the fish. The fish had to be pulled by one part of their body.

These warm ups were fun to create because we could do anything that would bring our animal side out, which follows what we learnt about Artaud last week. He wanted to bring out people’s raw emotions and go against what society thinks is normal behaviour. So these exercises needed to engage with that raw emotion, ready for the main task.

For the second task we had to pick a nursery rhyme and come up with a piece without using words and using audience involvement, to depict the nursery rhyme. We chose Humpty Dumpty because we thought we could use the idea of the actors being the horses and the audience could be the kings men, so when Humpty Dumpty fell over, the ‘horses’ could push the audience around Humpty Dumpty and then move through the legs of the audience members and lay over Humpty Dumpty to show he is no more. This task was another exciting exercise to do because we could think of crazy things to do to depict this nursery rhyme. One of our feedback comments to help us improve on it, was that we could be more forceful with the audience to push them onto Humpty Dumpty and we could have been more grotesque to show the Humpty Dumpty story.

Next we talked about Theatre of Cruelty, and the 5 main elements that are incorporated into it. The first element is to push extremes and make the audience feel uncomfortable and the actors need to push their extremes and be beyond normal, but not melodramatic. The second element is a universal language that everyone can understand and engage with , so if a play is taken to any country, the audience can feel the same raw emotions and understand what is happening. The third element is the physicalisation, going to the extreme, physical gesture takes priority over verbal language. The fourth element is concrete language of symbols, for example using breathing as a symbol for an emotion that can be easily recognised. The fifth element is the audience/performance relationship, breaking the fourth wall. The idea Artaud had was to have the audience in spinning chairs so the audience could watch a show all around them. But this never happened because he was considered to be mad, and most of his ideas that he wanted to implement did not happen.

In conclusion, I found that I understood a great deal of his ideas and why he had his ideas. I found it quite exciting to know we are devising a short piece about nightmares, because everyone can relate to having nightmares and it’ll be a good way to show the grotesqueness of Artaud’s ideas and push ourselves to the extreme. Even though Artaud was considered mad and his ideas ignored back then, nowadays it is possible to try out his ideas and push theatre to the limits.    

Acting: Antonin Artaud/Universal language of Theatre Lesson 1

Tuesday 3th February 2015

This week in acting, we started looking at the French practitioner Antonin Artaud. Artaud did not feel that the naturalistic staging and acting style of the time (early 1900s) reflected life. Stanislavsky style of naturalism was supposed to be a reflection of life on stage, in a natural way, but Artaud disagreed and felt that the pain he felt in his life was not reflected on stage. He felt that theatre should reflect the pain and emotions that real people feel in a surrealist way so he came up with a “Theatre of Cruelty”. He wanted his Theatre of cruelty to show the violent and physical determination to destroy the false reality.

In class we looked at the Universal Language of Theatre and how to create an emotion that everyone can understand without text. This is because Artaud wanted to get rid of theatre’s reliance on text and instead used movement and gesture to show emotions and ideas on stage. In class we did a breathing exercise where we had to breathe in and out using different emotions such as happy or anxious or angry. When one person breathed with an emotion, the rest of the class had to watch and then feel the same emotion and do the breathing style themselves.

We also did an exercise where we showed happiness, love and then adoration towards each other but without sound. We also stood in pairs and we could make sound but not words to express anger. This was about Artaud’s work on emphasizing movement and gestures and sounds, rather than following text or script.

Another exercise we did was to line up 7 people and start with one person at the end showing a low sense of anxious emotion and then as it went up the line the emotion got bigger and bigger until the last person was showing the highest level of anxious. We had to build on the level of the person before and increase the level as it went from 1-7.

Our work in class on expressing emotion through movement and sound and gesture was part of Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty where he wanted to get rid of naturalism style of acting and instead show not everyday life on stage but over exaggerated life and emotions on stage.

I felt it was really interesting learning about Artaud. It was quite overwhelming to hear about the work he did and how one lady even gave birth during a show. I can see why he created theatre of cruelty because naturalism is quite a safe version of life on stage but Artaud wanted to show danger because there’s danger in real life. In terms of universal language I found it really interesting how as a company we could all show one emotion once we got over the fact that we looked ridiculous. I found it amazing and quite an emotional release.

I think my strengths were that I went for it and didn’t hold back but my weakness was that I didn’t understand the difference between symbolic imagery and literal imagery.

So in conclusion from this lesson I found it was a completely different style from Brecht which was interesting to compare in my head. It was good to learn about different practitioners and their work. 

Acting: Evaluation

Tuesday 20th January

This week in acting we were carrying on with our group working on our scene. This week we work better as a group because we work outside which mean we weren’t distracted by the other class members. We go through the scene and came up with some great ideas which includes when Adzio and Stephanie’s kiss and when they dance together we have made it so that they dance to Macarena this takes the emotions from the play. This play is a upsetting piece of theatre so making some parts humorous will remind the audience that they are in a theatre and won’t get draw way from the real life. We came up with using music in the last monologue that called "bang bang" which will work well with the monologue we are using because it relates to  the words that are said to build on this idea we are going to look really happy and dance in the background.

We had a rehearsal on Thursday which work well an till other people started to come in the room, the group members became distributed. I feel that the group has a hard time focusing. I think next time we work in a grouping felt i want  go with people who work and not get distracted easily.

My strengths from this lesson is that I was ready to work and didn't get distracted with other members class an d come up with some good ideas.  My weaknesses from the lesson was that I couldn't get the group to work.

Acting:Twelfth lesson

Tuesday 20th January

This week in acting we were carrying on with our group working on our scene. This week we
work better as a group because we work outside which mean we weren’t distracted by the
other class members. We go through the scene and came up with some great ideas which
includes when Adzio and Stephanie’s kiss and when they dance together we have made it so
that they dance to Macarena this takes the emotions from the play. This play is a upsetting
piece of theatre so making some parts humorous will remind the audience that they are in a
theatre and won’t get draw way from the real life. We came up with using music in the last
monologue that called "bang bang" which will work well with the monologue we are using
because it relates to the words that are said to build on this idea we are going to look really
happy and dance in the background.

We had a rehearsal on Thursday which work well an till other people started to come in the
room, the group members became distributed. I feel that the group has a hard time
focusing. I think next time we work in a grouping felt i want go with people who work and
not get distracted easily.

My strengths from this lesson is that I was ready to work and didn't get distracted with
other members class an d come up with some good ideas. My weaknesses from the lesson
was that I couldn't get the group to work. 

Acting: Lesson eleven

Tuesday 13^th January

This week we carried on with working on our scene for berth’s Dr Korczak’s Example. The group I’m working with are hard to get working they keep going off topic and it’s getting annoying as we only have two weeks to finish our scene.

 I thought we can use the songs I need a dollar for when the musician comes in, thinking that if we have an upbeat version of this song. Using this juxtaposition distances them from the play. We were going to have signs on the musician saying I sing for my supper and have one Adzio saying something an along the lines of being unable to trust or I’m going to fight as long as I can to show the rebel that he is growing up in to. Stephanie could have a sign on her that is reliving her thoughts or personality to remind the audience that they are in the theatre.

When Adzio and Stephanie are slow dancing someone could put the dolls in the front of the stage and the dancers can slow more backwards they speak they lines but it only the dolls on the stage it help create less feeling for the audience. We haven’t thought a song to dance to yet but we are going to use dramatic music when we are change characters with revolves around the apple.

Our first scene we are going to use our bodies to make a table to set the scene for Stephanie and Dr Korczak so then we will going to the front of the stage and talk to the audience so we can break down the fourth wall.

My strength for this week’s lesson are the ideas I had but my weakness what that I could get my group to work so I feel we did get much done.

Next week I think we need to plan out our scene and put in to action the new ideas we have come up with and then keep going over it and then have an extra rehearsal.