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.