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.