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.