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.