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.