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.

Acting: Antonin Artaud/Universal language of Theatre Lesson 5

Tuesday 24^th March 2015

For our warm up we worked with greetings and with disgust. The greeting exercise was easier than showing disgust. I found it hard to show disgust because I felt I was doing the same action when I could have explored different ways of showing my disgust but I feel it was a good starting point because we haven’t explored negative greetings before.

We worked in groups and had to think of a ritual to do which was fun. We had to think of a ritual like a wedding or birthday party. In my group we did a wedding, and we had to perform it naturalistic first and then we had to do it as Artaud would have wanted. The techniques we used were exaggerating the emotions we felt and the actions we did. We also exaggerated the movements of walking down the aisle, doing really big steps. Doing this exercise it gave me a clear understanding of how Artaud wanted his actors and audience to start scavenging under the skin, feeling raw emotions.

One group did Christmas as their ritual. They started off sleeping, then woke up and sang chirstmas songs. Then they sat and looked at us as if we were a present that they were waiting for permission to unwrap. We started to feel self-conscious, as they watched us. It was quite off-putting. So I was starting to feel like an Artaud audience member. This piece was interesting because it made me feel happy but in an uncomfortable way, which is how Artauf wanted his audience to feel he didn’t want just happiness he wanted uneasiness as well.

We then worked in groups and looked at symbolism and surrealism. We asked ourselves does the visual add or detract from verbal linguistic words? I think it depends on what you’re trying to get across. Sometimes it’s nicer for people to imagine themselves, but in other ways Artaud’s work needs to also been seen to understand it.

Then we got into groups and we were told seven words and we had to think of what they symbolise to us. The words were: horizon, tree, water, seed, sea, flower, and cloud.

Horizon makes us think of sunsets, morning, destiny and tranquillity. Tree- purity, naturalism and stability. Water- lifesaver, refreshing, purity and nourishing. Seed- growth and the beginning. Sea- summer, happiness and soothing. Flower- colour, pleasant smell, positivity and death. Cloud, rain, imagination, dark, death and unstoppable.

We looked at these words and we found that actually they symbolise something different for al l of us. They are not taken literally, they can be metaphors. The first words we I think took literally and then we started to think about it more deeply and think of what we feel when we think of these words. Then we got given five words of emotion and we needed to come up with a still image of each words. The words were anger, sympathy, despair, boredom and loneliness. We came up with really good ideas for the words. For despair we looked down at the back of the wall and people interpreted it differently, some thought it was boredom or loneliness which was interesting because you could see different people’s reactions to the images and how they interpreted it.

Lastly we had to create a still image of short phrases. Which was difficult because the phrases were quite complex like ‘captivity followed by liberation’. 

Acting: Antonin Artaud/Universal language of Theatre Lesson 4

Thursday 17th March

Today we started with some warm up exercises that encouraged us to communicate without words because we are learning about Artaud’s Universal language. Then we talked about Artaud and how he witnessed a performance by Balinese dancers in 1931 in Paris, which inspired him to create his own theory of theatre which was Theatre of Cruelty.

Artaud thought that words were limiting and also he felt that all the subjects that other dramatists were talking about were limiting too, and didn’t mean anything to him. He wanted to break away from the realism theatre at the time and use symbolic language with images and gestures, sounds and movements. He wanted to make the subject matter universal so that if he took it to another country everyone would understand it.

Then we talked about significant moments in our lives and we had to observe each others body language like their facial expressions and their breathing and face and eyes. We had to do this instead of listening to their words. Then the storyteller had to tell the story again but without words, just using gesture and movement. This exercise helped us understand what Artaud wanted from his actors- he wanted them to be trained so that everyone can understand them.

We did another activity were 2 people would go out of the room and we would get a number relating to the level of the emotion Love. We also got a social status number which determined how we would behave. We would have an activity to do such as fishing and we would have to act it out how our social status was. The group had to guess our numbers of social standing and Love.  We had to try hard to show our emotion and social status through movement and gestures but no sounds.

In one activity we discussed how turning stories into movement and gibberish and gesture and having other people speak over another groups scene with dialogue, showed us how visual images have the power to get emotional responses from us even if we’re not saying anything.

All these tasks today helped us to understand Artaud’s attempt to create a theatre of cruelty that used symbolic, universal language to allow everyone to access the material.

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.