Most Useful Exercises Evaluation

The Useful Exercises Evaluation

These selected exercises or experiments have been quite inspirational and useful things when it came to making work for experimental theatre. I explain in more detail why that is and what I get from them and how they can be interpreted into performance material. The other exercises or experiments I have spoken about already in my notes but I wasn't inspired to create any work from it because I didn't get much out of it or I felt like it had little relevance to the mind, the effect of drugs or specifically the amygdala.

Below are descriptions on how to do an exercise/ experiment and underneath it has a person reflection. Depending on how much I got from it I put it in a particular colour so it is obvious how effective and useful the activity was in devising for the show.

• If it was very effective and useful then in would be in the colour green.
• If it was effective and useful to an extent then it would be in colour blue.
• If it was a little effective and useful then it would be in the colour red.

Meditation

• Originally meditating for 9 hours for 10 days. However, for educational purposes we meditated in silence for 30 minutes.

Meditation is a good exercise because it pulls you away from reality and makes you concentrate on living in the present. It draws your focus to your breathing pattern, this is meant to encourage you to disengage with your inner monologue (the voice inside your head) and show you a way to become relaxed, recharged and honest.

Connecting With The Sense Of Touch

• Closing your eyes and using your skin to connect with what’s around them.

Connecting with the sense of touch is a good exercise as it encourages you to disconnect to your subconscious routine and pay more attention to other human features such as your sense of touch. By using the sense of touch it makes you familiarise with things that you wouldn’t be able to notice from sight, smell, or hearing. This gives you a more extended look at the texture of something and this could inspire the show. Depending on what a particular texture makes you feel, it can be used and amplified to create an atmosphere for an audience member to experience. For example, it is was a soft and comfortable material such as wall, it could project a comforting and warm atmosphere. This atmosphere could make a person happy.

Contact Improvisation

• In partners we keep our eyes shut and make contact with our skin. Creating a sequence of non linear actions.

Contact Improvisation is a very good exercise. If we are looking towards showing the unconscious mind in action then this exercise would be good because it makes you forget about the people around you and makes you connect with yourself and the senses that you tend to not pay attention to. For example touch. The theme that this show needs to highlight and project to the audience is that we are representing drugs that affect the mind. Or in other words ‘the impacts of external stimulus.’ Using your skin to get to know external stimuli gives you a new and different perspective of thing than if you used the sense of sight, hearing and/ or smell.

Riffing

• A circle of simple and synchronised movements create an atmosphere of energy that get sent into the person in the middle trying to find themselves. They soon refine a movement and then someone goes in to copy the movement and then explores movements with them.

Riffing is a good exercise even though from an outside viewer the people do it may look a bit pathetic. However, it’s know that riffing can be very useful when searching for yourself or physically finding a story to tell. From taking part in the exercise, I can express that I have never felt so vulnerable yet so free when doing an in-class exercises. Being in the circle and having my eyes shut, I must admit I felt so stupid moving about, but eventually I let everything go and I let my body speak for myself. I accepted the energy from everyone else and built up myself esteem. It was a moment that was different, yet so beautiful with creativity, freedom, confidence and acceptance.

Choral Riffing

• The whole group start off with changing between laughing and crying. Then everyone follows their instincts and does what they feel is right. Then the actions combine into a group movement. Then the whole class merge with each other to create a class movement. Then someone changes the movement and the class does the moment making the leader disappear.

This is a good exercise as it makes a complete physical improvisation look like a ritual or a fluid choreography. This movement activity is great to put in the show because it releases any form of tension that existed before and breaks any barrier between every person. If someone just simply starts off something and everyone responds to it, it can become a very beautiful moment seeing something that was raw but yet have so much meaning and strong connection. Some things from this can inspire other ideas and evolve to a sequence of movements that can represent a feeling that you get from the amygdala or something that you have experienced can be interpreted with this activity.

Ganzfeld Effect

• We make a mask out of paper and cover our eyes with it. This allows us to only see the colour white. Then we lie down for half an hour whilst listening to a white noise or a very low base and then identify what happened to us individually.

Ganzfeld Effect is a good exercise mainly for the intention of gaining inspiration from the depths of your mind. It was relaxing, and interesting because I went through things that I never really questioned or thought about before. For example When I managed to get into it I started to feel this fuzzy feeling within my body. It wasn’t exactly pins and needles and I’m not so sure if it actually was the feeling of my blood rushing through my body because the feeling differentiated every few minutes. It was hard to say but that strong feeling I can only describe and relaxing and pleasurable. From staring at nothing for such a long time I believe I started to hallucinate things. I saw different colours in forms of steam/smoke that spread across my provisional vision and merged into shapes and other colours. I assumed that happened because my sense of sight became hungry in the need on seeing colour and the things around me or I saw theses things because it was a feature that simply occurred in my mind and whatever happened in my mind , my inner voice didn’t simply speak out like usual, as a matter of fact it used my sense of sight to project it right in front of me. I went further into analysing this as I thought that the colours could of represented how I felt and the smoke/steam was recreating the images from my memory/mind. This became a sort of inspiration that made me want to use this in my work.

Emotional Learning

• One person starts off a movement and everyone takes a moment to observe how to copy the movement and breathing pattern. Once learnt everyone closely crowds around that person and does the movement in sync with them. After some time the movement mutates into a personal interpretation and then someone runs through the middle to break that connection to start a new one.

Emotional learning is a very good exercise as you first have to find something that represents the fear or a memory that made you learn a lesson from it. This feeling of fear  becomes and instinctual movement that can easily be picked up by others and mutated into something a bit more personal. You revisit feelings and thoughts from the past that have helped mold you into the current version of yourself that you are today, and in some way you feel a sensation of pleasure and relief that you went through and learnt something- even if it was a fear condition experience. Theses moments can really fit into the show because an emotional atmosphere gets created once we all experience one person's feeling. The room becomes honest and power in a way that it encourages different experiences through one person’s outbreak. It’s a strong and beautiful moment when you just stop and watch one person and then others amplify it into something more. You can see it as a caterpillar (the memory/ past experience)  turning into a butterfly (something that makes everyone rediscover who they are).

Tick Tock

• We get into groups of three and one person is standing in the middle, facing towards one person. The other two have to be on their knees facing towards the middle person. The middle person has to fall forwards towards the person they are facing and be caught. The person who caught them has to push them back towards the other person. They continue doing this movement until you get a steady tick tock pattern.  When practiced well every group does it to create a synchronised tick tock action.

This exercise is good because  it had a sense of synchronisation that gave the room a sort of atmosphere. It made me think of the mind producing thoughts and ideas. This related to the fact that brilliant ideas are produced and perfected over time. And once the word time was highlight in my mind I realised that this activity could represent that, that time has an effect on our minds. So do drugs (good or bad) and once you are going through a drug phase time seems to slip by in reality, however, in your drugged mind you feel timeless or lime seems to elongate itself when you are not in full control of your mind. This would of been a strong image in the show that could represent the elongated or timeless effect that drugs seem to have. When everyone seems to rush about not paying attention to anyone and then suddenly the tick tock action happens for a while that creates this moment where people start to become anxious on when it will end.  It’s slow and steady and it feels like it’s been a long time, when in fact it’s only been a couple of minutes.