Performance Workshop Notes 07/02/17

Evaluating the work
Artistic
Prof/ vocational
Clearly expressed judgements


Revelation
Positives
Working in very open and humble manner
Becoming more open and comfortable with contact improvisation and riffing because I created a layer of freedom and acceptance.

Consternation
Negatives
Working with no given circumstances
During emotional learning people were struggling to do physical movements.


Evaluate test performance 1 year 10s
Evaluate experiments
Tick tock balancing and drops turns into a tick tock sequence. This experiment didn't have enough meaning.
Fixed it by given circumstances and given it to imaginative depth.
Layer one fall game
Layer two everyone doing the hand raise in pairs
Layer three was doing a tick tock motion in  a group of three


Pain and pleasure
Empty peace of physical theatre but we extend the piece and when it repeats we bring it into life by living through the moment and putting instinctual breathing in it.

Is what we created theatre?
It is theatre to the extent that it is something you can experience, be apart of and gain something from it. You can explore the creations and things we have experimented and be encouraged to be honest yourself and draw something from it.

Term 3 Exercise Review 4

Term Three Exercises

Meditation

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

Connecting With The Sense Of Touch

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

Contact Improvisation

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

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.

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.

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.

Choral Choreography

• It is similar to the choral riffing because everyone gradually does a similar move however this is more looking at one person doing something and everyone else feeding into that movement to develop it going even further. Then someone doing something else and waiting for the rest of the class to respond.

Speaking Your Inner Monologue (The Dark)

• We all had to lie down and stare into pitch black. We have to disconnect from everyone and listen to our inner voices. And with what our inner voices say we need to repeat everything they say out loud.

Writing Your Inner Monologue

• We need to get a piece of paper and pen. We got two sentence starters to use so we can write what first comes into our minds in relation to those sentence starters. The sentence starters are ‘I remember’ and ‘ One day’.  The point is to continue writing what we think and don’t stop until the time is up.

Speaking Your Inner Monologue (Sentence Starters)

• Instead of lying down in the dark this time you are in partners and you use sentence starters to help stimulate thoughts. You continue speaking until times up.

Pointing Out The Obvious

• We get into partners and we both take turns to point out what we see from the other person. This could simply be describing their appearance. But the thing you can’t do is give your opinion.

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.

Hand Raise Fall

• Everyone is walking around the space. One person raises their hand and says me and starts to fall backwards. Everyone has to prevent the falling person from connecting with the floor.  People that don’t reach them in time continue push focus towards the falling person by being on one knee and looking at them. The game expands by having more people drop at the same time.  And people can say ‘you’ to tell another person that they have to fall and be caught.

The Trust Fall Exercise

• We get into partners and one has to fall into the other’s arms. This could be done backwards or forwards. You take turns.

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.

Pain And Pleasure

• You get into partners and you sit back to back. You start to explore your partner with back on back contact. You evolve that motion into the technique of contact improvisation to search for three positions that resemble pleasure and pain. Once these positions are found you must loop it and live through these moments.

The Finished Monologue

You are conscious and so am I. When you are not conscious your body begins to shut down, your eyes roll to the back of your head and your brain becomes slower. When you are conscious you are aware of your bodily feelings like pleasure, pain, excitement and you retrieve autobiographical memories. So at this instant you and I are conscious of some aspects. But you are probably not aware of the touch of a chair, the subtle balancing of your body against gravity, a flow of conversation in the background and of some of your major life goals. These unconscious elements are as important as the conscious ones because they give us natural comparison conditions.

Performance Workshop Notes Part 1 24/01/17

Term 3 Exercises Review 3

Term Three Exercises

Meditation

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

Connecting with the sense of touch

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

Contact Improvisation

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

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.

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.

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.

Choral Choreography

• It is similar to the choral riffing because everyone gradually does a similar move however this is more looking at one person doing something and everyone else feeding into that movement to develop it going even further. Then someone doing something else and waiting for the rest of the class to respond.

Speaking Your Inner Monologue (The Dark)

• We all had to lie down and stare into pitch black. We have to disconnect from everyone and listen to our inner voices. And with what our inner voices say we need to repeat everything they say out loud.

Writing Your Inner Monologue

• We need to get a piece of paper and pen. We got two sentence starters to use so we can write what first comes into our minds in relation to those sentence starters. The sentence starters are ‘I remember’ and ‘ One day’.  The point is to continue writing what we think and don’t stop until the time is up.

Speaking Your Inner Monologue (Sentence Starters)

• Instead of lying down in the dark this time you are in partners and you use sentence starters to help stimulate thoughts. You continue speaking until times up.

Pointing Out The Obvious

• We get into partners and we both take turns to point out what we see from the other person. This could simply be describing their appearance. But the thing you can’t do is give your opinion.

How To Use Drugs

Performance Workshop Notes Part 2 17/01/17

From looking at all the exercises that we have done so far, I have come to the conclusion of the ones that would really help to make the end of term performance and show the potential of experimental theatre.

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 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.

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.