Stimulus of the week - Images

For our first session we looked at a picture of Artaud that he had drawn of how he saw himself. Artaud



First we began to discuss what the image could mean and what ideas we could use from it. Some ideas that we came up with were that he was broken and a mess. we also thought that the other people in the picture could represent multiple personalities like the good part of him (bottom left) and the bad part of him (bottom right) and the person in the middle is the human and the mess it has become because of his other personalities. 

Another idea we came up with related to the style of Berkoff; very grotesque and dark. From this we began to create our physical theatre piece. We decided to use the idea of the people in his mind trying to control him and take over. We extended onto our piece that we had created with Tish in the style of Berkoff. Our first movement was one person being enclosed into a circle of other people. We did this to represent them being in control of the people in his mind because they were controlling him.

Our next movement was the person bursting out and all the people around them being thrown to the floor to symbolise that they were trying to break free. Then this person sat on the floor, heavy breathing as we all lay on our backs, moving our chests up and down to show that we were all connected with one another. After this we continued to try and trap this person by creeping over to them as they try and get away from us. We wanted to show the pain that this person must have been going through. To show this we ran towards them screaming and then dragged them with us to centre stage. To finish our piece we wanted to interperate Artaud's lifestyle so we threw ourselves to the floor and the person who represented Artaud formed the position of tying his shoe as this was how he died. All of us were lying on the floor to show that because Artaud was now dead, the people inside his head were dead too.

Our next session focused on an abstract image of a woman.

We thought that this woman had a horrified look on her face as if she had just witnessed something terrible. 
From this we created a physical theatre piece based on some from of physical conflict and the innocent bystander (the woman in the image). We wanted to show the physical theatre style of a fight happening and make it look quite abstract as the image shows very abstract colours and patterns on the woman's face. We thought that this woman had a very flirty side to her so we decided to keep it very light and gracious as this is how we imagined her personality to be.

In our final session, we looked at a more abstract image that gave no direction of meaning whatsoever

We began to brainstorm ideas; the main ideas that we decided to focus our piece around was an eye and how much an eye sees and all the things they could have witnessed, for example violence or a crime. From this we created a stylised piece of conflict between two groups of people. We used weight bearing and canon to symbolise that we were conflicting. 

If I was to do this piece again, I would change the movement to be more heavy and sharp as our movement was quite flowing which did not give the impression of conflict. I would also have one person isolated from the scene that's taking place to symbolise that they have witnessed it and it has affected them.

Devising techniques

Our stimulus was a piece of text by Orestes.

We started by analysing the piece of text and picked out words that stood out amongst the others/ key words that we could focus our devised piece around; for example, we chose to focus on a small section of the text:

It chokes me, squeezes hard and harder
Cannot think, cannot break its grasp,
Or scream or breathe or utter,
and sound

After we had chosen the part we were going to work with, we began brain storming to see how we can apply the style of physical theatre into our performance. Once we had a few ideas we experimented with various ones to see which ones we thought worked and which ones didnt or needed to be changed slightly in order for them to work. Whilst coming up with multiple ideas we thought about various points to help us such as:

Levels

Juxtaposition

Emotion

Contrast

Another way of devising a piece is thinking where an idea originates. We discussed that an idea can originate from anything and creating deep thoughts about something as ordinary as a pencil and moving away from the stereotypical ideas. For example, a pencil can write thoughts, thoughts that arent always possible to say out loud, a pencil holds so many secrets. We control the pencil, we hold the power over it. What if the pencil controlled us and the roles were reversed? What would happen then?

Once a piece has been devised, we then thought about our character. What would they be feeling? Creating a story around them. If there are any objects or furniture around them how would they respond to that object or use that piece of furniture?