Friday 28 November 2014

Tmesis Workshop


For this session, what had the privilege of working with Tmesis. Tmesis are a theatre company that specialises in physical theatre. Tmesis Theatre is a physical theatre company based in Liverpool. The company create, develop and share world-class physical theatre through performance, participation and an international festival, Physical Fest.

For the past ten years the company have toured nationally and internationally with the shows; Tmesis, Memento More, Anima, The Dreadful Hours, Wolf Red and Variations of the Heart. They have worked with some of the world's leading practitioners in the process including, Tanya Khabarova (Derevo), Malou Auriado (Pina Bausch) and Nigel Charnock.


During this workshop, we focused on using our bodies show various elements and to show how emotion can have an effect on movement.

We began by improvising how the different natural elements (earth, fire, water and wind) We thought that because earth is a solid and has a large density, that it would have very sharp and fast movements. With water, it is the complete opposite, every movement would flow from one to another, smoothly and slowly. Fire is very unpredictable so we thought that it would be very fast and the movements would be scattered and messy. Wind can be very smooth but fast and unpredictable so for this we used movements similar to water but a lot faster and bigger.




After this, we worked on bringing our our primal instincts and acting similar to apes or cavemen. we began by starting off with small movements such as dropping to the floor and worked our way up to high levels of mindless anger; this involved much larger movements such as running and throwing yourself across the floor. When we did this, our natural instinct when we reached high levels was to add sound. We started screaming at each other in anger or screaming in fear of the other person. 



















Rehearing and Putting each section of our performance together


In this weeks sessions we worked on running through our full performance and teaching certain parts to other people who were absent when we came up with the routine.

For Tish's session, we created a commercial dance routine. A commercial dance is a very common dance routine that a lot of other people do such as street. We decided to add this routine into our final performance at the end of the cheer leading scene. Once we had created this dance, we came up with forming a small group at back centre stage the dropping to the floor. From this, we realised that this small dance routine was an effective transition to get from the cheer leading scene to the chair scene.

For the next session, we worked on running through our performance again so we all knew exactly where we were supposed to go and when we were supposed to move. Some parts still looked slightly messy. For example, during the youth dance routine, the three people doing emotions at the back did not look in time and also looked a bit unsure. To solve this we talked it through and came up with specific movements they could do in a specific order as this would look more sharp and tidy.


Rehearsing and tying our performance together


For this weeks sessions, we started by doing a rough run through of our whole performance so we could have a rough estimate of how long our performance was going to be. We got a rough time of about 25 minutes allowing an extra five or ten minutes more.

We then discussed the parts that jumped out at us that we didn't intend on including in the performance but we thought worked really well. For example, when working on the ending or the performance, Tia and Meghan were facing one way and Ami was facing the other way; there was a part in the ending when we take a step forward and then drop our heads and arms to the floor, when doing this they were in a 'zig zag' form and when the stepped forward they met in the middle to form a line. I thought this looked really effective and it used slight mirroring and also looked very sharp.

For some sections, the music lasted longer than the routine or didn't really have an ending to it such as the grotesque dance routine. For this we came up with the idea that as we end up in a small group at front and centre stage, this reminded us of bohemian rhapsody. We thought we should use this as it adds comedy into the performance. However, this did not tie in with the theme of our performance so we thought that it would be an effective idea to have the music cut off and Tia and Meghan say "that was very inappropriate for a funeral" This would also be an effective transition into the dance routine that followed it as we could walk into our next positions in an 'awkward' style.

As we did not have an ending, we began to brain storm some ideas. In the end we came up with the
idea of circulating back to the beginning of the performance where we open the letters; we then worked around this. We came up with the idea of having small groups and one letter being passed from group to group with important news on it. However, every time the letter was passed the reaction to the news would be different, as if we had all received different news. As I am the last person to have the letter, we thought that it would be effective for me to look at the letter then put it back in the envelope for the ending. We then came up with the idea of having Meghan singing in the background. We chose the song Home Town by Adele as this song is very peaceful but also sad

After this, we worked on running through the performance and making each movement and transition more precise. We also discussed costumes. We came up with the idea of all having plain t-shirts but different colours to show that we're all different  but all look the same as each other.

We then had a costume run through to see if the costumes worked well together and they did. They were light so we could move around easily and didnt get too hot.