Stimulus of the week - Music

WORD OF THE WEEK
Tension

We started the session by listening to a piece of music and spontaneously creating a character from this. Then we listening to more pieces of music but instead of creating a character we created a shape. This meant that there was no specific character and that it was more abstract like an emotion or feeling.

For the second part of the session, we created two small scenes, one to a sad piece of music and one to happy piece. From the sad piece, we created a scene set I a concentration camp where people are forced into slavery, starved and killed. For the happy piece, we created a scene about people getting ready to go on a night out. Once these two pieces were created, we then switched the styles of music around so the sad piece of music was playing with the happy scene and the happy piece of music was played with the sad scene.

The happy scene with the sad music gave a sense that something bad was about to happen in that scene and it wouldn't be happy for much longer.

The sad scene with the happy music gave it a slight sinister feel to it. Like a horrific comedy, this is the sort of style that would make people laugh and then have them questioning why they are laughing, like they are sick people for laughing at something so serious.

I the next session, we discussed how music can suggest atmosphere and story line. We came up with various story lines to various types of music that we thought fit well with that particular piece. For example, one piece of music was by Tom Waits, this piece was quite upbeat and was sang by a man with a very rough and 'bouncy' voice, from this we came up with the idea of his person being a villain and trying to manipulate someone into doing something bad by making it sound appealing to them.

Stimulus of the week - newspaper article

For this week we focused on newspaper articles as our stimulus.

For our first session, we were given various newspapers to look at and choose and article to work with. The article we chose to work on was "you're next, Briton told Jihadist's threat to hostage after second US journalist is beheaded in the desert" 

We decided to focus on the words "you're next" as this doesnt tell too much about the story and we could expand it from there. We then decided to use canon and each of us would fall back in to the next person whilst saying "you're next" to symbolise people dying. After that we created a circle continuing to say "you're next" whilst walking to round in the circle, this was to represent a person's mind and what mental state they must be in thinking they might be next to die. We then formed a line and held each other's hands as we began pulling from side to side to symbolise being beheaded. To finish our piece we all held our heads, screamed and then dropped our heads.

We wanted to show the story of people being killed in a more stylised and physical way rather than simply acting out the scene. We also incorporated Berkoff's style of using the body as the object, for example, we became the knife at the end.

If I was to do this piece again, I would add more facial expressions within our actions as, although it was supposed to be very non-naturalistic, we wanted the audience to feel the pain too and our faces did not show that. I would also change how we fell to the ground s it was very stylised and 'neat'. I would have made it more heavy and 'floppy' as a body would look after being killed.

Tom's Workshop

We worked with Tom and second year level three students on (date) for a physical theatre workshop. Tom is a student who attends RADA, a drama school located in London.

For the first part of the workshop, Tom talked to us and helped us to understand the process he went through to get into RADA and also his career in acting before that. He gave us advice about having a profession in acting and how we can help give ourselves a better chance at succeeding.

Tom told us that in the film and television industry, no theatre training is required. However, a lot of castings are based on appearance and is very competitive. The live performance and theatre side of an acting career is equally competitive but training is needed to learn skills such as how to project your voice properly.

For the second section of the workshop, Tom helped us focus our minds so we were one hundred percent involved in our acting and living in the present moment. One of the exercises we did was maintaining eye contact with a partner and using the concept of "I can hurt you and you can hurt me". This helped us see the reality of the other human being standing in front of us and how unique and significant they are.

We then chose a different partner and we were told to hug them. This was to establish the feeling of the other person, we cleared our minds and focused purely on the heart beat of the other person to help us focus.

After that, we focused on creating a relationship between two people. For example, when entering a room, you take a moment to notice the other person in the room. This creates an imaginary 'coil' between you and them. The coil is like a an invisible rope that connects two people. Therefore, when acting you enter a room, you notice who is there, react to their presence and then begin to communicate to them.