Lesson 6 9/02/16

Lesson 6

We discussed at the beginning of the lesson that during our rehearsals that we would try not to respond to the pressure of letting go or performing in front of anyone. We were given feedback to:

·         Learn to go

·         Have fun when you are performing and enjoy what you’re doing

We had to ask ourselves:

What do we need to do today?

-work out strength and weaknesses of the piece by seeing what works and what doesn’t

We began to set up the bar and put cardboard all over walls to give the space a blanker feel to it and give the space another level of an atmosphere.

We then asked ourselves:

Why is our performance piece experimental?

Because:

·         It’s not traditional we don’t know what’s going to happen- this links to Grotowski’s teaching of channelling emotion like a medium (which is what the improvisation storytellers do during the performance piece)

·         We are altering a space to make theatre- this links to Peter Brooke teaching of being able to take any space and make a piece of theatre there.

·         We have being studying Tom Waits and our piece is based on him. We have previously acknowledged that Waits has a contrasting view to many people similar to the experimental practitioner Artaud.

We then asked ourselves:

 How can we make our piece good? 

·          By keeping things simple but bold and commit to the action

We next did a character exploration exercise in order to further develop our characters and add more layers to their personalities. We were asked to walk in our own characters up to the front of the bar table, get a drink, walk over to a large box, stand on it say a Tom Waits quote, walkover to the microphone and say another quote from Tom Waits.

We received feedback on our characters for this exercise:

·         Inhabit your character

·         Let go of anything that is stopping you from freeing yourself

·         Keep feet still to be grounded and rooted to receive energy so your character can feed off of it

·         Give more energy

·         Allow your character to come out fully and focus less on the drunkenness of the character  and more on the personality hiding behind the drunkenness

We then did a run through but without lights and all of the appropriate props and costume.

Feedback on Run- through:

-Butoh Dancers during the story telling need to be the movement of the action instead of the main character

-Don’t be scared to get into the middle of the stage because you need to own the entire space

- Develop your character more because otherwise it doesn’t feel like a bar

-We need to get more contrast in the piece (between more than just characters)

-Go a lot further with the build ups of tension

-Be much more free