Wednesday 5th October
To start off the lecture, we had a discussion with our lecturer about what which practitioners are important for us to know about. The 3 most important practitioners that we must know about are Antonin Artaud, Konstantin Stanisslavaski and Grotowski. Cara then set us an independent research task for us to look up who they were and what they did.
After the discussion we carried out a warmup. Firstly we used our intercostal diaphragmatic breathing to open up our lungs and warm up our diaphragm and intercostal muscles. Next we looked at some diction and travelling exercises. The first one that we looked at was “pah, tah, kah”. This exercise uses the letter p, t, and k throughout the exercises and uses different endings for each line for example “pah, tah, kah. Paw, taw, kaw”. I find this exercise very difficult and I think that it is going to take me a while to learn this. Another exercise that we looked at is called “ma may me maw moo”. For this exercise you have to say “ma may me maw moo” through 5 times however, for each line you put emphasis on one word. For example the first line goes “MA may me maw moo” where there is emphasis placed on the “ma”. Then for the second line the emphasis will be placed on “may” and so on.
After the warmup we moved onto the main part of the session. The aim of today’s session was to start exploring physical theatre. Physical theatre can be used within performance when the actors act and become the shape of objects. The task that we were given was that one person would be a chef and the other 2 people would have to be the kitchen utensils and the ingredients which the chef would use. However, this performance was a mime and we were only allowed to make sound effects. We came up with the idea of making 3 short scenes which showed different utensils and food being prepared. The first scene was a bowl, acted by me, and over the bowl was an electric whisk, played by Mikey. Angel played the chef and she started and stopped the whisk. The next scene showed Angel as the chef cutting some vegetables. The last scene showed myself and Mikey as the product which the chef had made, growing in the oven and then being taken out of the oven. A video clip to the performance of this task can be found here:
Overall, I think this task went well as it flowed nicely and we were focused so there wasn’t any giggling throughout. Also we were given some feedback from our lecturer saying that it worked really well and she was able to tell what all of the things in the scenes were.
A quick task that our lecturer set us towards the end of lesson was to improvise as a children’s toy. The first thing that popped into my head was an old teddy bear. For this I sat with my legs apart and with my arms directly above them. Because I was stationary, I decided to move around slowly in a circle and when I stopped, I flopped my head to one side. Here is a link to what we did:
As you can see in the video, I was not very focused throughout the task because I was giggling. This is something that I will need to work on throughout the course as this is not a professional thing to do within performances unless it is scripted.
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