Nature v Nurture stimulus images

Workshop 4

We watched the pieces developed by the class. Write about the work that you saw and the potential of the pieces. How were they experiential?

GROUP PIECE

We then started to work on the group piece.

What does it say to an audience so far? 

What is your favourite moment of the piece so far and why?

How is it experimental? 

Workshop 3

1 hour session on creating a narrative using images- inspired by Forced Entertainment...

Each person had 5 random pictures.

You had 10 minutes to create a story using them.

In groups of 4/5 each person tells their story. They must show their pictures throughout. No one can interrupt.

You discussed how the stories were told: In first person? Location centred? Character driven? Did we feel like we were there? Etc...

Next in pairs shared your pictures, decide to keep all 10, or get rid of a few. You then created a new story. Again must share the pictures when telling the story. Focused further on how the stories can be told. (You should find that these become more about a performance)

Share and discuss the work. 

Evaluate your experience of these exercises. 

You then started to develop your duets/trips responding to your art work from The Tate. 

What did you decide to use?

Why were you drawn to this piece of art?

What is your piece about?

How is it experimental? 

What practical ideas do you have?

What do you want your work to say?

Nature V Nurture

You need to have completed some research on the 'NATURE V NURTURE' debate.

Here are some links for you:

Saatchi Gallery

http://www.saatchigallery.com/

For further inspiration have a look here. You can see all the art work online. If you have a spare evening or weekend you should pop and see the work. 

The gallery is in Sloane Square, just down the road from The Royal Court Theatre. 

Some cabinets...

Experimental Company - Forced Entertainment

Artistic director Tim Etchells describes performance as...

'going into another world and coming back with gifts'. 

'The work we make tries to explore what theatre and performance can mean in contemporary life and is always a kind of conversation or negotiation, something that needs to be live. We’re interested in making performances that excite, challenge, question and entertain other people. We’re interested in confusion as well as laughter.

We started working together in 1984; in the many projects we’ve created since then we’ve made lists, played games, spoken gibberish, stayed silent, made a mess, dressed up, stripped down, confessed to it all, performed magic tricks, told jokes, clowned around, played dead, got drunk, told stories and performed for six, twelve and even 24 hours at a stretch. We’ve worked on texts, we’ve danced and moved, we’ve fixed things meticulously, we’ve improvised. We’ve made serious work that turned out to be comical, and comical work that turned out to be deadly serious, digging deep into theatre and performance, thinking about what those things might be for us and what kinds of dialogue they can open with contemporary audiences.

As well as performance works, we’ve made gallery installations, site-specific pieces, books, photographic collaborations, videos and even a mischievous guided bus tour. In many ways the company itself – a unique 30 year collaboration – is the bedrock of everything we do, a rare example of people building, maintaining and continuing to develop a vocabulary, way of working and innovating together over a long period of time.'

Taken from their website: http://www.forcedentertainment.com/about/

Here are some clips of the companies work, watch and write a response to what you've seen. 

Q - What makes their work experimental? 

An interesting interview with Tim Etchells (Artistic Director of FE)  - speaks about his solo project and how it was devised. Could be useful for creating your work next week. 

Here is the FE channel on youtube, lots of lovely videos to watch...

https://www.youtube.com/user/ForcedEntertainment

Lesson 2 - 13/1/15

Today we continued to develop the work of 'Cost of the actor' and '...being cruel to ones self.'

Remember to evaluate your experience. 

Strengths, weaknesses, justifications. 

Body over mind - you started off with some movement work, asked to allow the body to overcome the mind, be fluid, improvise with the body.

Q- How did this feel? What movement occurred?

Tickle me - you tickled your partner and they tickled you. This term you are not becoming a character, you can't. You are representing, replicating a person/emotion.

Q- why do you think we did this task? How did if make you feel?

Impossible tasks-

Q- What was your impossible task? How did you try to achieve it? How did this task make you feel?

Music=movement

You were given three tracks to listen out for. How did this impact on the session? Why did we do this?

Continue to research experimental work/artists.

Complete Tate Task - bring work with you on Tuesday.

Workshop 1

Reflect on the lesson today.

Starting Questions

What is theatre?

What have you learnt over the last two terms? What new skills have you already developed?

What do you think experimental theatre looks like?

What are your expectations of experimental term?

Any examples of watching any experimental work? How did you know it was experimental? 

Cost of the actor: 

For each exercise you need to write what you have got out of the task as an actor. 
Evaluate your experience of the task. Each task had music at some point and the lights were turned on and off at moments. Ensure you write about the impact of the music and the lights in each exercise you participated in. 

1.

Walking on the grid, then added music

Introduced thing you were moving towards

2.

Knee fights in pairs

3.

Fishing lines

4.

Lover trying to leave

5.

Alphabet boxes solo, group

6.

Dancing in the dark

Describe how you responded to the body over mind dance exercise. How did you feel and why? What did you notice your body doing? How did other people respond? What was the purpose of us doing this task? How does it link to Artaud?

7. A Spurt Of Blood

We read Artaud’s play....

Q - What was your initial response to this?
Q-  What did you think it was about?
Q - How were you able to relate the Artaudian ideas of theatre to his own work?

You created a version using text then a non verbal piece considering the below:

Using total theatre:

Lights

Music

Actor relationship

Symbols

Assault the audience's senses

What section did you recreate how?

Why?

As an actor how were you challenged to perform?

As an audience member how did the pieces make you feel? Were your senses assaulted?

The Spurt of Blood TRANSLATED BY RUBY COHN

CHARACTERS
A YOUNG MAN
A WET-NURSE
A YOUNG GIRL
A PRIEST
A KNIGHT
A COBBLER
A BEADLE
A PEDDLER
A BAWD
A HUGE VOICE
A JUDGE


YOUNG MAN: I love you and everything is beautiful.
YOUNG GIRL: [With quavering voice] You love me and everything is beautiful.
YOUNG MAN: [In a lower tone] I love you and everything is beautiful.
YOUNG GIRL: [In an even lower tone] You love me and everything is beautiful.
YOUNG MAN: [Leaving her abruptly] I love you. [Silence] Face me.
YOUNG GIRL: [As before standing opposite him] There.
YOUNG MAN: [In an exalted high-pitched voicej I love you. I am great, I am lucid, I am full, I am dense.
YOUNG GIRL: [In the same high-pitched voice] We love each other.
YOUNG MAN: We are intense. Ah, how beautifully the world is built.
[Silence. There is a noise as if an immense wheel were turning and moving the air. A hurricane separates them. At the same time, two Stars are seen colliding and from them fall a series of legs of living flesh with feet, hands, scalps, masks, colonnades, porticos, temples, alembics, falling more and more slowly, as if falling in a vacuum: then three scorpions one after another and finally a frog and a beetle which come to rest with desperate slowness, nauseating slowness]
YOUNG MAN: [Crying with all his strength] The sky has gone mad.
[He looks at the sky] Let's hurry away from here. 
[He pushes the Young Girl before him]

[Enter a medieval Knight in gigantic armor, followed by a Wet-Nurse holding her breasts in her hands and puffing because her breasts are swollen]
KNIGHT: Let go of your tits. Give me my papers.
WET-NURSE: [Screaming in high-pitch] Ah! Ah! Ah!
KNIGHT: Damn, what's the matter with you?
WET-NURSE: Our daughter, there, with him.
KNIGHT: Quiet, there's no girl there.
WET-NURSE: I'm telling you that they're screwing.
KNIGHT: What the Hell do I care if they're screwing?
WET-NURSE: Incest.
KNIGHT: Midwife.
WET-NURSE: [Plunging her hands deep into her pockers which are as big as her breasts] Pimp. 
[She throws his papers at him]
KNIGHT: Let me eat.

[The Wet-Nurse rushes out] [He gets up and from each paper he takes a huge hunk of Swiss cheese. Suddenly he coughs and chokes]
KNIGHT: [With full mouth] Ehp. Ehp. Show me your breasts. Show me your breasts. Where did she go?
[He runs out] [The Young Man comes back]
YOUNG MAN: I saw, I knew, I understood. Here on a public street, the priest, the cobbler, the peddler the entrance to the church, the red light of the brothel, the scales of justice. I can't stand it any longer!

[Like shadows, a Priest, a Cobbler, a Beadle, a Bawd, a Judge, a Peddler, arrive on stage]
YOUNG MAN: I've lost her: give her back to me.
ALL: [In different tones] Who, who, who, who.
YOUNG MAN: My wife.
BEADLE: [Very fat] Your wife, you're kidding!
YOUNG MAN: Kidding! Maybe she's yours!
BEADLE: [Tapping his forehead] Maybe she is.

[He runs out] [The Priest Ieaves the group and puts his arm around the neck of the Young Man]
PRIEST: [As if confessing someone.] To what part of your body do you refer most often?
YOUNG MAN: To God. 
[Confused by the reply the Priest immediately shifts to a Swiss accent]
PRIEST: [In Swiss accent] But that isn't done any more. We no longer hear through that ear. You have to ask that of volcanoes and earthquakes. We wallow in the little obscenities of man in the confession-box. That's life.
YOUNG MAN: [Much impressed] Ah that's life! Then everything is shot to hell.
PRIEST: [Still with Swiss accent] Of course.

[At this moment night suddenly falls on stage. The earth quakes. There is furious thunder and zig-zags of lightning in every direction through the zig-zags all the characters can be seen running around bumping into each other and falling then getting up and running about like crazy. Then an enormous hand seizes the Bawd by her hair, which bursts into flame and grows huge before our eyes]
HUGE VOICE: Bitch, look at your body!

[The Bawd's body is seen to be absolutely naked and hideous beneath her blouse and skirt, which become transparent as glass]
BAWD: Leave me alone, God.

[She bites God in the wrist. An immense spurt of blood lacerates the Stage, and through the biggest fiash of lightning the Priest can be seen making the sign of the cross. When the lights go on again all the characters are dead, and their corpses lie all over the ground. Only the Young Man and the Bawd remain devouring each other with their eyes. The Bawd falls into the Young Man's arms]
BAWD: [With the sigh of one having an orgasm] Tell me how it happened to you.

[The Young Man hides his head in his hands. The Wet-nurse comes back carrying the Young Girl under her arm like a bundle. The young Girl is dead. The Bawd drops her on the ground where she collapses and becomes flat as a pancake. The Wet-Nurse no longer has her breasts. Her chest is completely flat]
KNIGHT: [In a terrible voice] Where did you put them? Give me my Swiss cheese.
WET-NURSE: [Boldly and gaily] Here you are.

[She lifts up her dress. The Young Man wants to run away but he is frozen like a petrified puppet]
YOUNG MAN: [As if suspended in the air and with the voice of a ventriloquist] Don't hurt Mommy!
KNIGHT: She-devil!

[He hides his face in horror. A multitude of scorpions crawl out from beneath the Wet-Nurse's dress and swarm between her legs. Her vagina swells up splits and becomes transparent and glistening like a sun. The Young Man and Bawd run off as though lobotomized]
YOUNG GIRL: [Getting up dazed] The virgin! Ah that's what he was looking for.

Q - What did you understand about Artaud from the work we have done today?

 Artaudian Techniques:

You need to start a research section on Artuad, Brook and Growtoski. 

What is theatre?

As we start exploring experimental term, I urge you to think about what theatre is. How should it make us feel? What should we experience when we watch something? 

Write a brief 300 words on what theatre is...

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2010/feb/09/define-theatre-national-scotland

Franko B

'Franko B makes drawing installations, sculptures, performances. Over the years he has built up a sizeable body of work and has become internationally known he has worked with many institution across continents including at the TATE MODERN, TATE BRITAIN, TATE LIVERPOOL, UK. ICA. [ the institute of contemporary in london. ] the IKON gallery in Birmingham, UK ..THE PALAIS DES BEAUX-ARTS, Belgium. EX TERESA MEXICO CITY ,Mexico . PAC [ padiglione di arte contemporanea, Milano. RU ARTS Moscow, Russia. and many more.
also his work is in collection in private e public institution, including a THE TATE MODERN, VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, and the permanent collection of the city of Milan, Italy and many more.'

http://www.franko-b.com/

Grotowski

http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/video/five-truths-grotowski

Brook

http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/discover-more/platforms/platform-papers/peter-brook

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/may/27/the-suit-peter-brook-review