October 15th – 17th
This week, we had a visiting actor/playwright/director named Megan Campeesi come in and run workshops with us pertaining to object theatre and how to appropriately use stimulus to influence your movements throughout a piece. Miss Campeesi studied at the LeCoq School in Paris, where they studied based on the theatre and direction methods of Sir Jacques LeCoq, one of which we worked on for a majority of the time she was with us. We looked at object theatre, where you use objects throughout a piece to represent different things. In small groups of four, we put on small devised pieces about man’s first steps on the moon. My group used a scarf, a tin can, and a ball to signify different things: the scarf became the rocket’s smoke, a seatbelt, the galaxy, and a backdrop for a news report; the tin can was a rocket, a seatbelt fastening, and the handle of a microphone; the ball was the sun, the moon, the earth, and finally the main section of a microphone. I had a lot of fun helping my group find interesting ways to use the objects in new & creative ways so that they weren’t being type-casted as what they may actually be used for.
We also did an exercise where we watching sugar cubes & the way they dissolved in a glass of water, before using it as stimulus to create movements that one might use when trying to portray the pain & grief that come with the death of a loved one. I found it really interesting, because everyone had such different interpretations of how it looked to them, and how they created their movements could represent different emotions depending on what kind of scene it was being used in.
This week’s theatre sessions were a lot of fun, & I’ve never really been to theatre workshops, since I’ve never really even been a theatre student. I think LeCoq’s methods are really interesting, & they allow for really diverse bodies of work while still holding significance in the world of theatre.