#y12term3

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Sylvia Plath reads Lady Lazarus

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SYLVIA PLATH

Sylvia Plath is best known as a poet, novelist and short story writer. Sylvia was born on October the 27th 1932 and died on February the 11th 1963. Plath got married to a fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956 and had two children; Frieda and Nicholas, living in both the United States and England. For most of Sylvia’s adult life, she was diagnosed as clinically depressed and committed suicide in 1963, after many failed attempts. Her son, Nicholas, also committed suicide and hung himself in 2009. 

Famous poems by Plath include, Daddy, Lady Lazarus, Mad Girl's Love Song, Tulips, and Deer Island.

The only novel she had written was The Bell Jar and it was published a month before her death. 

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WORKSHOPS (Grotowski, Brook & Arteu)

Tuesday the 5th of January 2016

JERZY GROTOWSKI 

Jerzy Marian Grotowski was a Polish innovative theatre director and theorist whose approaches to acting, training and theatrical production have significantly revolutionised and influenced theatre today. He was born in Rzesow, Poland August 11th 1933, and attended the Russian Academy of Arts. Grotowski died in Pontedera, Italy January 14th 1999. 

Grotowski’s theories were influenced by religious writings like the bible and Dostoevsky, and his work was said to be deeply spiritual because of it, referring to his actors as “holy actors”. He set up and directed the Polish Theatre Lab, believing that form was a lot more important than content. Jerzy’s main thesis was that he wanted to get rid of elaborate sets, costume and props and bring theatre back to the fundamentals: pure and simple acting. He believed that what good acting is, is keeping it raw by avoiding elements of production (staging, lighting, set) that would normally influence a performance, and rediscover more important features like acting conventions. 

He heavily encouraged his actors to be physically fit and healthy, in order to access emotions easily. For example, an exercise we did today that was invented by Grotwoski, was to run around for 45 minutes, outside and inside, walk with our arms in a circling motion, walk with hands to knees or hands to ankles and jogging in sync because he believed pushing his actors to full exhaustion would allow them to keep their mind focused on themselves rather than anything else, because that’s all they could do. Grotowski wanted his actors to be connected spiritually and rehearsals to become a way of life. 

He also pushed the idea of “via negativa” = to be present and involved in the moment. It was a technique of elimination to rid themselves of things that stopped them from playing and involving their skills in a role (believing exhaustion ensured his actors were able to access these emotions readily). 

Grotowski believed that poor theatre is a “live communion between the actor, audience and space.” Actor/audience relationship is vital, he thought that if the actors were so connected to the character they were playing they would have a moment of self-penetration = an actor’s moment of revelation on stage where they somehow changed, as an audience, they felt they could change too. 

I felt his exercise of pushing actors to exhaustion worked. At the end of the 45 minutes I felt the only thing I could focus on was how tired I was. I didn’t have the energy to allow my brain to wander elsewhere. However, despite being so tired, I felt ready and inspired to work. 

ANTONIN ARTUAD

We started this workshop in a cycle of emotion, we had to start small and slowly evolve our emotions bigger and bigger. Our first emotion was 'joy' starting with subtle smiles, shrugs, sighs and hums. As it got bigger, people began to laugh, sing, jump and hug and slowly the whole circle started to scream. We moved onto sadness and I think the whole class found this emotion to evolve a lot more challenging. Although joy is a universal emotion as is sadness, I feel that sadness is expressed in many different ways and because it’s so much more personal, it felt unnatural to make it collaboratively bigger. However, I understood that just because an emotion needs to get bigger it does not necessarily mean that it needs to be expressed bigger, it just needs to find a deeper and more intense route. 

An exercise I found incredibly captivating was creating a tunnel (using a row of chairs) to create an intense and real as possible experience. The five actors had to react to the conditions, that Ben would slowly add on aloud. At first he said they were deep underneath the earth’s surface, the air smelt and was thick and humid and breathing was hard because of it. Then the walls were slowly closing in, and they saw the end to the tunnel, however the texture beneath them was jagged rocks making it harder for them to get through. He then asked people to slowly create an external experience, I had to bang on the top of the chairs (essentially the top of the tunnel) and Sybil had to whisper things like: bring me home, don’t leave me. Afterwards, the actors who had the full experience said it was incredibly distressing and real. I believed it as I watched it. It made me understand that you can create an experience for yourself as an actor or an audience member with minimal aspects of set, lighting or costume.

Tatenda and Frank got into the middle of the circle, and Frank was told to be dead, and Tatenda was told that Frank was her son. The image was beautiful, Frank was lying on her lap as she whailed on top of him. We were instructed to slowly create soundscape that reflected the mood in front of us. I could hear heartbeat sounds, weeping, sobs, hums, lullaby’s, muttering of ‘I love you’, squeaks, crash sounds, sirens etc. We all built upon each other to create a distressing, experiential and destructive soundscape that added on incredibly to the image displayed. 

This workshop made me realise how incredible small things can be used to create an experience, with no other factors that are needed to influence it. 

PETER BROOK

Brook believed that actors should feel emotions internally at an extreme and intense level, solely through body language and facial expression. To fully grasp his thesis, we got into a circle and counted 6 people to our right and observed them, every little detail: the way they stood, held their face, their posture and took in as much detail as possible. We had to copy every small movement we could pick up on, and of course the 6th person to my left would be observing me. If this was a successful exercise, slowly the whole room would be doing the same thing. After understanding what the task was asking of us, we counted 10 people to our left and the class started to over exaggerate actions to make it easier to pick up on and this created a ripple effect. This made us understand how audiences are observant and every slight movement must be thought out. 

We also had to externalise an extreme emotion we felt through a chosen body part. I chose fear and my chest. I did this by breathing heavily, letting my chest cave in every once in a while. It was very interesting to see you could feel an emotion not verbally or facially but through your body. Thalia picked up on my emotion so I feel I was successful.  Our final exercise involved the whole class. Jack put some music on to help amplify the ambience. We were instructed to close our eyes and begin to mould into an emotion. I chose anxiety. I felt myself shrivel and try and make myself unseen. I began to go lower onto my knees and start to sway. Jack asked us to vocalise it and I started with moans and groans and slowly started to scream “make the voices stop!” When he began to countdown from 10, my emotions escalated so quickly that I wasn’t even thinking about it. 

This exercise I felt changed the way I’ll approach acting. To externalise an emotion with my body before engaging it with speech and expression. 

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THAIMUN II Conference

4 - 6 APRIL 2015 - YEAR 12, TERM 3

The Thailand MUN Conference took place on the 4th to the 6th of April in 2015, and provided a ton of new experiences for me. I chaired in the Human Rights Committee and practiced a number of skills.

I did some work in advance to help plan the conference; my co-chair Holly and I wrote three research papers to give to the delegates, in order to get the debate at a high standard. Informed debate is good debate in the MUN. For me this really underlined the service aspect to being a chair; it isn’t about you, it’s about helping everyone else get the best out of it they can. Especially for new people MUN is about learning about yourself and making yourself better, and how good or bad your chair is really makes a lot of difference. It’s a lot of responsibility but ultimately, it’s fun.

I worked closely with Holly to make sure everyone got the best out of the conference. We had set ourselves a goal that everyone would speak at least once. We encouraged the delegates to speak, but we weren’t aware that for some, this was their first conference. We spoke to them during the lobbying time and helped them formulate their speeches. Working with Holly was especially important at this point because we had to really persevere in order for everyone to learn something, but we did it in the end. Everyone spoke and two delegates approached us and thanked us for our efforts, saying that they were grateful we had helped them to speak in public, which was very rewarding to hear.

The biggest challenge I had to face was how to deal with delegates who don’t behave properly. We had a slight issue with one delegate being inappropriate (really creepy) to the female delegates and we also found out he was telling other, less experienced delegates what to say in their speeches. We received a signed note from some delegates detailing how irritating he was being and how he was ruining the debate. This was difficult to deal with because I’m not a teacher and I don’t generally feel like telling people off is my job - but as a chair, I found out that it was, so I dealt with the problem. Ultimately, it’s a very difficult social dynamic, because we’re both students, but my job is to help other delegates get as much out of the conference as possible and to do that I had to have a private word with someone and revoke speaking rights. It’s easy to overcomplicate it and feel intimidated but I learned that in this situation the way to handle it is to just deal with it.

Chairing at an international conference was new to me but I learned a huge amount both about the activity and about myself. On the last day, I represented Iraq in the General Assembly. This presented a new challenge as I was only informed that I would be changing the day before the debate, and as we were discussing ISIL, Iraq was a very central country and had to be kept in the loop.

All in all, it helped me practice old skills and develop new ones, so was a very rewarding experience!