The REAL A-Team of D&CP @therealateamofdcp - Tumblr Blog

The Black Cat. Aftermath

I suppose this will be the last blog post. Today we performed our piece ‘The Black Cat’. We all worked extremely hard over the course of our devising period and I must say everyone did themselves and Edgar Allen Poe justice. Today we started at 12am, trekking in to uni - some of us nervous, others ill. Never the less we broke into Newton Annex and had another prop run through, in which we tidied up transition stages and tried to make the piece slicker. Due to feedback from yesterday’s group meeting we decided to “dirty up” the table cloth. In a way it represented, not only Matts mentality, but also Matt and Tasha’s failing and unstable relationship. It was my final decision to not put the cloth on the table correctly, to have the cloth uneven and creased as it added to the idea of instability. We also tided up the music, the opening scene in particular as the singer often drowned Matts monologue out. With Matts monologue holding such significance, especially as it is from Edgar Allen Poe’s text, it was a shame to lose it over a tech issue. I also made the decision that my character should continuously focus on Matt, as my character is a manifestation of his guilt and grief within his own psyche, which takes a life of its own when he drinks. At 2:30pm we ran a dress rehearsal, and soon enough 4pm came. I am immensely proud of Alpha today. N.R.

Prop Run

Today saw the first run through with props and timing with the recent changes. We have spent a lot of time putting together sections; as in individual scenes, but we have yet to really fit the whole thing together and see it run smoothly, and to time. We now have most of our costume sorted and some of the key props: the rope tie, the beards, the torches, the photos, the table cloth, the wine glasses. All of which proved useful to rehearse with as having them in hand changed the dynamics of many of the scenes. Unfortunately we have yet to source some of the bigger (as in physically larger) props like the bicycles, the wall, the detective’s bed covers, and the cutlery. All of which are very important in the running of the piece and the visual aspects, I just hope that these don’t prove to be a problem at a later stage in the development process. One of the biggest changes to the piece itself that we made was tweaking the final scene with Matt. We finally managed to put together his ending speech, and reveal the symbolism of the rope neck-tie and his hanging, and how it was ever present throughout the story as the audience watch the build-up to his inevitable fate. We had him give the same speech he did in the opening scenes but this time the girls appear from out of the wall turn his necktie to make a noose and take him back into the wall to lie once and for all with them.

F.P.

Production of The Black Cat Continues

Production of The Black Cat appears to be heading in the right direction. This week, we wanted to progress in the development of the piece even further by focusing on the interrogation of Fredrick by the detectives. This would take place at the "Old Bassett Mansion", a location change from the previous house that was burnt down by Marcus Bassett. We discussed various ideas that we felt should be included within this scene prior to devising. This is a pivotal scene within our piece, as it reveals the connection between Bassett and the "nice blonde lady", described by Fredrick in an early scene. It also helps in the development of Fredrick's character, revealing his shady attitude. It is determined in this scene that something is not quite as it seems with the old housekeeper, who stops at nothing to protect the whereabouts of Mr. Bassett and his wife. Still keeping with the rules set to each character, the detectives would probe Fredrick on information regarding the recently burnt down house, the mysterious missing blonde woman and the current location of Bassett. I feel that the use of these rules is particularly effective, as it allows for the development of some interesting and sometimes humorous devised material. It gives each character a purpose or motive, allowing them to be focused on achieving it at whatever cost. My character is only permitted to use three word answers, making it sometimes challenging to complete my motive. In this scene, this is generally the case. Nevertheless, my three-word answers combined with Dan's continuous question asking, makes for a good interrogation and enables the characters to uncover useful information.

In this seminar, we were also able to devise the death of Tasha's character. After Bassett convinces himself that the ghost of his ex-wife is contacting him, he feels he is obliged to kill his current wife, strangling her with a belt and instructing Fredrick to put her in a "safe place". This scene was a huge challenge for everyone involved, as we wanted to portray something that looked effective but still kept with the overall themes of the piece. Death on stage can often be performed ineffectively, due to the limited knowledge we all have with death. Which is understandable. We wanted something that was quite absurd, which created an uncomfortable and eerie atmosphere within the audience. Something film noir-esque definitely came to mind. This scene is perhaps the climax of the piece, and although may be shocking, is definitely not unpredicted.

Following on from this, we wanted a scene that differed from the doom and gloom previously portrayed. The next scene needed to be a confrontation between Bassett and a detective, after he is found discarding the murder weapon. We felt that elements of humour should occur, in a sense making it a "chase scene". Music such as the Benny Hill theme tune came to mind, as well as using bicycle handles to create the illusion of riding a bike, an idea often associated with comedic moments.

We will further develop and finish off devising our piece in upcoming seminars and rehearsals.

B.C

Introducing Fredrick

This was our first session after the Easter break, and so quite a lot of the session was spent focusing on what we had already come up with, so that we knew that we hadn't forgotten anything. We also found that in rehearsing some of the sections, we cleared up things that we weren't exactly sure about before the Easter break, thus making the piece much more easy to understand, for the audience and ourselves, as well as tying up loose ends in the plot.

In the second half of the lesson we decided that we needed to find a way to bring Feargal into the piece again, which is when we came up with the idea of having Matt and Tasha's characters go to the old Basset house, where a slightly crazed butler, played by Feargal, would be living. This was to add some comic relief after the scene where Matt's character burns down the first house. A video of this rehearsal mid way through devising is up at the top of this post.

Through developing the scene we wanted to show the growing tension between Matt and Tasha's characters, because it would be interesting to see the development of that tension and the growing influence of Nia's character over Matt, which would ultimately lead to the murder scene later on in the piece.

This scene also gives Feargal a good opportunity to use multirole to develop a different character to his 'Chief' character. While also a comedic role, Fredrick has a very different physicality and voice, making this a nice challenge for Feargal to define his two charaters.

The Devising Continues

This week in our devising process we tried to develop the games that we had set out for our characters and then use these in improvising new scenes. In having the games which we did we found that it was much easy to create a character and we found the scenes were not only interesting but meaningful as well. We spent a lot of today focusing on the interrogation of our main character by the two police detectives. As we will still unsure as to where our piece was heading we decided to improvise and film what we created, this would give us something to look back on and pick out the key moments. We found it slightly difficult to get to the meaning of this scene at first, it just seemed as though we were going around in circles however once we had established what the scene aimed to achieve we began to find it much easier. The rules that we had set out allowed for interesting moments in the scene such as the police detective's questions to Marcus Bassett were made intriguing by the way in which he answers the questions with animal facts; a trait that we attributed to him due to his love of his animals in Edgar Allan Poe's original Black Cat story. The other police detective's rule of only ever saying three words is also very intriguing in this particular scene as Ben (the actor who plays the character) found it difficult to interrupt the questioning, so this gave him extra power when he did say a line. Although we found that the aforementioned scene consumed a lot of rehearsal time we managed to develop the beginnings of a character for a dead wife. We jumped straight into an improvisation at the end of class, which was shown in front of the other group. This particular scene involved the dead wife and the husband sitting far apart with the husband drinking. We came up with the rule that every time a drink was taken the dead wife should move closer and say one line until they were almost touching. The feedback we got was positive, we found that people enjoyed the awkwardness between the pair yet still saw a strong connection between them. The only negative point was that at times it was inaudible. This scene has remained relatively the same ever since the first performance, however as with the rest of the piece it still has room to grow even when finished and I would attribute this to our games and rules.

-M.S

#Alpha-Circuit Theatre Company

Lesson 15/03/13 - The Birth of a Theatre Piece

After coming up with our final piece idea last week and getting together a semblance of a storyline, this week Alpha-Circuit Theatre Company began to get our fledgling piece onto its feet, experimenting with rehearsal techniques and the stylisation of set placement.

With our idea of a film noire-esque play loosely based upon the works of Edgar Allen Poe now more or less set in stone, we set about trying to block our opening scenes. Due to film noire being quite stylised, we attempted to reflect this in our first scene by having the Chief (played by Feargal) at his desk in a meeting with the two detectives (played by Ben and myself) with his back to the audience. We felt that by having the Chief initially be a faceless authority figure, it would create a sense of the detectives being somewhat downtrodden by a Chief that - as shown through dialogue - was clearly less intelligent than them, but still in power over them. After a couple of improvised runs of the scene, we decided (at Tobi's behest) that we should take on board a technique practised by theatre company Kneehigh and assign a rule to each character and then attempt to stick with it whilst improvising a scene to see what resulted from it. As it happens, this turned out to be very helpful and yielded some interesting and effective results. My character's rule was that he can only speak in questions; Ben's character rule was that he could only speak in sentences of three words or less and Feargal's was that he had to interject loudly and rudely at any given time. As such, this made for an interesting dynamic that achieved the aim of the scene in an entertaining way. This rule-setting carried over to Matt and Tasha's characters. Matt, playing the killer based on the narrator from Edgar Allen Poe's "The Black Cat", was given a rule wherein he had to provide animal facts at appropriate moments. Tasha's rule involved her having to faint whenever anything that could be even remotely construed as a sexual innuendo was said. As such, the dinner scene we began devising between the two characters ended up having many puns based on Matt's sausage. To fit again with our aim of stylising the set, we had the two characters eating their dinner at either end of an overly long dinner table to symbolise the emotional distance between the couple despite only living with one another.

Next week should hopefully see a lot more progress with these characters and their applicable rules, with dynamics between characters yet to meet still unknown until we improvise them in the future.

- DL

#Alpha-Circuit Theatre Company

Edgar Allen’s: Monkey Business.

In today’s seminar we had the chance to start thinking about out final performance pieces. In the week leading up to today we had discussed the idea of bringing in a premise for a play each so that we could brainstorm them and perhaps come up with something. I had personally thought over the fact that our company consisted of six people; four males and two females, and that we could have some kind of relationship comedy drama that involved two straight couples and a gay couple. As the piece needed to be around 40 minutes I thought we could have three 10 minute scenes per couple and then a climax of a final scene involving all the couples for 10 minutes at the end. I thought of the concept as something along the lines of Abigail’s Party in terms of an evening dinner or something similar where something goes wrong. I proposed there could be a secret affair, or someone else could come out to the group or the gay couple could be unknown to the rest of the group and then perhaps one of them was homophobic.

But after a discussion with the rest of the group they said they liked the idea but we realised that it would involve a lot of writing and that’s not the aim of the assessment, besides the fact that it would create more work for ourselves than was necessary. So we had to think of something that we could base a piece on without making it up entirely ourselves. It was at this point that someone hinted at the idea of myths, legends and fairy tales. We like the idea of taking a well-known story and twisting it into our own, perhaps somewhat warped creation, a Frankenstein’s monster type effect. As a group we agreed that we wanted to focus primarily on Greek Legends out of the three so we started to look at ones we knew and ones we didn’t. After some discussion on children’s tales and a brief research on Greek Mythology this was the assorted list we came up with:

Little Red Riding Hood

Medusa

The Tasks of Hercules

Humpty Dumpty

Pandora’s Box

Minerva

Hansel and Gretel

The Odysseys

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

Rapunzel

Rumpelstiltskin

Icarus

Jason and the Argonauts

The Nymphs

The Titans

But again with the practitioners we had learned about in mind many of the ideas we came up with were either too daring, too simplistic, or too far off from the objectives of the assessment. Suddenly a wild idea appeared! Edgar Allen Poe and his dark tales; they fitted all the criteria in terms of a plot that we were vaguely familiar with, they were simple enough as starter blocks that we could play around with them and make them our own, and they had a dark side too them already. The two stories that stood out to us were The Black Cat (the story of a man who kills his wife and hides her in the walls of his house) and The Murder’s In the Rue Morgue (the story of a monkey that brutally murders two women, and is recognised as the first detective story). We have started to combine the two stories into one and the result is that of a film noir type detective murder investigation. This is what we pitched to the other group and they seemed to agree it was a good idea. For next week we will try and develop more on the idea (scenes, characters, setting, etc.) and see what we come up with.

F.P.

Forced "Alpha" Entertainment

This week, our seminar immediately began with each group presenting our short, Forced Entertainment-style pieces.

Our group had met up prior to the seminar, to discuss ideas that would eventually produce a stylised performance. A typical Forced Entertainment production includes a set of rules, to which each participant is expected to endure throughout the duration of the performance. With this in mind, it was only necessary that we incorporated this into our devised piece. "Speak Bitterness", is a production by Forced Entertainment and includes elements that are similar to the exercise we participated in last week, as Tasha discussed in the previous blog post. The actors are required to reveal personal confessions, whilst behind a long table. This performance would generally occur over a 6 hour period, with the audience permitted to enter and leave the performance space as they see fit. Of course, it would not be possible for our piece to last for 6 hours, however; producing something with similar attributes has helped improve our knowledge on this particular theatre company.

We decided to use the phrase "I was happy when...", as the starting point for each confession. Unlike the previous week, we had decided that only one person would be revealing confessions at any given time. They would be given a microphone and positioned on a chair at the front of the performance space, whilst in the midst of various other components. We set out the performance space into three sections and decided to work around the theme of "good and bad". From this, we were able to set ourselves a number of rules, to coincide with the structure of a Forced Entertainment piece. These rules were as follows:

At least one person needed to be in each section throughout the performance.

At the front, the person who revealed confessions needed to remain on the chair and continue to do so until the microphone was taken from them by an individual at will. This section represented the "good".

In the middle section, six chairs were positioned in a horizontal line. Individuals who sat on a chair needed to keep with the continuous rhythm that began at the start of the piece. Everyone sat on the chairs to begin with and could enter and leave the section when possible.

Within the back section, a fighting scenario occurred, with people initiating violence towards each other. This represented the "bad". People could enter and leave the section at any time.

Whenever the "SMART" theme song was played, everyone was required to stop all action and stand in a frozen image of their choice. The song was played at random and the images needed to depict "good and bad".

I was able to notice a number of things during and after the performance. A Forced Entertainment-style piece requires its participants to remain physically active and have good sustainability throughout. As a result of this, at times I found myself losing my breath and my focus decreased because of this. It was also difficult to maintain the continuous rhythm. Despite this, I believe that our piece was performed to a high standard and conveyed elements of a Forced Entertainment-style performance sufficiently well.

After both groups had performed, we were told about the next assignment. We were required to create a piece of immersive theatre that would be aimed at one person. It would be an intimate performance, that relied upon the chosen person's use of their senses to make it work.

B.C

Our "Speak Bitterness" inspired piece that we created.

N.W

#Speak Bitterness #Forced Entertainment #bath spa university

In up to our Kneehigh

This week was our turn for the peer lecture, we decided that we would utilise the space that the lecture theatre provides and get our peers involved as well. We started by showing a rehearsal technique from Lee Strasburg that we used in our presentation before Christmas. It began with relaxing and relieving stress through the body, we then told the participants to slowly get up and start walking around the room. Counting down from ten we the instructed them to transform into a gorilla by the time we had counted to one. This was designed by Strasberg to make the actors aware of their body and how to use it in unaccustomed ways through the final portrayal of the animal. The next stage to this is creating a character using the animal as a cast into which you mold the characters emotions and tendencies. We then began to look at more recent work and both groups demonstrated the pieces that we had created in the previous seminar. These pieces started with a written extract and we were told to pick out three key sentences. Around these sentences we began to create moving images. We were told not to create clichéd images however, be as imaginative as possible. We showed these pieces to our peers and received valuable feedback as to what they interpreted and whether the thought it effective. Overall our peer lecture was not brilliant as we had failed to prepare. We could have utilised the time better and shown more of our work. Getting feedback from this would have helped us in the future, something which I would advise the forthcoming groups to do.

In seminar we began by looking at an animal exercise that is the same sort of thing that Kneehigh would use. We were each given animals and told to visualise how they moved. We then began to move around the space as our animal demonstrating key characteristics. We were then told to rise to our feet and become human but take on the animal’s persona. As we moved around the space we started to converse in what we imagined the voice of the animal. So at this point I was lion, so I was striding around the room with a dominating walk, my head held high and a rather dismissive look in my eye for example. This is used by Kneehigh to help exaggerate personas in their characters; I personally found it intriguing, useful and a good warm up as well. We then carried on work that we started on the Red Shoes. We first showed our work which we had created last lesson. Our brief for this was to take a section of the Red Shoes that we felt was most important or that we deemed intriguing and create a thirty second piece that demonstrated this. Our company decided to focus on the religious implications of Karen and her Red Shoes and our piece consisted of Karen struggling to get free of the Church with the Church literally restraining and dismissing her while she flaunted her Red Shoes. From this we were told to expand this into a two minute piece in which there was a beginning, middle and end, centering around our theme. We were told to imitate the Kneehigh style of production in doing this. So we needed a chorus which interacted with the audience, big characters and simplistic dialogue. Our chorus consisted of the Devil and God who were almost fighting for Karen and we intentionally portrayed both entities as corrupted, drawing parallels to the reality of religion. Karen was represented as naïve and easily persuadable. We then showed the Church to be desperate in literally grabbing Karen and holding her down. We then finished with Karen dancing with the Devil. Our feedback was very constructive; we were told that we should up the tempo of the piece, as the middle was not as intense as it needed to be. We were also told to create greater animal like personality’s, especially for the Devil and God. Finally we informed that we needed to narrate the piece more to the audience. So after this we worked on these points and are showing the final, polished piece next week. Overall I felt that this exercise was very good for helping us start to devise. It helped us think about themes and the meaning of the piece and incorporating this all into a piece that we created. I look forward to advancing these techniques and modifying them for our own devices.

-M.S

Entertainment of the Forced variety

We began our seminar by quickly giving short presentations on the theatre companies that we were assigned the week before. We were given Forced Entertainment, and so had to learn about durational theatre as well as the basics of the theatre company as a whole. The other group gave a presentation on The Wooster Group, which was interesting to hear about because we had heard about them, but had not really learnt much about them.

After this, we were told to sit in a circle on chairs, while wearing paper crowns and begin telling stories, with the idea that we should not give names of places or people, or stories about people in the room. The rules were that we were not allowed to let any stories finish so had to interrupt each other, and that we could not start a story from where we had been stopped before.

This exercise was bizarre because what started as us trying to make up stories of our own, became re-tellings of popular stories and film plots, as well as patterns emerging of moments where we were interrupting each other almost every third word, to letting some stories nearly run their course.

After this exercise, our group were asked to sit on a row of chairs and pass a microphone between ourselves saying a sentence that began with the phrase "I was happy when..." Eventually we weer given more rules such as;

When Tobi played the ABBA hit "Dancing Queen" we all had to get up and start dancing behind the chairs in the most energetic and rubbish way possible until the music stopped playing, not matter how long it went on for.

We could snatch the microphone away from whoever it was being passed to or was holding it.

When Tobi said "Red Shoes" we had to perform our version of 'The Red Shoes' behind the chairs.

During the dancing and Red Shoes acting, Tobi could at any point say a person's name and either add 'reflect' or not. If Tobi just said a person's name then that person would drop out of the activity and go back to saying things that made them happy, and if the were asked to reflect, they would have to talk about their experience of the exercise and whatever came into the top of their heads

We could also comment on the last thing that someone had said, if we had a reaction or thought about it.

We then watched the other theatre company do this exercise, but with the phrase "I am obsessed with..."

For the next session, we were told to come up with our own version of this exercise to show.

N.W.

#drama #forced entertainment #bath spa university #Drama Studies

Mega Post Ultra: PART TWO - Lesson 25/1/13 & Our Latest Peer Performance Lecture (29/1/13)

Part 2 of 2.

As Nia mentioned in her last blog post, for the lesson of 25/1/13 we were set two tasks: to have completed our images that we worked on last week concerning Feargal's story and to have selected three standout lines from a piece of text about the story of the Unknown Soldier in World War II.

First of all however, Tobi had us partake in a Complicité exercise wherein we observed an object doing what it does (e.g. a scrunched-up plastic bag unfurling on the floor; a party popper going off) and attempted to emulate this object in our companies. We here at Alpha-Circuit had to emulate the party popper. As a group we would begin to move in the way that the party popper did, only to freeze whenever Tobi clapped his hands for the rest of the class to analyse what could be going on in a scene with the cast in such a group pose. This continued multiple times until we had come to our final still image of us all scattered on the floor like the party popper's streamers. This image provided quite a stark one for the observing classmates and Tobi even said how he would be interested in seeing a play/performance that began with that stage arrangement. The exercise taught us that inspiration for a piece can come from anywhere and that we should be encouraged to experiment in such a way to see what possibilities can be thought up for a piece.

After this we showed Feargal's images in our group that we should have performed on the 18th but due to weather conditions and a subsequently cancelled seminar, we were forced to postpone until this week. Then we moved on to forming a set of moving images to depict the the three lines chosen from the Unknown Soldier text, which again led to some positive reactions from the audience. We were then told that we should choose a section from Andersen's tale The Red Shoes in order to perform a similar set of images to be performed properly next week.

The events from this lesson led us into our second Peer Performance Review lecture. As we had decided to lead a more practical workshop this time around, we decided to have the audience participate in various exercises from our presentations, namely our Animal/Monkey exercise preceded by some yoga-like warm-ups, followed by a showcase of our images worked on in Tobi's lessons. Unfortunately, we did have a few hiccups. Due to a few late arrivals, we didn't have a lot of time to run through the lecture before everyone else arrived and so a lot of what we said was performed on the fly. We knew what order we were going to be running things in, of course, but we were somewhat under-prepared. Despite our best efforts to create enough space for the audience to indulge in some yoga with Feargal, when it came to the lying down parts there simply wasn't enough space and so only those at the front could really participate properly. We then brought people up from the audience to be a part of the Animal Exercise afterwards, which went very well and was enjoyed by all. However we made the decision to run the exercise twice, somewhat spurred on by a desire to fill the time we had a little more. Thankfully though, the exercise was still enjoyed the second time and went towards educating the masses about our presentation subjects. Our images from lessons went well despite a couple of people being missing/having to be brought up to speed on what they'd missed beforehand, but this proved to be inconsequential.

It would have been nice to be able to perform some more fully-fledged pieces, but hopefully we should be moving onto such things soon in lessons.

- DL

#Bath Spa University #Directing & Creative Practice

Mega Post Ultra: PART ONE - Pre-Christmas Lecture & Presentation

In the first of two long blog posts, I will be talking about our pre-Christmas lecture and our presentation, as mentioned in the title. I hope Tumblr doesn't have a word limit.

Before Christmas, our class (Group G) put on our first lecture, or Peer Performance Review as I believe they are now known. Our actual content for the lecture did feel somewhat limited, as Group F had presented a LOT of what we had also done in Tobi's classes the previous week. However, drawing some inspiration from the works of Katie Mitchell, we aimed to put our own interactive spin on things. For example, for one of our multimedia facets we put up a live Twitter feed on the subject at hand, in which both Group G and audience members could participate if they so wished. This went relatively well, however some silly Tweets were posted which at times drew attention somewhat away from our performances that we put on for the room. Where was I though you may ask? I was downstairs in Newton building, live via Skype call to the lecture room upstairs. However we had some slight technical issues, namely in that we couldn't get the sound to work properly. Therefore I had to resort to handwritten signs to get my introduction and such across to the room. More technical hiccups occurred later on however, when a video was attempted to be shown to the room and the sound was discovered to be working, during which time I was clapping at a motion-detecting light above me and talking to myself with annoyance. Naturally, snippets of my private time were then broadcast to the room. Luckily the audio was choppy and so only random noises were broadcast, so the embarrassment could have been worse. I was switched off from the call after that to avoid any more mishaps. The performances however went well, and the only real issues were with the technical side of things. As such, we aimed to have a more practical approach to things for our next lecture to be put on after Christmas.

The day before we could go home for Christmas however, we had to put on our presentations. Alpha-Circuit Theatre Company (that's us!) were presenting on famed theatre practitioner Lee Strasberg, a subject that we all found very interesting. We looked at his work with The Method, his advocacy of naturalism and realism and his strong desire for actors to depict the truth onstage. My specific part of the presentation however was to discuss how Strasberg's legacy with the Method still influences the world of film acting today, notably looking at both Daniel Day-Lewis and Heath Ledger.

These two actors utilised the Method to startling degrees in order to bring realism and truth to their roles, with varied results. Day-Lewis took (and still takes) the Method to extreme lengths, even contracting pneumonia on the set of Gangs of New York due to not wearing a thicker coat on the belief that his character in the film would not have owned such a coat. Despite the risks to his health and the concerns of those working with him, Day-Lewis' pursuit of truthful role depictions have been fruitful, landing him multiple awards for his work including Best Actor wins at the Academy Awards. Heath Ledger also heavily utilised the Method for his role as The Joker in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, locking himself in a London hotel room for a month whilst getting into character, practising and experimenting with his Joker laughs and keeping an in-character diary as the Joker. Unfortunately, Ledger of course passed away due to an overdose before the film was released, with many citing his accidental passing to a reliance on pills as a result of his getting too deeply immersed into the Joker character. As such, I discussed how Strasberg's Method often results in strong performances, but also can lead to big risks with the health of those who utilise it.

The centrepiece of our presentation's workshop section was the Animal Exercise, wherein we relaxed our fellow classmates before enabling them to take on the characteristics of monkeys. I thought this part of the presentation went well, however some of the participants didn't feel as properly immersed into the monkey-like state as Alpha-Circuit did in rehearsals which was slightly disappointing. Ultimately however, I believe our presentation went well and certainly helped our understanding of Strasberg's teachings and the subject of The Method and naturalism, which will certainly come in useful for when we have to devise our own pieces for our final evaluation.

(To be continued...)

- DL

#Bath Spa University #Directing & Creative Practice #Alpha-Circuit Theatre Company

Lecture & Presentation, Lecture & Work.

As I was the first one to report back after Christmas I've decided to write one big post on what we've been up to for the past month and a bit.

I suppose the most important thing should come first; Rebecca asked us one simple question on the day of Group G's lecture, What is our company about? What is our Ethos? It was a question we ignorantly stepped past in the beginning. We created a company without a cause and we did not pause to think that perhaps that cause was the crux to our "mission". In my opinion I believe that we will create our purpose as we develop through the course, no doubt by our final performance we shall have created a character to our company. But with this question on our minds we decided to take a birds eye view of our company and question it's ideals and name. Yes, that's right, we are no longer called The A-team. Sad I know, but alas it had to be done. So what is our new name you ask? Well after a few fair hours arguing and deliberating we decided on Alpha Circuit (Over Alpha Banana Circuit).

So how did our lecture go? Well, I think. We decided to focus on the works of Katie Mitchell, how she worked (especially with multi media) and how she compared to her contemporaries. This was great as Katie Mitchell serves Biscuits to all her actors at the start of rehearsals, which is what we did! As well as that she checks the radiators are on so the environment is comfortable, puts coats and bags in one corner of the room and starts the evening with a friendly, sociable atmosphere so her actors and crew are as comfortable as possible. Rebecca stated the week before that group G had to show their performance pieces, which is what we did. We performed our pieces in the lecture along side our media films (which we've previously spoken about in this blog). We also used social networking devices such as Twitter and Skype in our lecture to show that Katie Mitchell focuses on film because she is one generation back from us, and if you were to expand on her legacy then you would have to use social media. As the guys before me have said, there were a few glitches with this, but due to the time scale it was inevitable that our lecture would be unpolished.

Our Presentation also looked at a practitioner who worked with film, Lee Strasberg. It was a very enjoyable subject to focus on as we got to look at the works of Marlon Brando, Heath Ledger and so on. We talked about his creative vision and his influence on/and/or creation of Method Acting. I talked about why he used Method Acting. Strasberg was interested in naturalism and realism. His goal was to portray the truth of everyday life on stage. The actor Johann(yo-han) Friedrich Fleck suggested, we should make definitions for the term Nature and Natural. When we talk about what is natural, we mean its ordinary, common, something we all experience. Off the stage the ‘Natural’ is little acts or feelings such as putting your shoes on in the morning, making a cup of coffee, going outside and feeling cold. Things that have little significance when we do them each day. On the other hand when we say “Only in nature does such a thing happen”, it’s very much like saying only in nature do you fall in love, hold your new born child, die. These things have a great amount of significance as they do not happen all the time.

Given these definitions what is ‘Natural’ for the Actor? Is it the stage or the truth?

“The true meaning of “Natural” – a thing so fully lived and experienced that rarely does an actor permit himself that kind of experience on stage. Only great actors do this on stage”. Why is that? On stage it takes a particular mentality for an actor to give himself to the imaginary; with the same kind of fullness that we use when giving ourselves to reality. This is where sense memory and the basic object exercise come in. They fuel the imagination and help the creative process. When you were monkeys, it may have taken some time getting used to – you had to let yourself go, but once you were in the reality of the exercise, some of you actually believed you were monkeys. “The actor has to evoke that reality on the stage in order to live fully in it and with it.” We can incorporate our own experiences of real life into the production, acting like oil in an engine for a smooth running play.As Lee Strasberg said “The human being who acts is the human being who lives" .

So that brings us back to current day and our last lecture on subjectivism, post-structuralism and deconstruction."Our own mental activity is the only unquestionable fact of our experience", this lecture blew my mind and gave me a lot to think about. It also made me want to do more research into it.

Finally, this weeks seminar. We noted that we are moving from directors to companies this term and we looked at the concept of devising. What does Devising mean? We came to the conclusion that Devising required 2 or more people with a subject matter in mind and then they worked together (improvising) to create theatre with this subject in mind. We watched a short video on the theatre company Complicite, who like to work with experimental theatre. We learnt that Complicite means to be aware of the actions of your partner. Complicite's theatre looks brilliant, Tobi told us that they used physical theatre in the way that wouldn't require "jumping over someone head", that it was physical theatre that was accessible Then Tobi grouped us into threes and fours to create theatre using 3 moves, sitting, standing and rolling. He then made us group into our companies and to work on our own Complicite. Tobi made us envision a school of fish and how they moved, he then made us move like the school. It was surprising how much focus that required. He then set us 2 tasks for next week. But as I'm sure all will be revealed in the next blog post.

N.R.

Group G: The Lecture

Even with the culmination of all that went wrong technically or otherwise in our lecture I personally thought we did well with the time we had to put it together considering how little material we had at our disposal, due to our predecessors managing to use most of it up themselves. The fact is although overall everything may not have gone to plan and there were points that had we rehearsed more could have run a lot smoother; our concept, all the things we tried to include and what we presented in the end was still far more a performance and a damn sight more daring than many of the other lecture groups were willing to go, and for that we should congratulate ourselves.

In terms of what went well I believe our use of multimedia was both unique and effective. The twitter feed was one of the most interesting and funny things about the lecture; getting laughs throughout. It could be argued that the screen took attention away from people trying to speak to the room, and it’s true whilst some group members were attempting to deliver their pieces people in the audience were devoting no attention to them and instead reading the tweets. But, wasn’t that in a way the point of Mitchells work, and something that she herself used in her productions? To have more than simply a single strain of action on the stage to watch, and a piece that were you to watch it again you would have a completely different experience of, and did we not have essentially two shows on at the same time; the comical yet relevant twitter feed and the more formal presentations on her work?

On a more personal note I think my part in the lecture went as well as I could have hoped. Speaking on Chekhov’s influence on Mitchell’s work my set was short, concise yet informative and thankfully went without a hitch, well, almost.

The final week’s unusually brief lecture, led by Rebecca, was on Post modernism. She discussed deconstruction and how it’s more a deeper change from within, the idea of structure, the Id Ego and Super Ego, and signifiers that we manipulate to match our own understanding. But she really only skated over these topics as we will be going into them in further detail in the lectures at the start of next term.

F.P.

Of Tweets and Skype

As Ben has said already, it was our groups turn to deliver the lecture, which was no mean feat seeing as despite having a terms worth of teaching to use, the previous group had basically done it all, so we didn't want to redo what had already been done.

BUT our saving grace was that we were going to wow the whole year with our incredible feats of technology, or so we thought. Armed with a skype call and live twitter feed, we went boldly to the lecture room, having no knowledge of what was going to unfold.

When the skype call had to transfer to a Facebook video chat, and without sound, meaning that Dan needed to use handwritten signs to communicate, which actually worked out quite well in the end, which was a small blessing.

The Twitter feed was a success in keeping the audiences focus, as they did seem to enjoy the tweets we were posting. However some members of the group were being silly with it, which caused some tension within the group, but we live and learn.

Overall, the lecture went quite smoothly, with the information we presented being clear, concise and backed up with performance pieces that we had done in class with Toby. The strongest parts of the lecture were definitely the performances, biscuits at the beginning and the webcam with Dan on the screen. Next time we have a lecture I think we should definitely focus more on performing work that we have been doing in our theatre companies.

In our seminar, we simply watched our lecture and was able to discuss it with Tobi and we found it very interesting to be able to talk about how we felt it went and what we thought could have gone better, or what we could have changed.

In the next week, the lecture was from Kerry Irvine, who spoke about how she became a producer of new plays and the process of how she choses what play would be good to put on and when. This was an interesting insight to the world behind the script, which we haven't been able to see as yet.

N.W.

The Week we Presented the Lecture.

This week's lecture was presented by our seminar group, group "G". After various discussions, we decided to focus primarily on Katie Mitchell and the techniques she uses when directing a piece of theatre. Initially, we found it difficult to produce new and original ideas, due to the fact that the previous lecture had already highlighted a lot of her work and detailed the specific aims she is prepared to meet whilst directing. We didn't want to present the same findings during the lecture, as to keep it interesting for the individuals watching and to help in the progression of their learning. Katie Mitchell is known for the use of multimedia in almost all of her work, so it was essential for us to emphasise this during the lecture.

Mitchell has often transferred literature into stage form. The previous week, group F had already explained about a particular exercise, in which we used Chekhov's short story "The Doctor" as a stimulus for a performance that incorporated elements of multimedia. They however, did not present these performances, something in which we were prepared to do in our lecture. We we asked by Tobi to decide on the most prominent moments in the story, which we would focus on during the performances. Due to low numbers in the other theatre company, I was asked to join them for this activity. We also discussed the most used examples of multimedia in society today. We decided that social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter, were popular amongst young people and would be an effective way of presenting the bulk of our lecture. We wanted to use Skype in the introduction, using it as tool for conveying our aims and expressing a brief overview. We decided that Dan would converse in a Skype call with another member of the group, which would be projected onto the wall of the lecture room. He was situated downstairs from the room, to keep this as realistic as possible. We also discussed the idea of keeping the Skype call running throughout the lecture, enabling Dan to interact with the group and the individuals watching the lecture. However, various technical difficulties affected this, making it impossible for this idea to be achieved. There were a number of sound errors during the set up and progression of the lecture. To begin with, sound was unable to be produced at all, meaning that Dan was forced to write the introduction speech on paper and reflect this to the room. Although this wasn't ideal, people watching the lecture were still engaged due to the uniqueness of this idea. The sound was also a problem when playing the multimedia pieces in conjunction to our performances. No sound was produced for a while, however we managed to figure out how to increase the sound levels eventually after much frustration. We also decided to project a Twitter feed onto the wall of the lecture room, allowing members of the group to occasionally tweet about elements relating to Katie Mitchell as well as individual feelings towards her methods. This was a good idea and at moments was found to be comedic, however it often did distract the audience from the people talking at the front. The influences of Katie Mitchell such as Stanislavski were researched by our group and spoken about during the lecture. We also briefly reflected upon Robert Wilson and portrayed an example of the "Wilson Walk", before discussing it's meaning and relevance to Wilson's work. Various biscuits were presented at the entrance of the lecture room for people to eat, as this relates to Mitchell's warm up exercises and the idea that she wants her actors to always feel relaxed before starting a strenuous workshop. We finished the lecture by reflecting on the idea of "truth", something that has been the focal point for the three directors we have studied in term one. Some of us gave a personal input on own own recollection of truth, before referring to the audience for questions.

In the seminar, we discussed how we thought the lecture was perceived and how effective it was for the people watching. We were able to watch a video of the lecture, which was filmed on the day and began to think about good moments and possible solutions for ideas that didn't go to plan. We all collaboratively agreed that we didn't allow ourselves enough preparation and time to rehearse and run through the lecture before it began. We were unable to rehearse in the appropriate space due to use of the room before out allocated spot, which may have been the cause of various technical problems and confusion from different members of the group. We felt that sufficient research into our individual parts had been successfully achieved, with each person being able to effectively deliver interesting information during the lecture. The lecture went well, despite some faults. As they say, the show must go on...

B.C

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