“I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself” // "Without an element of cruelty at the base of all shows, the theater is not possible. "

The Cost of the Actor exercises

This exercise was interesting for me because at first I found it frustrating because I found it really hard to turn the corners sharply and stick to the lines and I also kept on bumping into people but as the exercise progressed I learnt that there were ways to manoeuvre physically to negotiate when I came too close to a person which involved moving in the other direction swiftly  which sounds simple now that I'm writing it but in practise was more difficult. I think it may have been because the action had not entered my body yet and my mind was not focused on the activity. As soon as my mind started to focus on the activity, it just made sense to turn a corner when someone might collide with me, this didn't happen when I hadn't warmed my mind to the exercise. 

In terms of drawing meaning from the exercise, I felt like the constant moving in different patterns of lines portrayed indecision and it felt skittish when I was doing it. It was similiar to Stanislavski in the sense that we were working from an action to get to an emotion, although in this case it was a somewhat strenuous physical action. When I watched Josh doing the exercise I thought he had a sense of being galvanised behind his movement and it was really interesting to watch, I'm not sure if it was because he was so focussed on the thing that he wanted because by this point we had added the incentive of the thing we really wanted. It almost looked like he was a scientist of some sort looking for an answer to a question because of how motivated he was by it and I guess the same rules go in experimental as physical, one must have a sense of internal motivation for the performance to be engaging.

I only found out afterwards that the stopping and starting of the background music was deliberate in an attempt to annoy and therefore distract us but I found it so difficult to turn the corners to begin with that this didn't really annoy me, I just thought there was difficulty with the sound.

Later on, when we were doing the game where the aim was to tap the back of the other person's knee, things really started to literally heat up. It was during the middle of this game that I actually thought I can't continue. I just found it so tiring and I really wanted to stop but at the same time I didn't because I knew the point of all of it was to push your limits. It's interesting when your physical side is telling you you can't do something and your mental side is pushing you to. I think I like that feeling of struggle because even when I go jogging and I get tired and that same sensation comes over me, I try and do the same thing, I try and mentally pull myself through.

The next exercise we did was by far my favourite because it had objectives for each person e.g to get away from your lover and it gave it a sense of internal justification and it felt very similiar to physical theatre for me. I was with Troy and we were both finding interesting, fluid ways to achieve our objectives. And linking to what I said in the last paragraph because there was that strong internal justification and motivation I managed to pull through despite being quite physically tired.

I understood the meaning behind the letter on the various vertices of the boxes exercise which I think was meant to have a similiar purpose as the exercises above, to generate movement based on internal motivation - especially when we had to spell out meaningful sentences but I found it slightly tedious because it was so difficult to remember where I had put all the letters and so the exercise of touching the letters in an interesting way was difficult. I thought that the group improvised piece we did was good despite this mainly because of Josh's idea to lift me than transition into the "shush" which made it fluid and it worked.

I think one thing I took from the first lesson is although this term is experimental and literally anything goes the experimental piece that you make must be rooted in the ideas of the stimulus. For example in the lesson our stimulus was Antonin Artaud's The Spurt of Blood and I felt that when we were devising and performing our experimental versions of the text and when we saw other groups performances of the text it didn't actually stem from ideas in the text. I think one of the reasons this might have happened is that the text is really difficult to comprehend. Even looking at the text now I still don't understand what the point of it is. But maybe this is because I am looking at things from a naturalistic perspective. I just think all art should be truthful and if you are given a stimulus you should at least root your performance in it. There were interesting uses of space and lighting in all the performances for example when we were seated in rows during Kim's group's performance I thought that worked really well and I thought the spatial dynamics were really well thought out. 

I had another idea while we were midway through devising our piece but because we weren't allowed to use words and my idea involved words:

I noticed that on the first page there was a contrast in moods between the sardonic love scene of the YOUNG MAN and YOUNG GIRL and the dark lewd content of the dialogue between the KNIGHT and WET NURSE. 

I would have had the Young Man and Young Girl scene occur then after the Young Man's last line I would have had the earthquake happen with the objects like the stars being physicalised with breaks of  seconds of darkness in which the YOUNG MAN and YOUNG GIRL would escape out of the door in 905. The people who would physicalise and make a soundscape of the things in the earthquake would still be present and moving even after the YOUNG MAN and YOUNG GIRL left the room even as the KNIGHT and WET NURSE started their dialogue

"Increasingly, I’m finding performance much more interesting than acting, theatre more compelling than plays."

I just watched a video of Franko B performing 'I Miss You' at the Tate and it was interesting because although it was simple it was still interesting and I still wanted to watch it. It was the stark imagery of his naked and very white body with the mismatched chords of the music. It was just enchanting in that way. But also, the pauses that he held when he went to each edge of the runway drew me in because you never knew when he would start walking again. It feels like something I could just rewatch over and over again.

Watching I'm Thinking of You was almost hypnotic and the thing that struck me about it was the fact that because he never stopped swinging you never could quite fully look at him before he went away again. Again I could sit and watch it for hours in a calming way. This reminds me of when you see a metal ball on a pendulum swinging back and forth. You also notice from watching it over and over again how beautiful the glide of the swing is a it goes back and forth.

Unfortunately some of the photos that I took are not publishing properly but one of the overwhelming motifs of the art that I liked or responded to was shadows or an element of darkness. I think what's interesting abut shadows is how they are often used as metaphors for darkness in a person. Also the feeling that you're never alone because your shadow is always with you.

The thing that drew me in about this was the fact that you could walk into a room with that spider hanging from the ceiling and not know unless you looked up. I guess this links in with the motif of not knowing something dark and sinister is always following you, that ignorance of the darkness that is looming around you.

Again this picture had the shadow and in this case I guess the strange thing about it is the shadow does not seem to mirror the girl in the picture emphasising the idea that the shadow may in fact be another darkness not reflective of the girl.

I really liked this because not only did it have that surreal aspect to it. It was also subversive and felt like the surrealism stemmed from a place of truth. The thing I thought when I was looking at it was the idea of a person being trapped, specifically a woman.

Linked with the work above, when I looked at this picture and various other pictures by Bourgeois which were a similiar style to the one above was the idea of womanhood and the pain behind womanhood. The red and the blurring of the blood in the pieces of art made me think of period blood and the pain behind becoming a woman.

The thing that drew me to this was its simplicity but also its complexity in the sense that it has this darkness. You don't quite know what lies within the darkness and the ambiguity was interesting to me.

I think what drew me to this was the barrenness and the fact that even though you can't depict the waste and barren quality of the picture in 3D, the 2-Dimensional nature of the picture adds to the wasteland effect because it makes it look as if the rubbish has been heaped and the painter has taken a cross section of the waste in that dump.

This photo is interesting because it is coming from darkness and is looking outward into the light. You have the feeling that you are in some ways at the root of this dark place. Also there's a loneliness in the photo which is exemplified by the chairs. I can't quite explain why the chairs make the picture so lonely maybe it is because they are empty.

Concept: Using three of the photos above I have an idea for a piece which involves a birth of some sort. The 'thing' which is birthed than proceeds to strangle and suffocate the birther/female energy and in order to free herself the 'thing' must be put back inside her creating a reverse birth.As I was thinking about this idea I thought about how women struggle with post-natal depression and how perhaps this links to that. 

I think this represents the place where the thing is birthed from eventually this scar could grow as the thing is being birthed.

 I think this is representation of the female energy although the female energy will be abstract.

 Maybe the thing she births is simply darkness, her own darkness and thus it has to be swallowed back up again.

This represents the stage of her being trapped by something she has birthed herself. 

*****

The quote that is in the title of this post is from an article Sarah Kane wrote for The Guardian in 1998 when she was putting on Crave at the Edinburgh Festival. I didn't really understand what she meant at first but when I read the sentence again I started to get it. We use performance to describe a lot of things including one of the main allusions in the article: football. And although maybe before reading this article I would have taken issue with someone comparing football to theatrical performance, I'm now starting to see the viewpoint I had beforehand as slightly pretentious and I'm starting to see what Kane means. That feeling that you get when someone scores a goal unexpectedly, that thrill almost feeling revived as if your life makes sense is what you should feel during performance and if I'm honest it's something I rarely if ever feel at the theatre and if I have felt it I haven't felt it for a long time. I think what she says is timely and I think there's a tendency for theatre to become so assigned to knowledgeable audiences that endless revivals are programmed that ironically don't give you that revived feeling.