Interdisciplinary Practice Journal

Week 9: EXAM WEEK

Pre-Exam: For my exam, I have ended up running with the idea of story-telling performance. I keep seeing the imagery of my tree and my aim is to make the audience see it too. I have taken on board a lot of the advice given by my peers in my dress run last week. I am going to try and scale down my arm movements (which is difficult for me) in an effort to let the words tell the story. I have also been trying to decide whether to speak in the first or second person. My initial instinct is second but someone told me last week that they were against that. I will think it through.

Post-Exam: The exam is over and went pretty well, I think. I am consistently bad at being able to judge my own performances but I know that it was what I was aiming for and that I took lots of advice on board. Above is my presentation explaining my piece. I have included details about ‘Ski Jacket’ and re-presentation/reconstruction, as well as mentioning some of the inspirations for my piece. Go People have been in the back of my mind throughout this whole process and, whilst they are not strictly storytellers, I took on a lot of their ideas about world-building. Alastair also told me about Debs Newbold. I hadn’t heard of her before but she does a very similar thing to what I was trying to achieve and watching the way she spoke and performed was really helpful.

Week 8, Part 2

For the second part of week 8, we have just been working on our solo pieces for the exam next week. I feel like it has crept up on me really fast and I have been struggling with ideas. I would like to try and combine reconstruction and my text-based learnings somehow.

Idea 1: Set up imaginary scenery through text that I would speak. This would be based on ‘Ski Jacket’ by Peter Doig that I found in the Tate Modern. I might combine it with ideas of gender or I might not – ‘when is a tree not a tree’ and ‘when is a woman not a woman?’ Could use similar techniques to the ones I saw in Go People’s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

Idea 2: A movement-based piece inspired by ‘Head III’ that I, once again, found in the Tate Modern. It would illustrate the ‘cosmic anxiety’ that the artwork is meant to portray. Panicked and manic? Movement is not my strongpoint, however.

Week 8, Part 1

Interesting Exercises:

- This week we were split into makers and performers again. We (the makers) worked a lot with text and how you can generate that. Initially we did some hot-seating, where members of the class sat in a chair in the centre and other people had to shout out someone that they had to imitate. During my turn I had to imitate my brother, my Grandma, and David Cameron. It was a fun game but was very difficult to improvise about people you know on the spot.

- Going on from that, we were given three types of text and then told to write them out. They were from Tim Etchell’s book ‘Certain Fragments’ and they were an interesting way of generating text that you wouldn’t necessarily think about. My favourite of these texts was ‘A Text of Obvious Lies’. This could mean anything you wanted it to mean and I wrote a monologue from the point-of-view of someone saying that they were not having an affair and that they were just working late.

- We then also did the exercise as pictured above. Each of us were given a type of text from ‘Certain Fragments’. We wrote a single sentence down and then folded it over and passed it round the circle. You could only read the sentence before yours and the photo above is what mine became. Imagination is a crazy thing!

What I Took Away From This:

Week 7 

This was a week long exercise that began with a line-dancing lesson. As a class we learnt the dance routine shown above, and then we split into groups to devise a performance based on the moves. Our main instruction from James was that everything we included in our piece had to earn its place.

This week was a fairly stressful learning curve for me. Being given about seven hours was mildly overwhelming to begin with. I am so used to working at speed that I was unsure as to what I would even do with those seven hours. In the end, I was glad of them as my group scrapped our work-in-progress with about an hour to spare. We oversaturated our piece with too many ideas and our whole concept basically imploded in front of us.

Week 6: Part 2

A Hollow Body 

- For the second part of week 6, the makers went on an exciting adventure. We each downloaded a ‘theatrical app’ called A Hollow Body. This app was to be done in pairs and was a atmospherically narrated walk from St Pauls Cathedral to The Museum of London. We did it on a very misty, wintry London morning and it was very fun. It made you aware of your place in the city and of everything going on around you. It also kept talking about slipping past people unnoticed and yet also being picked up on the security cameras – being seen and unseen. 

Week 6: Part 1

Interesting Exercises:

- This week the makers and the performers were split up for the first time. Being in a room with just makers was a really nice experience and I really enjoyed these sessions. The first interesting exercise of the week was when we wrote a piece of text about ourselves. There were no stipulations about it, it just had to be about us. Then someone else in the class read it out. Mine was about my mixed-race heritage and my fairly broad Yorkshire accent. This was then read out by Clare, who is fully British and has an RP accent.

- Another exercise that I found interesting was when we given an autocue from one of Action Hero’s shows that had no punctuation in it at all. One by one we went up and read from it, whilst also being filmed. Watching a television screen of a livestream that you can actually see being recorded is very bizarre and also very interesting.

What I Took Away From It:

Week 5, part 2

Interesting Exercises:

- At the end of week 5 we did a workshop with Ira Brand. She is a performance artist currently working on a drag king act around Bruce Springsteen. I found this workshop particularly fascinating (in part due to my interest in queer theatre). We began with an exercise in which every body wrote down three phrases that started with ‘we’. For example, ‘we miss home’ or ‘we have been in love’. Then they were all placed in the middle and someone read them. If you agreed with the statement, then you stood up in the performance space and if you disagreed with the statement then you went and sat down in the audience.

- From there, we then got into groups and had the choice of five youtube videos to watch, each focusing on a different person or character. My group chose Tilda Swinton and we watched a clip of her as the angel Gabriel in the film Constantine. Using this as a jumping off point, we then went on to construct a piece of theatre about Tilda Swinton.

What I Took Away From It:

Week 5, Part 1

Interesting Exercises:

- This week we explored the idea of reconstruction. It all began with a youtube video of four American soldiers watching the explosion of a nuclear bomb in the skies above them. In groups, we were encouraged to reconstruct and reinterpret the video and make it into a non-traditional piece of theatre. In my group, we explored the gestures of the soldiers and how you show something like a nuclear bomb on stage without any form of tech. 

- From there, we then went on to look at Action Hero’s Playbook. We could pick some of the ‘plays’ and reconstruct them into pieces of our own. The only stipulation is that we could only use the text that was on the page. Our performance was the one featured above. We made the ‘play’ into a type of choreography and featured the dialogue as a voiceover to make sense of the movements.

What I Took Away From It:

Week 4: Part 2

Interesting Exercises: 

- For the second part of the week-long Say Yes workshops, we had to construct a piece of theatre centred around one of the artworks that we found in the Tate Modern. My group chose the artwork that I had found, which was The Three Dancers by Pablo Picasso. From this, we constructed a performance which had three performers stood in the centre of a circle made up of audience members and explored the idea of being seen and unseen in today’s society. 

What I Took Away From It: 

Week 4: Part 1

Interesting Exercises: 

- Week 4 is an ‘off’ week. This means that we are not engaging in our usual daily sessions. Instead, we are taking part in a ‘Say Yes Workshop’ run by Nick Wood. The first interesting exercise of this week was the one that the workshop was named after. You had a conversation that could only be continued with the words ‘yes and ...’ This was then followed up by a similar task. which stated that you could only continue the conversation with a ‘yes but ...’ phrase. The contrast between these two phrases was the point of the game. ‘But’ was blocking whereas ‘and’ allowed a positive collaboration. 

- For these workshops, we also took a class trip to the Tate Modern. Whilst there, we had to pick a piece of art that inspired us and say why it did that. We also had to find a place to sit down and then describe the atmosphere of the place; we could describe the people walking past, the artwork, the sounds and smells etc. 

What I Took Away: 

Week 3: Part 2

Interesting Exercises: 

- The rest of our sessions this week were based around the concept of deconstruction. During the sessions, we worked on deconstructing as much as we physically could. What I found the most interesting was the difference between the first and last pieces that we created. To start with, we worked in groups to replicate a tennis match as accurately as we could. We tried to copy the movements, the sounds, and the gestures. Then, bit by bit, we took certain things out. For example, we kept the moves but took away the gestures. Then we forgot about the traditional blocking of a tennis match and just did our moves at any time and in any direction. All of this led to a theatrical piece that was very stylised and expressionistic but still recognisable as a tennis match.

- From there, we took it one step further. The class began in our original groups, doing gestures and sounds without any semblance of order. We carried this on and started to infiltrate other groups until the studio just became a cacophony of sound and movement. James asked us to keep this up for fifteen minutes before slowly ‘dying’ and coming to a stop altogether as a class.

What I Took Away From It: 

Week 3: Part 1

Interesting Exercises: 

- Week three began with a workshop by Daniel Oliver. He talked us through his own show ‘Weird Seance’. Initially we told each other hugely exaggerated stories of our experiences with audience participation and then we picked the oddest sentences from other people’s stories. From this sentence, we were then encouraged to build a participatory piece that blurred the lines of truth and fiction and completely butchered the fourth wall. 

What I Took Away From It: 

Week 2: Part 2

Interesting Exercises: 

- These sessions were more movement based and we started by working with the spine - trying to adopt a ‘fish spine’ which allowed us to move with fluidity and awareness. We got into pairs and took turns in placing hands at the back of our partner’s head and the bottom of their spines to try and support one another’s movements. 

- We built on this and then worked on moving in pairs without touching each other. I worked with Clare and we tried to move in reaction to each other, exploring levels and directions. 

What I Took Away From It: 

Week 2: Part 1

Interesting Exercises: 

- We paired up and went into a public space to observe what we saw. Clare and I focused on the space above (which originally featured an elderly man reading a newspaper and smoking a cigarette). We watched passersby and then also entered the space ourselves, exploring how we as bodies affected that space. Once back in the classroom we then put together a small piece made up of gestures and words that we had picked up. 

What I Took Away From It: