Over the past two lessons, we have been split into two groups and our task was to devise a short piece around the stimulus 'metamorphosis' today we performed our piece to the class. Metamorphosis means change or transition. Our piece was looking at someone who is totally sane, has a 'normal' life and a daily routine in which our character is very comfortable with and has been doing for years, and it shows his transition from sane to insane, by little thing changing and/or going wrong in his daily routine (e.g. as part of the routine, he makes himself a cup of tea, and one time he drops and smashes the mug); and then he starts to forget thing in the routine (e.g. as part of the routine, he gets the newspaper from outside and reads a couple of pages, and one time he forgets to get the paper). And each time the routine restarts with him waking up to the sound of the alarm, the same song comes on with a radio 1 sound first; this was to show that everyday is pretty much the same for this guy. Also, every time he wakes up, he takes longer to get out of bed to show he is starting to lose the drive to live his life because it's so boring as he does the same thing every day. The final 'straw' that makes the final push to insanity is when he wakes up, there is no song like the other times, and he walks in to say good morning but he sees his family are dead. This turns him to complete insanity. We then created a movement piece to show his insanity.
When we performed it, it went very badly because the piece itself was bad, however I believe the idea was very good and unique. Me and Tyler (us playing the family) was told we looked very comfortable doing the naturalistic drama during the performance before we die, but looked very uncomfortable and awkward when doing the physical theatre. However Henri (playing the main character) was told he looked very uncomfortable doing the naturalistic drama, however very comfortable doing the physical drama. We also hadn't really thought through properly how we were going to show our idea well, it just looked a bit rushed and bashed together.
This is the daily routine we came up with.
From today's lesson, I realised I need to work on my physical theatre skills, both coming up with ideas for a PT piece and actually performing it. I also realised I need to work on figuring out how to transfer my ideas to a performance in a way that makes the performance look neat and clever.
For the second half of the lesson, Mr Webb lead a focus exercise where we laid down on the floor with music in the background, and we had to focus on what Mr Webb was saying and imagine and try to feel what he was saying (i.e. he would say that our faces, knees and ribs hurt). The point of this exercise was to have some sort of focus and this is what we should do before a performance to focus properly and get into character. During and after the exercise I felt very focussed and ready to perform something.
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