Day Two

Hello blog

Hitting day two head on, starting with a very intense warm up lead by the tom jaci and me, which will probably make moving tomorrow problematic, and then our vocal warm up lead by Florien and Runa, it was great to be learning different ways of warming the voice that what I am used to.

After we got our breath back we reflected on yesterday as a company, what really stuck with me from this was a conversation around contract of space, so what is the contract we enter in to when we watch an actor on YouTube vs an actor in theatre, a preacher in a train vs a church, a performance in the street vs a paid performance.

Willem then showed us some videos which to him held a part of what postdramatic theatre is, a style of theatre in which we are going to be playing with. So what I have come to understand of this at the moment, is something around making the performer as visible as the character like giving the performer real things to meet in the space that will affect the performer, aka getting sprayed with water. Also this idea of separation of referent and reference, so taking something out of context, so when you take a pen and say it’s a toilet brush. But the most interesting part for me was the idea of where is the link for the audience in all of this post dramatic theatre? So needing that grounding in reality to allow the audience in and then to allow the rest of the abstract ideas to fly. “you cant go crazy if you don’t know what normal is” Ben had a beautiful quote around this idea or post dramatic theatre “tell the audience it’s a lie, but then wanting to believe in it, so we don’t trick them, but they trick themselves”

Then we moved on to some Laban work. This was a new way of meeting this work for me, after having only touched on this work briefly; it was great to be re visiting it, and more in depth. So in this version of Laban there is weight= light or strong, Space=direct or indirect and time= sustained or broken. Once we went through each of these we assembled them in to the parings to make the 8 Laban states, Flick, dab, thrust, press, glide, float, wring and slash.

Around these we did some very exciting improvisations from an AA meeting with wring, to naughty actors with flick. Then we took our Chekhov character monologues and went thru each state again and coloured the text in that way, which proved to have some beautiful moments, including Nina working so innocently in flick, to Sonya working very practically in press, to Andrej getting frustrated in slash.

My favourite part of the day was in Willems words, “gorilla theatre” where we had 10 minutes to explore the idea of flicking in and out of character vs performer. Where Ben and Tai had a great scene where they did a scene from Uncle Vanya where Tai was feeding Ben the lines and Ben was performing them, but had an attitude to Tai “the author”. Where Jaci and I used Tom and Tai as puppets to work thru a scene in The Seagull, and Tom, Runa and Florien improvised a scene from the Cherry Orchard and were constantly popping in and out to inform the audience of what the characters are doing, with a lovely tone of warmth.

All and all this was a very exciting and full day and the promise of an exciting day of train riding and making ahead of us tomorrow.