Artaud Workshop

RESEARCH
The Theatre of Cruelty (French: Théâtre de la Cruauté) is a surrealist form of theatre theorised by Antonin Artaud in his book The Theatre and its Double. "Without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle," he writes, "the theatre is not possible. In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds." By "cruelty," Artaud referred not to sadism or causing pain, but rather a violent, austere, physical determination to shatter the false reality that, he wrote, "lies like a shroud over our perceptions"
The five key aspects to his methods are:

• Artaud argued against conventional theatre spaces.
• Artaud was opposed to representing 'real life' on stage.
• Everything theatrical will be used to create a new language of the theatre
• The actor must 'use his emotions in the same way as a boxer uses his muscles'
• The subject matter will focus on myths and well-known tales.

WORKSHOP
For this task, the workshop we had to do is devise a ritual and perform it on a member of a small audience that would be included in the performance. We sat down and thought what kind of ritual we could perform on the audience, and we came up with the idea of a holy baptism. We would have Jake stood with a bowl of water and me and Gareth would be stood with a piece of red netting and showing how dramatic our ritual would be. Billy would lead the audience in and then make them walk around a block and sit down, I would then run around with the netting and shout and scream as if I have been possessed and the netting is choosing the person who needs to be baptised. Jake would then perform a little speech and splash water on the chosen person's face, this would then be a sign that they have been baptised. To make it more dramatic and effective we as a group decided not to talk, so we used simple sounds such as grunts, groans, and screams.

The start position was me and Gareth curled up on a block covering Jake who was also knelt down. Billy then led in the audience and made them walk around the centre block a few times and then made them sit, whilst doing this me, Gareth and Jake rose so that we were all standing. As soon as they sat the music changed from a slow, flowing piece of orchastra music to an upbeat piece of dramatic music that would shock the audience, when this happened I ran round the circle of people with the netting as if I had been possessed screaming and shouting. This made the audience feel quite awkward and they weren't sure what was going on. I then made out that the netting had chosen someone (a boy from the audience) and therefore I wrapped the netting around him and made him rise. Gareth then led him over to Jake, where he performed a chant and splattered him with water as if he was being baptised to the faith we "believed" in, after this he was led to stand on the centre block with Billy. Billy then gave the mask that he was wearing to the boy and also gave him the cane he was holding, this was to signify the changing of the holy one, and from then on we knelt down and bowed to him. We then led the audience out of the room and that was the end of the ritual.

I feel the performance went well, and asking the audience they did feel awkward and they felt part of the performance, which is what we were supposed to do. To make it better we could of had a bit longer to plan out what we were going to do and make it a longer ritual, but with the time we had thats all we could do and I feel that it did go really well and we followed the rules of Artaud well.

EXTRA's Work

Throughout doing my Performing Arts, I have had Extra jobs for different TV programs. These are:

• Candy Cabs - A comedy drama about a group of women who set up a female only cabbies in a seaside village. (Played a member of a football crowd)
• Body Farm - A spin of from "Waking the Dead", a program about a farm that investigates dead bodies for the police. (Played a council estate child)
• Naked Apes - A comedy drama, written by the same person who wrote Skins and Misfits. It is about 3 male paramedics who take drugs and drink everynight. (Played a person at a rave and a person at a Café)
• DCI Banks - A crime drama, about a detective played by Steven Thompkinson (Played a university student and a person in a Café)
• Eternal Law - A drama about 2 angels sent to earth to protect the community, appearing as lawyers, starring Samuel West. (Played a tourist in York)
• Body Farm - Episode 4, (Played a university student at a lecture evening)

Whilst doing these you have to act natural and as if the scene was actually taking place in real life, so you can link the work to Stanislavski.

Stanislavski Workshop

RESEARCH
Stanislavski's system is a progression of techniques in acting used to train actors to draw believable emotions to their performances. The method that was originally created and used by Stanislavski from 1911-1916 was based on the concept of emotional memory for which an actor focuses internally to portray a character's emotions onstage. Later, between 1934-1938, this technique evolved to a method of physical actions in which emotions are produced through the use of actions.The latter technique is referred to as Stanislavski's system. This approach was developed by Constantin Stanislavski (1863–1938), a Russian actor, director, and theatre administrator at the Moscow Art Theatre (founded 1897). The system is the result of Stanislavski's many years of efforts to determine how someone can control in performance the most intangible and uncontrollable aspects of human behavior, such as emotions and art inspiration. His system involves...

• The Method - making an actor put their own experience, imagination and feeling into a role.
• Physical Actions- This activity provokes the actor to think about their character as a real person rather than simply role on a page.
• The Magic If- the basis of assuming the mentality of a character. An actor asks 'If I were there, what would I be thinking?' and then later 'If I were my character, what would I be thinking?'
• The Given Circumstance- The actor must believe in the given circumstances and appreciate it as the truth.
• Imagination- A character does not have a full biography. The actor must find details of a character's life from hints within the text or invent them.
• Circles of Attention- An actor could focus by concentrating on a small circle, himself and one other actor or prop. The actor, once focused on this small circle, extends his attention to a medium circle that includes more actors or larger props. After truly focusing on this, the actor can extend the focus of the large circle of attention to cover the entire stage. If an actor loses concentration, he can retreat into the small circle before building up to a large circle again. This enables actors to achieve public solitude.
• Truth and Belief- Stage truth is unlike real truth as it is not really true, it is merely suggested to be true by the actor. If the actor fails to employ the magic, if they will not reach the stage where they are speaking and acting as a character, this will cause the audience not to believe and, in turn, stop them from suspending their disbelief.
• Communion- Before communicating the subtle nuances of the play with an audience, an actor must commune with the cast. They must be aware of them and the character relationships between them.
• Adaptation- An actor must overcome problems to achieve the best portrayal of a role.
• Tempo Rythm- It is an actor's responsibility to find the correct tempo rhythm of every line and action performed. They should rehearse each line and action until they find a suitable tempo rhythm.
• Emotion Memory- It is an actor's duty to stimulate his own emotion memory from which to draw and build a character. These memories are repeated emotional experiences, rather than the primary experiences they are based on.
• Units and Objectives- The idea focuses on breaking the play down into units of action, and not just acts and scenes. The objectives within them dominate each unit and once reached the unit ends. There must not be too many units, but there should be enough to guide an actor towards realism. Each actor must realise their character's role in the objective, whether they want to achieve it, prolong it, prevent it, etc.
• Super Objective and Through-Line of Action-  The super-objective of a play is the main thrust of the plot, an objective that runs throughout the entire text, it links to all the small units and objectives via the through-line. To gain understanding of a character, an actor must be aware of their character's relation to the super-objective.

WORKSHOP
Stanislavski is all about his different methods, and one of these methods is "realism". We started by researching his methods so we could get an understanding of how he worked. We then seperated into couples (Me and Gareth - Billy and Jake) and had a go at acting as natural and real as possible. I found this quite hard as many of my other parts in plays have been over the top characters in musicals or pantomimes, however I gave it a go. I wanted to come up with a storyline that I had been through before in my life so it could be as real as possible. I know the feeling of a relative dying so we thought about doing a piece where Gareth was a policeman and he was coming to tell me that my wife had died in a car crash. However, as Mrs Marsh said, I wouldn't know what it was like to lose a wife as I haven't had one, so we changed it to be my sister who had died in the crash. Because of the scene being so serious Gareth began to laugh nervously, which therefore was making me smile and prevented me from being emotional, I tried my hardest though and we finally both got through it. My weakness in this is that when i become nervous I smile and laugh and if someone else does this before me I begin to. To help me next time I need to really focus on the task in hand and try my hardest to be as natural as possible and be realistic to the audience.

Berkoff Workshops

RESEARCH
 Berkoff is an actor, director, playwright and general iconoclast of the theatrical establishment of the last 25 years. The actor-audience relationship is immediate, where the expressive physicality and general language of the actors in creating stage pictures and image is not just a display of technical skill, but a pre-requisite of the making of the drama.  It is a form of theatre where the precision and economy of dialogue is paramount where “all the elements of the human being are brought into motion” (Berkoff 1991)

Elements of a Berkoff Production

• Large scale exaggerated mime and the juxtaposition of this with spare dialogue and phatic utterances.
• The replacement of props and furniture with what can be created by the actors bodies
• The almost hieratic leading characters, taking the audience through the narrative.
• The link with the idea of “total theatre”, which seeks to attract an almost spiritual response from the audience through using all the resources of theatre including athletic actors.

WORKSHOP
In our workshop, we were told how Berkoff would work with the audience. We realised that there was a lot of audience participation and that the actor on stage wouldn't know what was going to happen when they were on stage due to the fact the audience made up the story line. They did this by clapping when the actor was doing something that they would find amusing. The actor would have to clock different objects to see if the audience wanted him/her to use it, and then if they chose the right object they would then have to do something with that object, using clapping the audience would tell the actor again what to do. We then put down about 7 props onto the stage in different places and had a go our selves. This proved quite hard as the audience could think up anything and the actor wouldn't know what to do. After a while we got the hang of things and we were becoming quicker at doing what the audience wanted us to do, this workshop really helps with your improvisation and our imagination. We all had a go at sitting in the audience and being the performer and each time we tried to make it trickier, but eventually we got the storyline. We filmed this straight away instead of rehearsing, as there isn't any need for rehearsing as it is all improvisation, you could rehearse one thing and the audience want another. My weakness was trying to think what the audience wanted, but my strength was that I had enough confidence to do tbe mime and the clocking of the objects.

Physical Theatre

RESEARCH
Physical theatre is used to describe any mode of performance that pursues storytelling or drama through primarily and secondarily physical and mental means. There are several quite distinct but indistinct traditions of performance which all describe themselves using the term "physical theatre", which has led to a lot of confusion as to what the definition of physical theatre actually is.Physical theatre is the art of creating objects with the human body, either as a single person or as a group. Physical theatre is an art that is becoming more and more popular in the theatres. Modern physical theatre has grown from a variety of origins. Mime and theatrical clowning schools, such as L'École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq  in Paris, have had a big influence on many modern expressions of physical theatre, and practitioners such as Steven Berkoff and John Wright received their initial training at such institutions. As well as ideas outside of the western theatre tradition creeping in gradually, there is a tradition from within Western theatre, too, starting with Stanislavski. Stanislavski, later on in life, began to reject his own ideas of naturalism, and started to pursue ideas relating to the physical body in performance.

WORKSHOP
To start with we were given different words to spell out with our bodies as a group, we started with the word "PINK" we could either do uppercase or lowercase letters...

After this we did the word "LOVE"...

We then had the harder task to creat different objects as a group, we had to create: a washing machine; a broken washing machine; and a Bicycle...

To end the workshop we had to do a piece from Goldilocks and the Three Bears by one of us being Goldilocks and the rest of us acting out the different pieces of furniture such as: the bowls; the beds; the chairs; and the stairs up to the bedrooms. We performed this in front of a small audience and each of them understood what we were trying to do and what items of furniture we were being.

Mask Workshop

To start off the mask workshop we had a short introduction to what we can and can’t do when performing with masks in order to maintain the illusion that masks provide, these included:

• DO NOT touch the mask
• DO NOT put on/take off the mask in the view of the audience
• DO NOT speak when wearing a mask
• DO NOT turn to the side when wearing the mask
• ALWAYS face forwards
• Use the rule of “clocking” to help the audience understand what you are trying to say

 

“Clocking” is a technique in which we use when wanting the audience to understand what we are trying to get across when not aloud to speak. This skill can be used in mime, silent movies, masks or any other time when no sound is required. After being introduced to the art of masks, we were told to improvise a small piece including both characters with masks and characters without, which would be shown at the end of the lesson. We started out by thinking of a story line that we could use in the piece, we decided on doing a scene on a train. It would start off with two masked characters already on the train and then an unmasked character (which was me) would come on and act as if they were late for an appointment. The scene would then progress from there, with different characters masked and unmasked to give us the final scene of one of the masked characters has a gun. After performing this, we realised it wasn’t to the standard we needed so we collaborated and thought up another idea. We came up with the idea of doing a piece that took roles in different social statuses, such as kings, queens and peasants. We came up with the idea to have a story which would be like a children’s fantasy story, we came up with the title “There’s a Dragon in the garden” and we unfolded the story from there. We had a king, a butler, two cleaners and 3 knights, all of which were a mixture of masked and unmasked. For another improvisation we did a scene in a doctor’s surgery, which involved 2 doctor, 2 secretaries and many patients; this was made up on the spot and I feel at this point we were getting to a high standard with the art of masks. After we did our performances  we had to create a presentation on how masks were used in different eras, we chose the eras: Ancient China; Medieval/Elizabethan; Ancient Greek; and the Italian Renaissance. We would each choose one of the eras and research it and put it into the PowerPoint presentation. When finished with our research we presented out findings to a group of year 8 students, they found it interesting but were getting restless towards the end due to the amount of facts they were being told.