Artaud - Total Theatre piece

Friday 27th November

In order to round of our work with Artaud, his Teatre of Cruelty and Total Theatre, our task was to produce a piece of theatre in groups of 4, with an aim to take the audience on some kind of sensory journey.

After much discussion, we came up with the idea of taking the audience through the experience of a plane flight and crash, involving different sounds and use of levels.

Below is a rough script which we created for the aeroplane voice-over.

I was then set with the task of hunting for various sounds which could be used within our journey, after grasping an understanding of how important sound can be within not just total theatre, but any performance.

Artaud - Importance of Sound

Thursday 26th November

Continuing our work with Artaud's ideas around Total Theatre, we begain to explore the use of sound within Theatre and Artaud's "assult of the senses", alongside use of foreign languages, with our own interpretations.

We began to explore the idea of taking the audience on an imaginary journey in order to create audience participation within theatre. For this, we got into pairs and took turns to guide our partner (who was blindfolded) through a journey which we created, explaining to them all the thoughts and feelings that they would be experiencing. The journey which I created was one involving a beach walk and I included the sound of the sea, feel of the sand and green rocks etc. My partner Kitty took me on an imaginary journey through history, as a soldier and general, fighting in legendary battles and crawling through trenches. This for me was an incredible experience, how the loss of sight, can lead you into believing that you are somewhere completely different, and also proved a good way to control and manipulate your audience.

In order to investigate the importance of sound within Total Theatre, we then grouped into 4's and were given a choice of different props that could be used to create a sound-scape. Our group chose to create a sound scape for a battle scene, using various objects, such as blowing into bottles as horns, using stilts to bang against the floor as a march etc etc. The audience were placed into a circle, blindfolded and back to back, we then stood around them in a circle while performing to add to the atmosphere. We were then able to take part in the other groups Total Theatre experience, in which a stormy, raining soundscape was created.

Through producing and being an audience member within these sound scapes, I began to understand that senses do work in the way people say; that if you loose one, others become stronger. In other words, as we had lost our sight, from descriptions and soundscapes, we were able to create our own visual picture with our imaginations of the scenes being created.

Artaud - The Theories

Friday 20th November

Today's lecture involved, completing our group language interpretation pieces, and a more detailed look into the works of Artaud, as shown in the Theories and Artaud handouts below.

Artaud: The Theories:

Antonin Artaud:

Artaud - The Interpretation of Language

Thursday 19th November

Today was spent looking at the many different ways of interpreting language, and how it can be interpreted through movement and gesture. We also worked on producing in small groups our own physical interpretations of words through the use of metaphors.

Split into two groups, first we created small pieces for the other groups to guess the phrase that it was based on. Then we wrote down metaphorical phrases for eachother to perform in the next lecture.

This was a useful activity as it helped us to move away from the reliance on language that we had built up within our monologues, and focus on new theatre aspects.

Artaud - Theatre of Cruelty

Monday 16th November

Today was our first introduction to the works of Antonin Artaud, and his theatre of cruelty. Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty is very much based on the idea that actors should be pushed to their limits, in order to expose a truth to the audience that they don't want to see. Artaud disagreed with the way that theatre was being "taken over" by text and speech and so opted for a more physical theatre use of language and gesture.

Arteud was also fascinated by the idea of his so called Total Theatre, a theatre which insults the senses, whilst playing with perception. He believed that theatre should challenge the audience and encourage audience involvement, rather than being a passive experience.

For our introduction to the meaning behind Artaud's idea of pushing his actors to the limits, we took part in an activity involving complete focus. In this activity we paced around the space, aiming to reach a personal goal in our minds, and the only way to reach this goal was by pacing. We could only pace in straight lines taking 90 degree turns with complete control.

I found that during this activity my body went into a sort of "auto-pilot" where my thoughts were fixed on reaching this goal. We spent over 30 minutes on this activity and after which I felt quite exhausted, both physically and mentally. Obviously this was nothing compared to the limits which Artaud would push his actors in order to create the horrors that he wanted to shock and control the audience with.

Final Monologue Performance

Monday 9th November

The day had come to perform our monologues that we had spent over a month preparing, complete with costumes etc.

After the hot seating session on Thursday, and continued preperations on friday, I felt very confident about performing my monologue despite the nervous vibes.

After a quick vocal warm up, which consisted of the usual 'aahhhing' and breathing from the diaphragm, we got started on the performances. Overall, I felt that mine went quite well, but unfortunately I managed to mess up one of my last lines, and was unable to prevent this from being understood by the audience, as I came out of character, despite pulling it back for the last few words... what a shame...!

I thoroughly enjoyed our insight into Stanislavski, I felt that I could relate to many of his ideas, and was also able to use some of them in a workshop which I carried out as part of my CAS at my old secondary school!

Hot Seating!

Thursday 5th November

As a final rehearsal, today was spent hot seating each actor in role as their chosen character, whose monologue they would perform.

This activity encouraged us to think about and join up all the research into the character that we had undertaken so far in the project, so that we could answer any questions thrown at us.

This was a good activity as it placed us in the head of the character, thinking on the spot and answering questions as we believed they would. It improved our improvisation skills, while also building the relationship between actor and character.

Final Monologue Rehearsals this week!

Monday 2nd November

Today I finally finalised my costume, and what did I do? Forget my shoes… nice one! Never mind, I just about did without them ;)

Once again we knuckled  down to rehearsing our monologues today, I am finally coming to terms with my lines, which are slowly becoming more natural.

After rehearsing individually inside our “little bubbles”, we performed a group rehearsal activity which proved to be a break through moment in my rehearsal process.

The activity involved performing the our monologues in three different ways:

• Singing was the first, and the idea behind it was that emotion is often unlocked through singing. I found this the least useful, mainly because my rubbish singing ability put me off, causing me to loose my place in the monologue.
• Overacting, this proved very useful as I came to realise how the tone of my voice was very similar, and noticed that there was no change in vocal expression throughout. I was unable to overact much more than I had already been performing.
• Speechless, this was a very difficult activity, I got completely lost. This was virtually impossible, I found that I had no planned movements to support my monologue what so ever. This meant that if I was to make a mistake with lines, I would be likely to come out of character and therefore loose the believability of my monologue.

The lecture today was rather hard hitting, but left me with a few rather large points to work on next lesson. A rather daunting prospect considering we are due to perform a finalised piece on Monday :(