Today, in the penultimate lesson, we had to work out what our piece needs to push it to be the best it can be. The first response to this question was to create the bar so we feel like the space is transporting both actor and audience. So we began to put cardboard over the walls and windows to create a space that felt like being in a cardboard box. It added that final dimension to the piece, allowing the space to become a blank canvas that we can paint on as artists.
We all decided that character development was what was needed to add the finishing touches to our piece. So we did an exercise in which we walked up to the bar in character, took a drink, walked to the central platform, spoke a quote, walked to the microphone and spoke some lyrics. This helped us set up our characters in the bar we now have created and we can now understand and visualise the purpose and meaning our characters have in the world we have created. From this exercise we learnt that we have to let go. In week six we should have the confidence to do so, but it is now about the leap of faith, knowing in ourselves that we can do it. We now have no where to go except more, forward and deeper with our characters.
In an experimental piece it is often easy to forget why our piece fits in this category and just do whatever we want without paying attention to key details. We discussed how our piece fell in the experimental category and we decided it was because:
- It is a piece based on Tom Waites a figure of unconformity, bold and strange characteristics.
- It doesn't have a solid structure- both for the audience who will be moving and the actors as we do not know what will happen at certain points in our performance.
From the run through we learnt that we need to:
- Live in the whole space- don't stay in one place.
- Butoh dancers need to move in accordance with the emotion not the story.
- Break out of our patterns within our peaks of energy.
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