Mark's Lesson and feedback

The lesson before Mark came in to teach us he requred us to bring in tot he next workshop, 200 words on found text, 200 words evaluating the text.
The found text i brought in was found that evening in the evening standard on my home from university...

A chance to star in Sixties-style film noir on streets of London

It is your chance to take part in a real-life film noir, a living drama that unfolds in the backstreets of London.

About a thousand competition winners will be directed, a pair at a time, to an old-fashioned Citroën DS.
Stepping inside, they will find themselves back in the Sixties in the middle of a tale told by actors from theatre company Punchdrunk. In The Night Chauffeur, femmes fatales and secret agents pour out their “life stories” as the titular Frenchman drives through quiet lanes for the 15-minute drama.
Participants may even find themselves out on the streets in encounters with other characters, although guinea pigs at the official launch night easily found their way back to the starting point.
The unusual adventure is the idea of marketing director James Watson, to promote new lager Stella Artois Black. It is open to members of the public who buy the drink at venues across London, who can then submit their details online for a chance to take part.
Bookings are offered on a first come, first served basis.
The show takes place at venues from The Westbourne in Notting Hill, The Dove in Broadway Market and The Ten Bells in Spitalfields between November 14 and 25.
www.stellaartoisblack.com

The Guardian review is on http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2010/nov/09/punchdrunk-stella-artois-corporate-theatre

This text led me to research into punchdrunk as a theatre company.For seven years, Punchdrunk have created theatre in unlikely spaces: wild gardens, disused factories, and at festivals such as the Big Chill. Their approach puts the visual, physical and musical before the text. I discovered they do a lot of site specific and "Happenings" style performances. One of these being The tempest where they found a derelict warehouse in deptford and created a sensory experience for the audience to experience the performance through stenches to spices. The masque of the red death was another performance they put on at the BAC. An Edgar Allan Poe gory story they evolved into a performance.
I then researched into Edgar Allan Poe and found one of his plays i had previously witnessed on The simpsons when Lisa made a small construction of "The tell tale heart"
I read the whole story and enjoyed the description, creepy first hand perspective and suspense it created. I thought this, combined with the most recent Punchdrunk project of the 1930's film noir setting and femme fatale theme was the perfect idea for my groups performance.
I was overwhelmed with excitement ready to engage with my group and the objects i was bringing with me including a morrocon lamp and a giant 30's 40's style lampshade i recovered from the thousands of shmae drais( a yiddish word for bits and bobs that are just laying around not looking pretty)my mother in law left when she moved out of her house.I felt an attraction to the lampshade even though i always hated it when she actually had it up in her house. Not sure why but i took it with me to the lesson. When we got to the lesson we had to get into our groups and show our objects, read our texts to the group.
I didnt feel as though my group were as excited as me and they didnt really 'get' what i wanted to do. I had spoken to them the last lesson about looking up Rajni Shah gift idea but neither of them had any feedback on the instillation that Rajni had Small gifts.

Rajni Shah is a performance artist who experiments with concepts, ideas and relationships between people, culture and identity. Based in Britain but with Indian origin, she focuses on the contrasts of the two cultures east and west and how they can also intertwine. Her work can be interactive, where the audience become involved (Dinner with America) or durational. (Mr. Quiver) She experiments with what it is to be human, using her body as a tool of expression. A reason she removed her hair so as to not be judged or have any excess to add a label to who she is. Often taking on different roles displaying how accustomed one can be when in different environments. Much of her recent work has involved America, the depiction of western culture. Delving into the reasons behind this and what can be extracted from Dinner with America, the outcome should reveal what messages she is trying to convey and what else can be extracted from the performance in question. I think the concept of small gifts where she left beautiful small gifts hanging for people to just take for themselves was to show that like the western world where one is always expecting something in return for giving it was a selfless giving and therefore a true gift. Jewish faith states that the kindest thing you can do for someone is do it for them anonymously making it completely selfless act.

Anyway after we discussed our written texts and found texts, we had to get into small groups and tell each other about our morning. We had to include all the details and once we had heard each others, we had to go to another group as a group and tell the story of our own mornign again or perhaps someone elses morning but tell it as our own.

I enjoyed this and felt it benefited us. When working in groups its important to take on board what our peers tell us and not be too self indulged in our own life. I repeated a combination of my own morning with someone elses and alot of people created a comical scenario once this was repeated numerous times to different groups.

 One guy in the class of his morning where he repetitively listened to one section of a song in the cab on his way to university, and another told me how he got shouted at for throwing a banana skin on the ground by a neighbour who called him from the window above.

The next activity was to break the whole class into two groups and each use the text we had heard and "cut it up" using all the space whilst the othere side of the class watched.

I enjoyed spectating rather than participating this time i liked the way some people in the group interacted with the audience in an intimate way, and some just spoke to one another as they walked around.

My group and I discussed how we could use the idea of gifts and handing out invitations to the class and meeting them at Stratford bus station. There we would talk to the general public giving them the gift of "time".

We spoke about the western world and how people are always rushing, gifts are always seen as material things.

What if we classified gifts as untangiable? Like listening, time, love, friendship? How would people react? How would we get our message across without being too obvious?

I really wanted to imitate the Punchdrunk style of  dress as femme fatale charachters from the 1930's with an air of mystery...as if in a detective story leading a few audience members to another performer and the unexpected, but wasnt sure how my group felt about that. They seemed intrested but uninthusiastic.

Richard Foreman’s Unbalancing Acts ‘Foundations for a Theater’

I was unable to attend this session however I am intrigued by the readings we were given and am disappointed that I missed it the visitor Broderick Chow. After looking him up on Google, I have found him to be a Chinese Canadian comedian who also has been in many performances including A street car named desire at the Pablo theatre and has performed at the Edinburgh fringe festival.

The module is entitled contemporary drama. However Hans Lehmann prefers the title Post dramatic theatre. He believes that post dramatic theatre or contemporary drama is a definition for the umbrella of anything “unexplored” before within performance. This can be of a sexual nature, parallel lives, or pressures that people often feel they are unable to express.

He gives a few examples within the introduction of his book. A few of these being a performance called, “Pornography and performance” A shocking play where the lights are dimmed and the audience are invited to grope the performers who are hidden through a cylinder. The lights then come on and the audience who have dared to act on their instructions/desires have been caught “red handed.” Another example of contemporary drama he gives us is what looks like a kitchen sink drama on stage. Only when the mother and daughter start spitting at one another and one of them gives a monologue from Oscar Wilde whilst eating dog food it rears its head as not so traditional or even “mainstream” It appears to me the more ridiculous a performance is and surreal the more secure it becomes within the post dramatic theatre realm. I liked the example of the Graeae Theatre Company’s’ performance called “peeling” Where a group of women with sensory and physical impairment put on a version of The Trojan women, a play within a play and slowly undress as they discuss life, lies and recipes. This to me is the type of contemporary performance that I prefer. It is obscure but at the same time has a deep meaning behind it. Richard foreman, despises people who need meaning behind a performance that they can define. He wants people to “feel” a performance rather than necessarily gaining something from it that they can remember with material explanation.

 A lot of Foreman’s work was made in the 80’s. Unbalancing acts documents how foreman created his theatre and the way he believes there is a third element between logic and randomness something between narrative development and pure chance. He wants to see how he can produce performance without stage directions and compares contemporary performance to a spinning top… there can be a lot of pictures or visuals but you should enjoy the buzz of when it spins rather than focusing on the physical details.
He claims people are afraid to oppose the western culture when they adhere to the lifestyle and performance style that is “Mainstream” I feel that he believes it will confuse people and remove their identity if 'things' are not what they expect or how they expect them to be. It happens to be that in my opinion someone who is confident in themself wont mind adapting their reality for the sake of creativity.

‘Signaling through the Signs’ by Elinor Fuchs from The Death of Character

Signalling the signs comes from the phrase when you have a near death experience. That moment when you discover you are not there and you have instantaneous clarity.
Elinor expresses her respect to the 1960’s performance artists who defined the start of a new era in performance. I shall go through these practitioners and provide a small analysis of each one in terms of their achievements.

·         Peter Brook; He was most famous for In writing about “The Empty Space” he outlines his theories on the theatre by exploring four different meanings of the word theatre - Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate.

• Jerzy Grotowski; They say he revolutionised theatre, and along with his pupil, Eugenio Barba, is considered father of contemporary theatre.

Work in Laboratorium produced Grotowski Technique, a method of education and training for actors. It consisted of many exercises that emphasized control of body and voice.

He was the author of Towards a Poor Theatre (1968), which declared that theatre should not, because it could not, compete against the overwhelming spectacle of film and should instead focus on the very root of the act of theatre: actors in front of spectators. 'Poor' meant the stripping away of all that was unnecessary and leaving a 'stripped' and vulnerable actor take away the props, lighting, make up and this reveals true theatre.

·         Julian Beck He was an Avant-Garde character who revelutionised playwrighting in the 50's and 60's. He got alot of his inspiration from LSD a mind altering drug which he self confessed felt it carried a "Certain messianic vision, a certain understanding of the meaning of freedom, of the meaning of the as yet unattainable but nevertheless to be obtained erotic fantasy, political fantasy, social fantasy--a sense of oneness, a sense of goodness, a marvelous return to the Garden of Eden morality...That's why we thought if you could put it into the water system, everybody would wake up and we would be able to realize the changes we were dreaming in terms of societal structures. People wouldn't be able to tolerate things as they were any longer. They'd realize that something is wrong out there, something is wrong inside me, something is too beautiful, too indescribable, too irresistible to put off any longer."
Co founded living theatre in 1947 with his wife.

·         Judith Malina Living theatre a company she co founded with her husband, they felt free to express experimental techniques.Paradise now in 1968 was the 'performance' that got a lot of performers arrested for exposing themselves indecently. Said to be one of the most influential female directors off broadway.

·         Joseph Chaikin This man was a director, performer and teacher.Chaikin joined The Living Theatre in 1959 and acted in Brecht and Ionesco plays, earning the first of his six Obies for his portrayal of Galy Gay in Brecht's Man Is Man. In 1963 he founded The Open Theatre, the country's premiere avant garde experimental ensemble theatre. Innovative plays such as broken glass in which he directed, a play about a woman paralysed from her waist down, meant to reflect the jews struggle in the second world war. Shut eye was another performance which i would have loved to have gone to see...

Shut Eye

With Shut Eye, Pig Iron teamed up with legendary American director Joseph Chaikin, founder of the Open Theater, to create an intriguing puzzle of tightly choreographed vignettes, songs, and dances.

A newlywed couple falls asleep at the dinner table; an insomniac finds herself trapped in a Gilbert and Sullivan musical; a woman visits her brother in the coma ward only to find him absorbed in a business meeting.  Poetic and absurd, Shut Eye counterpoints daring physical feats and ecstatic songs with intimate, small-scale revelations

http://www.pigiron.org/productions/shut-eye

 

Open theatre was Chaikin's own theatre company which he offshooted from Living theatre.

Chaikin emphasized the physical. He did not even care about  language. He wanted the actors to

think outside of themselves as opposed to the intense psychological, internal work that Stanislavskyadvocated. He was against “emotion memory” because he believed that it confined the actor,

something he learned from the Living Theater (Chaikin 194). Therefore, he developed a system

or developing plays based on improvisational exercises. He believed that the key to a truly

organic performance was to have actors trained in non-verbal improvisation, because it would

develop an actor’s understanding and response to a situation, which will in turn unconsciously

generate psychological narrative. (Roose-Evans 108).

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/385

Lehmann, H-T (2006) Postdramatic Theatre, Oxon: Routledge Richard Foreman’s Unbalancing Acts ‘Foundations for a Theater’

I was unable to attend this session however I am intrigued by the readings we were given and am disappointed that I missed it the visitor Broderick Chow. After looking him up on Google, I have found him to be a Chinese Canadian comedian who also has been in many performances including A street car named desire at the Pablo theatre and has performed at the Edinburgh fringe festival.

The module is entitled contemporary drama. However Hans Lehmann prefers the title Post dramatic theatre. He believes that post dramatic theatre or contemporary drama is a definition for the umbrella of anything “unexplored” before within performance. This can be of a sexual nature, parallel lives, or pressures that people often feel they are unable to express.

He gives a few examples within the introduction of his book. A few of these being a performance called, “Pornography and performance” A shocking play where the lights are dimmed and the audience are invited to grope the performers who are hidden through a cylinder. The lights then come on and the audience who have dared to act on their instructions/desires have been caught “red handed.” Another example of contemporary drama he gives us is what looks like a kitchen sink drama on stage. Only when the mother and daughter start spitting at one another and one of them gives a monologue from Oscar Wilde whilst eating dog food it rears its head as not so traditional or even “mainstream” It appears to me the more ridiculous a performance is and surreal the more secure it becomes within the post dramatic theatre realm. I liked the example of the Graeae Theatre Company’s’ performance called “peeling” Where a group of women with sensory and physical impairment put on a version of The Trojan women, a play within a play and slowly undress as they discuss life, lies and recipes. This to me is the type of contemporary performance that I prefer. It is obscure but at the same time has a deep meaning behind it. Richard foreman despises people who need meaning behind a performance that they can define. He wants people to “feel” a performance rather than necessarily gaining something from it that they can remember with material explanation.

A lot of Foreman’s work was made in the 80’s. Unbalancing acts documents how foreman created his theatre and the way he believes there is a third element between logic and randomness something between narrative development and pure chance. He wants to see how he can produce performance without stage directions and compares contemporary performance to a spinning top… there can be a lot of pictures or visuals but you should enjoy the buzz of when it spins rather than focusing on the physical details.

He claims people are afraid to oppose the western culture when they adhere to the lifestyle and performance style that is “Mainstream” I feel that the Media concept of performance art is one which people feel comfortable is accepting as it does not cause confusion. The alternative or post dramatic theatre can confuse and remove the identity of one who is not confident in themselves to face new challenges when it comes to creativity.