Artaud

We have now started to learn about Artaud and how he used a different style of performance. This is my favourite kind of drama to act out of all that I have learned about so far. Artaud would like to make performances that would make the audience experience quite an uncomfortable reaction to the play as it often involves uses all of your senses. He uses two main methods of acting; One called Total Theatre and the other called Theatre of Cruelty.
Theatre of Cruelty involved having the audience feel uncomfortable and make them unleash their unconscious responses. Artaud believed that everybody had a hidden dark response inside them that would never show due to the civilisation of the person. He then made this kind of theatre to allow people to feel this emotion as they watched or experienced his performances.
Total theatre had the actors use as much space as possible for their performance and would often be performed in strange places like air craft hangers or barns. This gave a lot of space for the performance to take place in. The audience would not be seated in just rows like they normally would be. Instead the audience would be scattered around the location leaving lots of space for the actors to roam around in between them to mess with their senses. This breaks down into even more specific methods he used. Extreme movement would be used to exaggerate the movements of the actors in an over the top fashion to really make the audience see the emotion in the characters. He would also use a thing called universal language to make sounds or noises without specifically using speech to emphasise the emotion or feelings of the characters. Finally he would use soundscapes to set the scene without there being a literal scene by using sound. This could be like our lesson where a thunder storm soundtrack was used to set the scene in the middle of a storm without having to use backdrops or props.
After learning all of this, we were able to have a 5 minute trial trying to use some of these methods before the end of the lesson. Our group managed to get a pitch black room where we banged metal to make a sonorous ringing sound, shook platforms for a rickety sound and made grunting noises to freak the audience out. While doing this, we would poke the audience unexpectedly to give them a shock because they couldn't se us.
In the next lesson, we focused more on the soundscape. We did an activity as a class where we had to make a thunderstorm without the help of technology and mostly using only our bodies to make the audience. We whistled to start to make the sound of wind like the calm before the storm. Then we tapped the chairs we sat on to make the pitta patter of rain slowly getting faster and faster until we tapped our feet on the floor to make it sound like the rain was getting heavier and louder. We rustled paper and clashed chairs to the floor to make the sound of thunder. I was told to just listen for the second time we did it, rather than to take part in making the noises. It was really strange how, although I knew how all the noises were being made, it still sounded a lot like an actual thunder storm. It was quite impressive.
Finally for this lesson we had to do a small performance in our groups. The performance was to show a psychiatric hospital so we did our performance about a girl who could see ghosts and needed help. We sat the audience on a tiered rostrum facing one another with our performance happening in the middle. We had someone under the rostrum to grab at people legs for a shock while shouting like a ghost. Someone and I played the ghosts that whispered and stared at the audience. We whispered how we died and that we needed help and the girl was the only chance we had for help. Finally we had the girl who controlled the torch showing us to the audience. We had it performed in a pitch black room so the only source of light was the torch. The grabbing at people legs was unexpected to make the audience shocked while the whispered and the girl claiming she needs help because she hears voices made the audience uncomfortable just like Artaud wanted. The only thing that we needed to do to improve was to make it longer and include more soundscaping work.

Frantic Assembly - Beautiful Burnout

Lesson 1
It was our first lesson and I had just been told I am working with the same partner from last time to do this work. I was looking forward to this as I like this kind of drama and my partner usually works hard so it was going to be a good performance. We got told that the script we were going to be learning and performing was beautiful burnout. This is all about a boxer from when he was young and signed up to be a boxer, to when he became a professional boxer until he gets hit by a car and has a career stopping accident. From there it is about the recovery process however the scenes we had to perform were from when he was a child and how the coach trained him to be the best. We spent a few minutes reading through the script and stating to one another a few ideas for specific parts of the speech to act out to but these were just basic ideas. Nothing was written down at this stage because we just discussed the few ideas we had in the lesson. After that though, I believe the lesson time was wasted due to my partner messing around doing a Scottish accent as the play is set in Scotland. Instead of then decided who will say what line or who would be what character, nothing else was done so for the next 2 days, I had nothing to learn at home we didn't assign characters.

Lesson 2
In the second lesson, my partner was ill so rather than practicing some of the performance ideas, we just annotated the script with most of the blocking ideas we had but this left many blank spaces on the script we had to fill in later as we just ended up standing there to the audience just saying our lines with no movement. Due to his illness, we just decided to focus the lesson on learning some of the lines and writing down ideas on the script of where and when to move, and what style we should do it in. (Like chair duets, shift round and through etc.) I could tell at this point that our performance was going to fall behind in the class so I decided to try and get some more done in our spare time and free lessons but my partner went home ill and nothing else could have been done that day. At least at this point I had lines to learn.

Lesson 3
This was the lesson were the teacher was not in due to his illness however the lesson was after school and I wanted to stay for the lesson even though there was no teacher, just to get more practice. I asked my partner to come up to the drama room but instead he said he was needed in music for the drama production. I let him go there and went home to learn my lines because he said he was needed to learn songs but I later found out that he left not long after I did. It was just an excuse not to practice. This annoyed me but life goes on and it was just one lesson.

Lesson 4 and 5
I spent the hour trying to do as much as I can for the performance, because at tis point, I still hadn't acted out and practiced any of the script. We just had ideas written down that should work in theory but still hadn't actually practiced. Every time I tried to practice anything though, my partner would stay focused for about 5 minutes then just not block anything and would just stand there reading the script. There was no effort from him to learn the script in his spare time because he still didn't know any of the lines. Rather than working on a scene until it was finished, he would work on the scene a tiny bit then just stand still saying his lines then just move on to another part of the script. The movements we had were either really basic or quite scruffy with lots of pauses and gaps for no reason. Yet he just wanted to move on. Near the end of the lesson, we discussed what song we were going to use in the scene were we do the quad exercise. We decided on a quad exercise because the character repeats his words quite a lot so we decided to make it a quad exercise and take turns acting to the song what the movements were. Once we had got the song in mind, we tried it with about 2 movements before my partner said it was good enough and moved on. It clearly needed work as we only had 2 movements out of 8 for it yet he didn't want to work on it. The only movements we had were jumping to the beat of the song (Which we chose to be Wipe-out) and punching on certain beats. Then my partner got distracted by picking the song, even though we already agreed on what song to use and slacked off for the last 10 minutes. He really needed some motivation but he obviously wasn't in the mood to work at that point. This was starting to get extremely annoying due to his lack of effort. This was the case for both lessons and nothing properly was rehearsed except for the 1st page of the script.

Lesson 6
My partner finally realised at this point how late into the rehearsal stages we were and he was quite motivated at this point. This may have been  because he missed yet another free lesson to practice because of another silly reason and this was our last lesson before we had a technical rehearsal and then the marked performance. He also skipped on a few other free lessons because he couldn't be bothered so this was our last real chance to practice and get some of the script actually blocked. We started by improving our very 1st scene by adding more shift, round and through movements to what seems like the prologue. Then we worked on the quad exercise movements too add more punches, dodges and general movement to the second scene. This improved it a lot and increased the flow of the scene. Next we worked on a chair duet and this scene was a little awkward to rehearse due to multiple characters speaking but there only being two actors. (Me and my partner). We decided to have it, so that if we stood up, we were another character but when we sat down and got back into the rhythm of the chair duet, we were back to the original characters we are playing as. I though that this was quite a good idea and should look effective. Finally we added another shift, round and through scene to show a boxing match. Rather than just acting out the boxing, we did the movements and to show a punch, I would move my partner's hand to my shoulder. To show a dodge, I would swivel though, under his arm placed in a punch position. These moves, although they were basic, when put together were quite effective to show a boxing match without an actual boxing scene. I have to be honest though, I am not fully sure I remember all of the movements we practiced and we still had another 2 scenes to block but that is what happens when your partner leaves it until last minute to get motivated.

Lesson 7 and 8
For these lessons, my partner went on holiday and he will be there for another lesson yet. When he gets back, we will have a quick run through but I am worried about it. I can't fully remember what to do at the moment and I doubt that he will remember much after going on holiday for a week. For these lessons, all I have done is watched other people perform their scripts and then practice my lines due to more of his absence. I really don't think this performance will get me a good grade but we will see when the time comes (being only a few days away).