This lesson was focused on 'emotional riffing'. We were expanding on our understanding of Artaud's work; 'the cost of the actor' and 'being cruel to oneself'. My experience of it was that it scared me at first, due to the sheer unpredictability of everyone in the space together. I thought that this fear may have held me back at first, but I quickly entered into the mindset of the activity. For me, the exercise went very well - I felt it progressed very fluidly and I think I got a lot out of it, having never done emotional riffing before. I felt like it got rid of the tension that was both in my body and mind, and I thought that the whole class had a strong connection. I was improvising with my body, a skill I have built up in physical theatre but found it interesting to apply with a different group of people and in a different subject. I can see how the exercise could have gone wrong though - it required everyone in the room to be on the same wavelength and to communicate by disconnecting their brains. Luckily, this happened in our session meaning it was interesting and eventful.
I found the exercise difficult; it did not come naturally to me, something that suggests social conditioning because expressing extreme emotion is not natural to do. It took me a while to disconnect my brain but even so, did not ease into the exercise straight away. Our teacher suggested we should "get rid of the internal critic", a quote that I can really relate to as I think the only part of the exercise that was hard was to stop thinking. I do not think I was particularly bad at this exercise once I got going; I think that anything goes in emotional riffing, it just took some time for me to get used to the idea.
One thing I learnt from the exercise was how fundamental warm-ups are, as we could have seriously hurt ourselves if not warmed up properly. We were exploiting our voices through screaming and making strange noises out of our vocal range, and doing expressive movements. If done without a warm-up we could have got injured easily, so it taught me that experimental theatre always requires the body to be warm and in a state of readiness for whatever activity is asked of it.
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