One of the most important things that I picked up from the lesson was that I need to commit to improve every lesson. The philosophy of devising that we are working with is using instinct to devise so there is an instinctual feel to the end performance. From this, I am keen to get a connection between my body, the space and each other. This is something I feel I have achieved in the other two terms and really want to replicate this term in rehearsals as well as the final performance.
Another aspect of performance that these sessions are helping me with is "playing" as a form of improvisation. In the past I think I have been stuck to the idea that rehearsals and devising techniques can only come from direct ideas and a stimulus, but this term I have come to realise that this is always the best way to devise. In class, we have been devising particularly 'soup' by just playing with one another and being bodies existing in a space together having fun and experimenting with what we can do. I have really enjoyed playing and am astonished at the amount of good work that comes from it - movements that may not have materialised the way they did if they had stemmed from 'an idea'. I think at the start I was not very good at this, and was slightly self-conscious but am getting better the more I do it and the more stimuli I have.
In the session today, we began by warming up (something I am getting better and better at and feel I would be able to do by myself now) and I worked hard meaning my body was relaxed and alert, ready to work. After the warm-up we began to do an exercise which we named '180 push hold'. We had to walk around the space, then our teacher would either shout out '180' (where we would have to turn around 180 degrees), 'push' (where we would have to push the person nearest to us hard and then move on) or 'hold' (where we could have to get the nearest person to the floor and then once we had, move on). I found the 180 part of this exercise relatively easy and found I had good concentration and was able to make the turns very sharp. At first, I kept bumping into other people when I turned but I managed to develop more spacial awareness as the exercise progressed. The hardest part for me, and the part I feel I was worst at was the 'hold' section because I am slight in stature, and found that I was simply not strong enough to pull anyone to the floor, no matter how hard I tried. I also found the 'push' quite difficult because of the same reason, and when I got pushed by others I found it hard to stay on my feet. I think to improve this I need to work on my physical strength and agility so that I will not fall over in the real performance.
After we had done that activity, we watched a video clip of Auschwitz and the horrors that were committed from human to human. A part that particularly stuck out to me was dead bodies being thrown on a pile, something that disturbed me a lot. We used this image and the exercise we had just done so that if someone was pushed over or pulled to the ground, they had to stay on the floor. Unsurprisingly, I was pulled to the ground almost immediately and the people who were left standing dragged all the 'dead bodies' onto a large heap. I found it difficult to be limp when people were dragging me, as it was painful to be pulled across the floor, and it was instinct to tense my body. I managed to overcome this though, and found it much less painful to be limp which surprised me. It was a very shocking emotional experience being put on a pile of people, and the mood in the room was very solemn due to the harsh reality of what we were re-enacting. I thought that this was a very Artaud style of working, highlighting the brutality of human nature by showing a disturbing scene and could see how it related to experimental theatre.
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