Theatre of the Absurd

Looking at theatre of the absurd, I was quite interested with the weird conventions of the the practice. Looking at an extract from 'Waiting for Godot' I noticed that although the lines and dialogue make sense, the lack of context really makes the text different from other styles of theatre.

One of the main points of Theatre of the Absurd that I found quite interesting is that it does not come from a specific practitioner and instead it represents a number of theatre practitioners who shared a common interest in looking at the way humans question life. It represents a common interest shared between all of humanity and the number of practitioners adding to the theatre practice as a whole.

Looking at the aspects of Theatre of the Absurd, the one that stands out the most for me is the meaninglessness and the devoid of reason that the practice has. A lot of other practitioners place a lot of their emphasis on the meaning and representation of their scripts and performances, however the Theatre of the Absurd is purposefully meaningless. For me, an intended effect of the theatre practice, is to have the meaningless words, yet still have the dialogue make sense in snippets. Much like 'Waiting for Godot' the dialogue, makes sense and follows like a story, however the dialogue makes no sense in terms of an overall plot.

The Dumbwaiter - Harold Pinter

A good example of a comedy used within Theatre of the Absurd, is the Dumbwaiter by Harold Pinter. Most of the dialogue takes place between two actors. The part that stood out the most would be at the beginning where both pieces of dialogue revolve around two articles "Dan" reads out of his newspaper. Whats interesting is that both discussions about the articles end with the same line. This brings up the repetutuin. In addition, a none of the dialogue progresses the plot and its almost all comedic banter between the two characters. 

Antonin Artaud

This week we looked at the practitioner Antonin Artaud, a french practitioner who created the Theatre of Cruelty. This form of theatre looked at shocking the audience to reveal the human condition or the primitive form of the human condition. Personally I am intrigued by the style of the theatre however I feel as though it is an extremely taxing role on the actor.

In this video we looked at creating a stylistic movement piece that was disturbing to an audience by repeating the same four movements over and over again. I feel like this can be very useful in certain performances as it uses conventions of physical theatre to make the audience feel disturbed, and its repetitive sounds and movements makes sure the audience is always engaged.

In this scene we created a piece of movement based on this image by Salvador Dali: The Persistence of Memory

The movement piece tries to capture the liquid fluidity of the clocks in the painting as well as the shifting perspectives make the painting seem to be dynamic and moving. We tried to use the sounds to continue this shifting landscape. I think this can be used in a number of places whilst acting. The surreal physical theatre movements allow the audience to feel emotions that cant be conveyed through naturalistic theatre. I like the movement side of Artaud's work however i feel as though the actors have to take on a very challenging role if they want to convey the disturbing imagery. However we can use the large physical theatre in a similiar way to Brecht's representative imagery to create a movement that embeds a representation in the same intensity of Artaud's movements.

Brecht

Today we made a scene using brechtian techniques to try and understand the way an actor would feel when trying to maintain the epic theatre. I found the task quite difficult as my techinque was a form of questioning where the audience can ask me as an actor about my own character. This technique although useful to portray the character to the audience, is extremely difficult from the standpoint of the actor.

Overall, I don't think I would like to implement these into my other pieces of performance as it increases the pressure on the actor to know their character. 

Theatre in Education

Today we looked at creating a piece of game show to try and add to the audience interaction idea. We looked at creating a slight conflict between the two step-brothers to try and get the audience involved more in the performance so as to keep them engaged. Using the ideas of Brecht we tried to make sure that during this section the audience wouldn't become emotionally attached to the characters or believe they were watching real life.

We decided to turn the conflict into a game show, that sticking with Brecht's conventions, broke the fourth wall and allowed the audience to participate. This game show would be over the top and exaggerated keeping in mind the young audience that would be watching the performance. This will also bring in the TIE aspects as it allows the young audience to take part in the performance, and have a say in the action.

Brecht

Today we looked at brecht and his style of theatre, and how it contrasted with Stanislavsky's own style and teaching. We looked at trying out his methods and techniques to have a better understanding. We created a scene using naturalistic movements and Stanislavsky's style of naturalism. We then created a new scene using Brecht's audience involvement techniques. The video shows this in action

I personally enjoy Brecht's techniques of making the audience a part of the performance as it allows me to easily create and portray a message that would be much harder to communicate using Stanislavsky's techniques. This means that for me I would definitely try and use Brecht's breaking of the fourth wall to keep the audiences on their toes and try and get them to be involved.

Stanislavski

Today we looked at doing a number of workshops to attempt to try and teach each other the different pieces of his work. I looked at using circles of attention to try and look at his attention to detail in terms of actors understanding and sensing themselves as well as their surroundings. This is important as an actor as it can give a believable performance to an audience if the actors and their characters look and focus on different aspects of their surroundings based on their circumstances. 

By putting a large amount of detail into a character, giving them other unrelated circumstances that perhaps will affect the character, offers an insight into that characters back story that the audience can pick up on and use. This is one of the elements that I will adopt into when i create characters as I believe that the added amount of detail can open up the characters to the audience in a way that allows them to relate better or at least feel like the characters are actually believable. 

Lee looked at purpose, and his activity involved having someone enter a room with a specific purpose to influence how that character would interact with the set. I quite liked this element and plan to implement it into my character development as it makes it extremely believable for an audience to see elements of the purpose within the movements and actions of the characters. 

However, Stanislavsky's attention to detail also involved fleshing out the characters more by getting actors to practice by shadowing a person in the room, to copy their movements and mannerisms directly. This is an element i find extremely challenging and don't plan on implementing it into my own acting and character development. Although it does allow for an actor to base his acting on a given root allowing him to better understand his character, I find it quite challenging and will not be attempting to use it in my own acting.

Later that week we had another workshop with other elements of Stanislavsky's work. I found Sahitya's workshop on looking at "the Magic If" to be interesting. It looked at putting the characters into situations to see how they would react. I personally do not find this an effective technique as it requires a good understanding of the character beforehand. 

However, Naz's workshop on looking at questions that characters must ask themselves is very interesting in exploring characters and what they think about their own situation, themselves and other people. This technique is extremely difficult to do, however if done right can give a lot of details of the character for the actor to think about and implement into his character development.

Overall, some of Stanislavsky's work is extremely useful and I will implement it into my own acting and character development, however not all of his elements and attention to detail are as relevant to me and what the amount of detail I would like to put in to my characters and to how naturalistic I would like to be as a character or as a director.

Theatre in Education

Today we began to actually create a storyline and plan staging, of how we would structure our performance and the way it is set.

We were very heavily inspired by the audience engagement and decided that it would be best to replace the normal proscenium arch stage with a thrust stage, this would provide and interesting base to place our performance. In addition for many of our scenes we decided to use the space around the audience to keep them interested and make sure they do not get bored with just seeing the acting taking place on the stage.

For our intro we were quite influenced with Stanislavsky's focus on character and decided to give the audience a glimpse of our characters as they enter, standing near the door in character interacting both, with them and each other. This uses the ideas of audience participation and engagement as it involves the audience within the interaction of the characters. This gives the audience a brief introduction into the different characters within the coming performance.

We then began developing the first scene, looking at the ideas of comedy to try and create a scene that conveys the introduction to the Cinderella based story that the performance is based on. We tried our best to make it funny to engage the audience using both slapstick comedy, a main element of comedy for younger children. 

Stanislavski

During the two lessons on Stanislavski we looked at his context, features, and impact on modern theatre and acting. Stanislavski has very revolutionary ideas, for his time, regarding the importance of actors, script and charecter. This was very interesting to think about in terms of how a charecter can be defined or played by an actor. This made me think about the way i play charecatre sureing my performances and think about how I could improve for the future. This changed the way I thought about playing charecters and how much effort must go into each one to remove myself and my personality from the characters.

Although I have taken many elements of Stanislavski's methods into consideration, especially those regarding his attention to detail, I personally do not like stanislavski's focus on removing the actor from the charecter and his focus on naturalistic theatre, as it does not allow for any symbolism or metaphorical elements. 

Theatre in Education

The first week we looked into what theatre of education is and what elements define it. We found that TIE works extremely closely with comedy as well as audience participation and involvement. This gave us specific elements to think about including in our performance. This discussion into the elements of TIE made us think about the way we would conduct our performance and the way we would create features that link to the base ideas of TIE. This changed the way I looked at staging and the blocking of our scenes.

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In addition to creating a funny and engaging performance with elements of audience participation, we still needed to have a main idea or theme that would be the main focus of the TIE, which we would be attempting to teach the audience, making them leave thinking about the topic or having learnt something. This forced us to think about a core message or theme that we could teach our young audience.