Over the duration of our physical theatre lectures we have learnt about many practitioners and focused on there exercises. One of the practitioners that I enjoyed discovering was Butoh. Butoh is a form of dance theatre born in japan pout of the turmoil of post-world war two era. It can be described as a “Hybrid sort of dance” (S.Faleigh, 2010). By this it means that it links physical and spiritual cultures from around the world, it can be performed by the young and old. The exercises involve playfulness and the ability to find our self, its about being in the space by yourself and being aware of everything and everyone around you. Leading on from this a technique that we learnt in out lectures was the ‘Glass Eye, this is where you stand in the space and transfer all your energy into becoming static and focusing on everything around us through peripheral vision, which allows us to leave our natural personality habits that we have developed through life.
I enjoyed using these techniques in lecture because I had never been taught about this specific type of dance, it was an interesting experience that we put our bodies through, What I enjoyed even more was watching someone else put them self in the ‘glass eye mode’ because it strips the persons personality away which is fascinating to watch. Another style of physical theatre we worked with was the company Frantic Assembly which is a more modern company. Its described as “theatre with no fear”. (Frantic assembly N.D) Frantic Assembly creates thrilling energetic and unforgettable theatre, the company attracts new and young audiences with work that reflects contemporary culture. Frantic Assembly’s unique physical style combines movement, design, music and text. Frantic assembly doesn’t just make movement, they bring text and objects to life. They are well known for using lifts throughout there performances. There devising process is difficult to cover as it has a wide range of steps, However whilst researching into Frantic assembly I discovered that there devising process starts with “the company having an idea then matching there big idea to a writer” from this they then proceed to bring it to life. (S. Graham,2014) When we started to put one of frantic assembly’s work into practice we mainly focused on lifts in pairs or as a group. One of the main lifts we focused on was ‘Learning to fly’ this we watched videos on and the put it to practice as a group.
Here are some images of the lifts we accomplished from the video’s we watched. When we did these exercises in class I wasn’t the biggest fan of being lifted as you have to put your full trust in the people around you, which is a challenge. However, we did do mini trust exercises to prepare us for the big lifts.
Another Practitioner of physical theatre is Jacques lecoq. His physical theatre exercises were based on clowning and mime which he taught at the school he founded in Paris. Clowning is based on comedy it makes the audience laugh, it doesn’t usually involve talking its more about being funny physically. In our lectures we used a clowning exercise called pass the laugh. This involved a group of people standing in a line and we had to pass the laugh and every person who laughed had to out laugh the previous person so that the laugh would gradually get bigger and louder. We also played with using other emotions such as crying. This exercise was fun because when you started laughing you started to genially laugh which made it even funnier for the next person. Watching from an audience’s point of view made it funnier because you were laughing at the actors trying to out laugh each other. I liked that there was no purpose in the laughing, but it was entertaining because we were laughing at nothing. I did take this method of physical theatre through to the rehearsal stages of my finale performance. It was a good technique when it came to the comedy of our performance, it helped us find the balance of whether stuff was funny or not funny. By toying with clowning exercises, it became of the key factors of making our performance. Our performance also involved Mime in that we acted in silence at certain points mainly when we were behind the mirror, we also got the idea of being limited into a box from the eliminates you have in Mime.
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