This document was used in conjunction with a performance we had to do for drama and theatre studies, it looks at a lot of theatrical styles developed by professional performers and the reasons for why we decided to use these styles in our own performance.
1. How was the initial material being researched and developed at
significant stages during the rehearsal process of creation drama?
Our initial stimulus was a movie called "It Felt Like a Kiss" by Adam
Curtis. This was our stimulus for if we wanted to do devised
performances. From this, my group and I took out a line from the film
which was "I just wanted to be me". We decided to base our whole
performance around this line. From this line we got ideas of media,
because media influences people to change who they are to for the
society's view of perfection. So from this this line we see a woman who
does not want to change who she is and how media controls people,
mainly girls, and how it affects them physically as well as mentally.
The effect of the media is that it puts pressure on teenaged girls so
that they feel they have to look a certain way, and if they done then
they aren't good enough.
The line "I just wanted to be me" helped us to develop out theme
because it suggests that the media is saying we shouldn't be ourselves.
This is relevant to today's society because the views of what is perfect
is so distorted. For instance, the view that models have to be so skinny
that they are almost anorexic. So we felt this would be a good theme as
it affects so many people.
We developed our first scene after researching the practitioner
Meyerhold. We researched some of his acting methods. Meyerhold
developed the idea of the bio-mechanical theatre. This is a theatrical
element in which the actors are doing similar robotic movements,
preferably in sync, the way a machine would function. This technique
was developed by Meyerhold because he wanted to widen the
emotional potential of a piece of theatre as well as express theatrical
pieces that could not be presented easily through naturalistic theatre.
With this research in mind, we developed our first scene which is called
the "Media Machine." We developed this because when we thought of
media we immediately thought of control. With this scene we are
representing the media as being the same, as our movement would be
synced. We came up with the ideas of sticky labels and labelling the
audience, the way models would be labelled in magazines.
I personally researched Punchdrunk Theatre Company in order to see
what their style of theatre included. We have decided to use the
Punchdrunk theatrical style in our performance; this is so that we could
use a wide range of lighting, sets and levels. The Punchdrunk theatrical
style has a large impact on me and my group. It gives us the
opportunity to showcase our ideas through a method not commonly
used by actors, which will really help us to show out ideas very clearly
to the audience in a way they will understand and through a method
they would appreciate.
, Later on we used elements of the theatre of cruelty from the
practitioner of Artaud to show actual pain in the performance. This was
done by tensing the muscles all over the body and we will use this in
the dream scene we developed to show the physical pain media puts
people through.
2. How effectively are you personally exploring and developing your
roles?
In the beginning of the rehearsal process I did research into
Meyerhold’s bio-mechanics. This helped me a lot because it showed me
how effective the movements were when they were done in sync. Some
of the research I did was looking up YouTube videos. These were videos
of professional actors using Meyerhold’s bio-mechanics theatrical style.
This was important as it gave me and my group a visual representation
of what sort of movements we needed to develop if we wanted bio-
mechanics to be used in our performance. This research was helpful
because it showed us the types of movement that could be used, and so
from viewing these videos we were able to develop our own movement
that fits in well with our performance in the correct theatrical style.
This really does fit well with our performance theme because media is
portrayed in the world to be the same and so with the bio-mechanics is
shows that media is is very forceful and controlling. This wouldn't be
easily put across it we used naturalistic theatre, however bio-mechanics
is a very effective method for putting these ideas across, so doing a job
that naturalism can't, and this was the purpose for Meyerhold
developing this theatrical style.
I also did research in Punchdrunk to see what structure we could use. I
found the official Punchdrunk website which explains what the company
does which is; allowing the "roaming audiences to experience epic
storytelling inside sensory theatrical worlds." Which effectively brings
the audience into the world if the piece of theatre and can even give
them a role to do within the piece.
We have decided to do Punchdrunk after researching it because we
thought it would be more captivating to the audience if they were
actively involved in the performance by being in the performance space
instead of sat down the whole time.
I feel that using Punchdrunks theatre style will make the piece more
exciting for the audience because they will be having an active role in
the performance, especially if none of them have been in the rooms in
the drama department before such as the theatre, T9, T10 and the
dance studio. This will hopefully make the audience feel tension and a
little bit of fear, because they won’t know where they are going or why
we are taking them there. Hopefully, through this, we will be able to
create the epic experience that Punchdrunk intended with the
developing of Punchdrunk theatre.
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