Our Performance - Evaluation

I was very nervous about our performance this morning, but by the end of the day, I felt we had a really amazing, truthful and effective piece.

We were all a little worried this morning, but after much planning and exploring with more ideas of riffing and emotional flocking, we managed to come up with an effective middle to our piece. We came up with some good ideas before that we decided to keep in our performance. We decided to stick to the Meisner Chat, the Lust Walk, BISP and Jack and Laura's kiss-pull. We then decided to do emotional flocking, then our stories that we have about something that had happened to us that meant something - my story was applying and getting into the BRIT School.

We then did the Riffing with the clap, then pulled the audience in and turned them around and turned the light off, we then whispered in their ears something we were extremely passionate about - I spoke about M&S Meal Deals and Self Service Checkout Machines. This made quite a few people laugh, but it didn't take away from the atmosphere in the room. I think it made some audience members grateful for the emotional break because our piece could be a little overwhelming for some people.

We then read out the stories that the audience had written down at the beginning. When they walked in, we handed them a piece of paper and asked them to write down:
I'm happiest when...
It made me feel...
My greatest fear is...
Which made them have to really think. When we read them out and we were doing the body riffing around them in a circle to music, it felt really powerful. The audience seemed to be really engaged with what we were doing and it made me feel more open to go further, because the audience were, emotionally, there with me. We finished with a body ripple of discovery and a group hug in the middle at the end.

We were all a little apprehensive about our performance, but I think it went really well. If anything could have been re-done, I would have made the emotional flocking a little bit more emotional as I still thought there were too many times where it got too much and was too overwhelming. We could have kept it quiet a little more, to create more of an atmosphere, but overall, I think the rest of our piece went really well and we had some really positive feedback from our peers and our parents.

I think we effectively managed to create a believable and emotional connection with our audience and some people got really emotionally attatched to our piece. When we performed it to our peers, I think that they got into it a lot more quickly and we had some strong feedback with people saying they wanted to join in and that they were welling up and some points, which was really good to hear, because it means that we know we were doing the right thing and just feeling it on stage.

We always have to work a lot harder when performing to our parents because they are less open to things and much more reserved people, however, I think we did really well, they all seemed to be really engaged and mesmerized by the riffing. When we were reading out the audience's stories and we were riffing around them, it felt amazing. With the music and the stories, I felt so powerful being able to move how I wanted to and move how I felt in my body. The audience members that were facing me were smiling and seemed to be fixated on all of us. It felt very surreal and when the performance had ended and everyone looked up from our hug, I felt the emotional connection break and I felt spaced out, as if I didn't know what had just happened because I was so involved in the piece. It was an amazing feeling that I didn't really want to end.

I feel like I've improved and learnt so much this term and, although some bits have been very stressful, it has been amazing and I feel like every lesson, I've been on an emotional journey and come out feeling exhausted, but amazing and so much closer to, not just everyone in my group, but also every single audience member.

Riffing

We decided to scrap the idea of the script and make a piece that simply involved different emotional stages and things to do with moral transgression. We did an exercise, which we worked and developed for the whole lesson.

Riffing is where you stand at the sides and start a rhythm with your feet, where you step forward and then stomp your feet back. We did this while clapping your hands on the step forward and sending our energy through our clap and into the middle of the circle to the person who is exploring their movement, to encourage them to keep going.

It is very scary and off-putting allowing yourself to be completely vulnerable, but once you're out there and you feel everyone's claps encouraging you, you feel a lot better and you don't feel like you look stupid, because you're feeling every emotion and movement. It is simply whatever feels natural.

One person goes into the middle and starts to move, however they feel, inside them, that they should move. They are very free to move and express things however they feel it. When you are in the middle, you need to follow every movement you feel in order to feel the next one. You need to find yourself a moment, where you have a recognition that you have found "it" or "something" that you need to keep developing. When the people around the edge feel as though the person in the middle has found something, you find yourself walking to the middle and copying their movement and you stay together in the circle until you become emotionally connected with each other. Then, the first person leaves and the new person tries to make up their own pathway of movement.

You feel very surreal when doing this exercise, when you're around the edge, you're exhausted because you're putting all of your energy into your clap and you are completely mesmorized by the person in the middle. You then find yourself noticing when they have found an interesting movement and you find yourself in the middle starting to copy them. It is an out-of-body experience, you don't tell yourself you're going to go in or decide your movement, you just find yourself in there suddenly and your feeling your whole body.

It's both very relaxing and exhausting at the same time! When you finish, you feel very spaced out, but also completely exhausted because it took everything out of you.

More Development

Will had made up a script over the weekend, which he brought in to show us. We read through it and started to devise around it. We then had a discussion to talk about our first impressions of the script.

On reading the script for the first time, I think it seemed a little blank and plain. I think it is going to be hard work, but if we really try, we'll be able to pull it off and get the script off the page and is going to take a lot of concentration and focus. It also requires us to imput our ideas on how we can improve it and us contributing ideas on how to bring it to life.

Some opinions of the class:

Cory: Very wordy - needs to be balanced with strong opinions.
Charlie: Like the drugs but, but needs more relevance to the couple. We could have our bodies as the stages in their relationship.
Dee: Positives and negatives of relationships. Not sure how to encorporate the stuff we did in the week. We could have the bodies spread out through the audience.
Kitty: Examples of how the love drug works.
Molly: Start with Sarah and Tom, then Jack and Laura kiss and ripped apart for a background to set the piece up.
Jack: Numerous relationships leaving the clinic with the pill, follow their lives.
Tom: More of a journey with people's bodies. Some go medically wrong. We could look at testing on animals and then lead into the animal courtships.
Sarah: Link moral transgressions - take the pill, against morals, abusive relationship - forces woman to take it. Explore these.
Jack: Have the audience like trial groups: give them each different coloured tic-tacs.
Molly: Side effects of the drugs leading to moral transgressions - the 7 deadly sins.

What are Morals?

Morals

"Morals have a greater social element to values and tend to have a very broad acceptance. Morals are far more about good and bad than other values. We thus judge others more strongly on morals than values. A person can be described as immoral, yet there is no word for them not following values."

Dictionary.com defines morals as: n : motivation based on ideas of right and wrong

So what?

"Understand the differences between the values, morals and ethics of the other person. If there is conflict between these, then they probably have it hidden from themselves and you may carefully use these as a lever.

Beware of transgressing the other person's morals, as this is particularly how they will judge you.

Talking about professional ethics puts you on a high moral platform and encourages the other person to either join you or look up to you."

http://changingminds.org/explanations/values/values_morals_ethics.htm

More Research on Moral Transgression

Some different definitions of what transgression is from different sites I found, whilst doing more research:

• A violation of law, command or duty: "The same transgressions should be visited with equal severity on both man and woman."
• The exceeding of due bounds or limits.
• Moral Transgressions are any thing against the moral standards of a society, common is homicide, rape, stealing. Each society has its own definition of what is allowed, such as in a one African culture, homosexuality with an elder of the tribe is used to give word the groom will not have sexual relations with another female while married.
• A transgression is something that is against a command or law. Whether you are cheating on a test, or cheating on a spouse, you are committing transgressions that are not easily forgiven.
• A transgression can be a failure to do your duty. A sin is a transgression against God. The noun transgression is from Middle English, from Middle French, from Latin "act of crossing/passing over." from transgredi "to step or pass over".
•  The act of transgressing; the violation of a law or a duty or moral principle

Research on Moral Transgression

When researching more about theatrical ways to portray transgression in morals, all websites seem to point towards the Rocky Horror Show, so we could do something to do with dressing up in the costumes, or portraying the same kind of views they do to show the audience. We could make a piece about homosexuality, which would be relevant at the moment, because of gay marriage becoming legal in the UK.

http://www.newlinetheatre.com/rockychapter.html

This website talks a lot about the Rocky Horror Show, the 1960’s and the moral transgression in America and the UK and how the Karma Sutra became popular and more shows became quirky and a little controversial. We could do something to do with saying the lines of some of the songs from Rocky Horror or some of the more controversial lines.

Feedback on Our Piece So Far and What Needs to Be Done to Improve It?

I feel like our piece has got a lot of potential and we managed to pull together a lot of material in this lesson. I think that it is really important to make sure that we make it look good and we don't fidgit or move or break our focus because that could cause the whole piece to look fake and forced. Everyone needs to put 100% into it to make it look good and effective and to make sure it reaches the audience and makes them think.

We need to all be really mature when performing this, because it needs to be taken seriously to work and be believable. We need to be able to do what Will is asking and not over-act it - people tend to make acting too complicated, we need to keep it simple, to make it believable. As soon as we start to act or put on an acting face, you are losing your believability and anchoring back to your residual self and not becoming a believable character which you can feel emotions through and convey and believable performance to the audience, which is what you are looking for.

We need to make sure that the transitions between our scenes are smooth and flowing to make our piece fit together. To make this possible, we all need to know what we are doing and really focus ourselves in rehearsals to get it to look very accurate and smooth.

As actors, we really need to learn to get over stuff as performers and realise that the spitting and biting might feel weird, but if it is done with conviction, it will look really good. We also need to realise that the spitting is not aggressive, nor is the biting, it is just a sensual way to meet a parnter. We need to put a longer piece in about trangressing morals and have a monologue that sets up the audience's pre-conceptions of what morals are and what they're about. We could also add a lot more to do with the theme of love, we could have some other poems, some songs about love, some more things on the projector to do with the more romantic side, now we have explored the sensual side.

I think the piece is very good at the moment - it obviously needs a lot more work and rehearsal time, but at the moment, I think we have a good rough version of our finished play. It is very obscure and dramatic and definitely breaks our comfort boundaries and challenges us to see how far we are willing to go. I found that the biting and spitting not only questions the morals of the audience, but also questions our morals. I found that when I had to bite Alex, I was breaking my own moral code of "Not to bite someone or hurt anyone" and found myself asking myself if it was ok that I was biting him and was it ok that the reason I was biting him was that I was blaming it on "acting" but it still hurt us both, so you need to see if you can push past your boundaries and find it ok to hurt other people for the sake of acting, your job, your own protection or even protecting someone else.

As an actor if you are asked to do weird things, you just have to go with it and follow your instincts, you can't act through things you are uncomfortable with, you have to let the action flow naturally.

Some ideas, for our piece, are a little weird, but you need to trust your partner to go with it. For example, Sarah and Tom are challenged to create a real piece of drama that conveys people really being in love. This is challenging for them, because obviously they aren't really in love with each other, yet they have to make it believable to the audience, by not acting, but relaying their emotion into how they would actually be feeling. It is also challenging not to have a text. You have to use your instinct and if you have a feeling you need to go with it. It is also challenging because you have nothing to fall back on. However, you do have an advantage, so that if something isn't working, you can change it to make it fit what you want to do.

As an actor you are really challenged to break your boundaries of what would be acceptable behaviour in society and push past it and hope the audience understand what you're trying to convey. If you have an idea, you just have to go with it and explore it in more detail to see the potential.