Tuesday pefromance evaluation

Today was our show day and for the whole day we were just rehearsing our piece and making sure everyone knew what was going on and the running order of the piece, when running through we were in our costumes that we would be wearing later on that day - bunny ears and in all black. before rehearsing we did an activity just to warm us up and lighten up the mood, we were asked to go into pairs and make up a game that only consisted of two people, after this we tried playing some of the games that were made up and they were very fun. one was to hug each other and try and touch each others elbow while being connected and the other was to have your partner facing opposite to you on the floor and have bunny tails around our feet and we have to try and take them off each others feet.

what went well?
I was proud of the end result of our show, I thought it went very well and everyone put their all in it, we were all bouncing off each other and all of our focus was too a high standard, we were so engaged in the performance that there was not one bit where we lost focus or were lost on what to do. it was very fun and an amazing experience, especially reliving all our childhood memories, when looking at the audience members all I could see were smiles and laughs which strengthened the piece more because that was the reaction we were looking for, everything went to plan and the audience got involved a lot, all I could sense was joy in the atmosphere and that reflected a lot within the piece. we were all fully committed and in the room we performed there was a strong spiritual connection between us all.

Even better if...
I don't feel there were any flaws within our performance, but I feel like if it was longer and we got the audience involved a little bit more then it would of been to a great standard, I feel like we should of put a bit more emotion and feelings into our movements when we heard a specific type of music so it showed that the music was flowing through us and we could feel the rhythm flowing through our bodies. at some points I felt as if the emotion we were trying to portray was by force because that what we rehearsed, so if it was natural then it was of had an organic element to it.

Audience comments/reactions
All of the audiences faces were filled with joy while watching the whole piece but at one point I saw a few tears and that was the part where we were reaching up asking for our mummy's to help us, but besides that we had a good reaction and a lot of involvement, after the show when talking to some of the audience they were thanking us because we made them relive their childhood and that they really enjoyed it, a few said it had really touched them and changed the way they see life, they said that they wouldn't take life as seriously and that even though in society they are considered an adult in their heart they will always be a child and by watching our performance it made it more apparent to them.

Overall, I really enjoyed being part of something special and awakening other people to see that they should just have fun and making people and myself relive their childhood, by seeing other people happy made me happy and made the atmosphere in the room 10x better. I feel like I am a lot closer with the people in my class and have learnt a lot about them individually and as a group.

Tuesday lesson 5

this session was our last session before the day of the show, so this session we were just rehearsing and polishing things up, we started off the piece with doing misorgi and eating fruit while this was being done some people were allocated lines to explain what we were doing and why. next someone was explaining Samadhi and performed it by cleaning their teeth. after going through the opening a few times, our teacher was sure that we were ready, when we came back from our break we were told we were going to perform our whole piece to an audience, even though lines were just distributed we were still confident. this was our first time performing to an audience and I am proud to say that it went well, I felt that because we had an audience we got more into our piece and there was more of a group connection. our audience were very truthful when they gave back our feedback and said they found it very unusual but it was good at the same time and all that was crossing their minds was to join in because they said it looked fun. one said that it brought them back to their childhood when they were younger when we did the hokey cokey, they understood what we were exploring in our piece and found it very fascinating how we portrayed that by doing many different things. the only thing that we got as critisim is that at certain points i.e. when we are doing our tribal dancing we should involve the audience so they could join in on the fun and have a laugh with us  and by not involving them they felt disconnected. later on we spent the rest of the day working on the opening sequence, as a whole I thought the day was very productive and we were able to accomplish a lot and add on things to make our piece better.

Tuesday lesson 4

after partaking in misorgi, and stretching. our first activity as a class was to do the 'Hokey Cokey' at first we were confused with the request but when partaking in it, I felt my childhood flash before my eyes and my emotions became very apparent; I was so happy and the whole class seemed to be having a good time, at no point did anyone not looke interested. from this we did an exercise called 'The Game' this 'game' gave us freedom because it had no rules and was based on working on the spot- improvisation. We all created a big circle and someone would go and play the song that brings them joy and anyone that felt comfortable to go in the middle and start an impro scene. during this task I didn't go into the middle because I didn't feel comfortable to and I felt that it was pressurising and I didn't feel the connection I felt last time in the lesson.

Following from this exercise, we got into pairs and was instructed to hold their hands then close our eyes and walk away from them, then try to find them by using touch, this exercise was intended on working on our touch senses and having to really feel a persons hands to differentiate them from others, most of us were able to find our partner and somehow this made us connect more spiritually because we found each other through touch. we started an unusual exercise where we stayed with the partner we were with but this time we started a game called 'Get of my back' this game consisted of being behind your partner and pushing their back at any time and whenever you push them, your partner would say ''get off my back''. this game for me was annoying because a push was spontaneous and because I didn't know when it was going to happen it made me agitated because it kept on surprising me and also someone was pushing my back, this caused me to put more aggression when we swapped over so that my partner realised how I felt when I was in that position. Stuart explained that some companies do this exercise for hours so we should empathise with the people this happens to. another exercise that we did was called ' mummy help me' where we would be in child's position but our hands would be reaching up, and we would repeatedly say mummy help me, personally I hated this exercise because it caused me pain and it did bring me to tears because it caused my emotions to overwhelm and it made me think of my mum and how much I love her and how much she means to me. when Stuart asked us to stop and I dropped my arms I felt restless and drained and I couldn't catch my breath, Stuart explained that a practioner used this because it is the theatre of cruelty. to end this session we ran through our whole piece with another theatre teacher watching us, after he gave us beneficial, helpful feedback; he said he wanted to join us and it was encapturing  because he felt like a child again and it looked very playful, this feedback made the cast happy because it was our first run through and already we knew that the message we were trying to portray came across clearly.

to end the day we went to the science lad where we will be performing our opening- surfing in the usa, beach boys and blocked the movements we will be doing to the song we then started watching our small group performances that will follow after the physical theatre piece. this rehersal was very productive and we had an idea of what our show was going to look like.

How the brain works

Our brain contains billions of nerve cells arranged in patterns that coordinate thought, emotion, behavior, movement and sensation.

Deep folds and wrinkles in the brain increase the surface area of the grey matter, so more information can be processed. 

Your brain's hemispheres are divided into four lobes.

• The frontal lobes control thinking, planning, organizing, problem solving, short-term memory and movement.
• The parietal lobes interpret sensory information, such as taste, temperature and touch.
• The occipital lobes process images from your eyes and link that information with images stored in memory.
• The temporal lobes process information from your senses of smell, taste and sound. They also play a role in memory storage.

Structures deep within the brain control emotions and memories. Known as the limbic system, these structures come in pairs. Each part of this system is duplicated in the opposite half of the brain. 

• The hypothalamus controls emotions. It also regulates your body's temperature and controls crucial urges — such as eating or sleeping.
• The hippocampus sends memories to be stored in appropriate sections of the cerebrum and then recalls them when necessary.

This term in our Tuesday's experimental lessons we are devising a piece focusing on how music can affect the brain, as of this I went to do research into this and this is what I found:

Happy/sad music affects how we see neutral faces:

We can usually pick if a piece of music is particularly happy or sad, but this isn’t just a subjective idea that comes from how it makes us feel. In fact, our brains actually respond differently to happy and sad music.
Even short pieces of happy or sad music can affect us. One study showed that after hearing a short piece of music, participants were more likely to interpret a neutral expression as happy or sad, to match the tone of the music they heard. This also happened with other facial expressions, but was most notable for those that were close to neutral.
Something else that’s really interesting about how our emotions are affected by music is that there are two kind of emotions related to music: perceived emotions and felt emotions.
This means that sometimes we can understand the emotions of a piece of music without actually feeling them, which explains why some of us find listening to sad music enjoyable, rather than depressing.

Ambient noise can improve creativity

We all like to pump up the tunes when we’re powering through our to-do lists, right? But when it comes to creative work, loud music may not be the best option.
It turns out that a moderate noise level is the sweet spot for creativity. Even more than low noise levels, ambient noise apparently gets our creative juices flowing, and doesn’t put us off the way high levels of noise do.
The way this works is that moderate noise levels increase processing difficulty which promotes abstract processing, leading to higher creativity. In other words, when we struggle (just enough) to process things as we normally would, we resort to more creative approaches.
In high noise levels, however, our creative thinking is impaired because we’re overwhelmed and struggle to process information efficiently.
This is very similar to how temperature and lighting can affect our productivity, where paradoxically a slightly more crowded place can be beneficial.

3. Take this one with a grain of salt, because it’s only been tested on young adults (that I know of), but it’s still really interesting.
In a study of couples who spent time getting to know each other, looking at each other’s top ten favorite songs actually provided fairly reliable predictions as to the listener’s personality traits.
The study used five personality traits for the test: openness to experience, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability.
Interestingly, some traits were more accurately predicted based on the person’s listening habits than others. For instance, openness to experience, extraversion and emotional stability were the easiest to guess correctly. Conscientiousness, on the other hand, wasn’t obvious based on musical taste.

Music training can significantly improve our motor and reasoning skills

We generally assume that learning a musical instrument can be beneficial for kids, but it’s actually useful in more ways than we might expect. One study showed that children who had three years or more musical instrument training performed better than those who didn’t learn an instrument in auditory discrimination abilities and fine motor skills.

They also tested better on vocabulary and nonverbal reasoning skills, which involve understanding and analyzing visual information, such as identifying relationships, similarities and differences between shapes and patterns.

Tuesday lesson 3

at the beginning of this session as usual we started with misorgi. all of us are familiar with this so there was no need for our teacher to direct us on what to do. furthermore, as we have done it previous times, we have gotten use to the fact that at the start of our lessons we will always be doing this. also being introduced to misorgi has strengthened my devising and focusing skills.

the week before we were asked to either bring in something that brings us joy or a piece of music that brings us joy. following on from this, we were asked to get into pairs and make a small circle between ourselves using the items that bring us joy; if it we didn't bring in an item and found a song instead, we used our headphones to create the circle. when our partner was in the circle we were requested to watch and listen to the song or to why the item brings the person joy. The partner I was with - Gabriel, was playing the song 3005 by Childish Gambino, he said the song brings him joy because it gets him in the mood to dance and because he knows the song so well every time it is played, even in a public space he always raps to it, because I am familiar with the song when he first started playing it I began to smile and rapped along with it as well, this is significant because it made us feel connected and more comfortable with ourselves because we know the song. my song was Location by Khalid, the reason why this song brings me joy is because it creates a relaxing atmosphere and the artist has a very unique beautiful voice. the exercise was very unusual but effective because it brought you out of your comfort zone and knowing someone else's song of happiness made me happy, and somehow created a connection because a smile or the emotion happiness is something valuable and nice.

the following exercise was interesting because we were instructed to give our partner actions to do but first with words, then sounds and finally through using our mind. this exercise was to work on our listening skills and making us bond. I found this a really fun exercise to do especially when not using words because it was interesting to see my partners response to sounds/ when using our mind to communicate it made me realise that people will not always have the same reaction to things as you would and it also awakened me because it's all about patience and not everything should be rushed.

to end that session we did a big improvisation including the whole class, everyone was instructed to use their object/song that brings them joy. the improvisation was fun to be part of because it was spontaneous, but there were moments were it became a bit messy and too much was going on, our teacher, Stuart asked some people to leave the circle and allow the improvisation circle to breathe before they were ready to go back in.

Things I enjoyed in the improvisation:
-Nansi's counting
- Benji, Jimmy and Joe's singing
- biscuits and party rings
- Jake riding on his bike around the room
- Elijah jumping up to fake love
- Tribal dancing and singing as a whole class
- Joe's harmonica
- Fairy lights



I found this exercise intriguing because the circle held a lot of emotions and majority were joyful, people were bouncing off each others mood and we were working hard together, there were no points where we were left unsure of what to do, everyone was committed and were open to ideas and had spontaneous ideas which we all worked around to make it look good. there were a lot of valuable bits and those bits are the things we will include in our final piece.

Lastly, we watched two videos about how music affects the brain ' This is your brain on music' by Life Noggin and another which I didn't catch the name of but was similar to the first.

- love, sex, drugs + music release the same chemicals
- motion & movement = emotion & feelings
- music changes your mood
- playing instruments make you smarter
- music affects how we see the world


at the end of the day we devised a physical theatre sequence that would be included in our final piece we used the song Surfing in the USA by the Beach Boys, after this was created we were broken down into small groups and we were all given a stimulus that we had to use to create scene on how music affects our mind. my group and I hadn't thought of any ideas this session. the session as a whole was successful and easy going because we managed to devise the first bit of our show and also learn a lot about each other and learn more about our brains.

Research

Peter Brook

Peter Stephen Paul Brook was born 21 March 1925, Brook was born in the Turnham Green area of Chiswick, London. He is an English theatre and film director who was based in France since the early 70s. He  won multiple Tony and Emmy Awards, a Laurence Olivier Award, the Praemium Imperiale, and the Prix Italia. He is called "our greatest living theatre director".

With the Royal Shakespeare Company, Brook directed the first English language production of Marat/Sade in 1964. It transferred to Broadway in 1965 and won the Tony Award for Best Play, and Brook was named Best Director.

He directed Dr Faustus, his first production, in 1943 at the Torch Theatre in London, followed at the Chanticleer Theatre in 1945 with a revival of The Infernal Machine. In 1947, he went to Stratford-upon-Avon as assistant director on Romeo and Juliet and Love's Labour's Lost. From 1947 to 1950, he was Director of Productions at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

In 1970, with Micheline Rozan, Brook founded the International Centre for Theatre Research, a multinational company of actors, dancers, musicians and others which travelled widely in the Middle East and Africa in the early 1970s. It has been based in Paris at the Bouffes du Nord theatre since 1974. In 2008 he made the decision to resign as artistic director of Bouffes du Nord in 2008.

Antonin Artaud

Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, also known as Antonin Artaud ( 4 September 1896 – 4 March 1948), was a French dramatist, poet, essayist, actor, and theatre director,widely recognised as one of the major figures of twentieth-century theatre.

In March 1920, Artaud moved to Paris to pursue a career as a writer, and instead discovered he had a talent for avant-garde theatre. While training and performing with directors, he continued to write both poetry and essays. At the age of 27, he mailed some of his poems to the journal La Nouvelle Revue Française; they were rejected, but the editor, Jacques Rivière, wrote back seeking to understand him, and a relationship via letters developed.  Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière, was Artaud's first major publication.

Artaud cultivated a great interest in cinema as well, writing the scenario for the first surrealist film, The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928), directed by Germaine Dulac.  The monk Massieu in Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).

In 1926-28, Artaud  produced and directed original works by Vitrac, as well as pieces by Claudel and Strindberg. The theatre advertised that they would produce Artaud's play Jet de sang in their 1926-1927 season, but it was never mounted and was not premiered until 40 years later. The Theatre was extremely short-lived, but was attended by an enormous range of European artists.

In 1931, Artaud saw Balinese dance performed at the Paris Colonial Exposition. Although he did not fully understand the intentions and ideas behind traditional Balinese performance, it influenced many of his ideas for theatre. Also during this year, Artaud's "First Manifesto for a Theatre of Cruelty" was published in La Nouvelle Revue Française; it would later appear as a chapter in The Theatre and Its Double. In 1935, Artaud's production of his adaptation of Shelley's The Cenci premiered. Les Censi was a commercial failure, although it employed innovative sound effects-including the first theatrical use of the electronic instrument the Ondes Martenot—and had a set designed by Balthus.

After the production failed, Artaud received a grant to travel to Mexico, where in 1936 he met his first Mexican-Parisian friend, the painter Federico Cantú, when Federico Cantu gave lectures on the decadence of Western civilization. Artaud also studied and lived with the Tarahumaran people and experimented with peyote, recording his experiences, which were later released in a volume called Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumara. (In 1976, an English translation was published under the title The Peyote Dance.) The content of this work closely resembles the poems of his later days, concerned primarily with the supernatural. Artaud also recorded his horrific withdrawal from heroin upon entering the land of the Tarahumaras. Having deserted his last supply of the drug at a mountainside, he literally had to be hoisted onto his horse and soon resembled, in his words, "a giant, inflamed gum". Artaud would return to opiates later in life.

In 1937, Artaud returned to France, where he obtained a walking stick of knotted wood that he believed belonged not only to St. Patrick, but also Lucifer and Jesus Christ. Artaud traveled to Ireland, landing at Cobh and travelling to Galway, in an effort to return the staff, though he spoke very little English and was unable to make himself understood. He would not have been admitted at Cobh, according to Irish government documents, except that he carried a letter of introduction from the Paris embassy. The majority of his trip was spent in a hotel room he was unable to pay for. He was forcibly removed from the grounds of Milltown House, a Jesuit community, when he refused to leave. Before deportation he was briefly confined in the notorious Mountjoy Prison. According to Irish Government papers he was deported as "a destitute and undesirable alien".[7] On his return trip by ship, Artaud believed he was being attacked by two crew members and retaliated. He was arrested and put in a straitjacket.

His best-known work, The Theatre and Its Double, was published in 1938. This book contained the two manifestos of the Theatre of Cruelty. There, "he proposed a theatre that was in effect a return to magic and ritual and he sought to create a new theatrical language of totem and gesture - a language of space devoid of dialogue that would appeal to all the senses."[8] "Words say little to the mind," Artaud wrote, "compared to space thundering with images and crammed with sounds." He proposed "a theatre in which violent physical images crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator seized by the theatre as by a whirlwind of higher forces." He considered formal theatres with their proscenium arches and playwrights with their scripts "a hindrance to the magic of genuine ritual."[9]

Final years

The return from Ireland brought about the beginning of the final phase of Artaud's life, which was spent in different asylums. When France was occupied by the Nazis, friends of Artaud had him transferred to the psychiatric hospital in Rodez, well inside Vichy territory, where he was put under the charge of Dr. Gaston Ferdière. Ferdière began administering electroshock treatments to eliminate Artaud's symptoms, which included various delusions and odd physical tics. The doctor believed that Artaud's habits of crafting magic spells, creating astrology charts, and drawing disturbing images were symptoms of mental illness. The electroshock treatments created much controversy, although it was during these treatments—in conjunction with Ferdière's art therapy—that Artaud began writing and drawing again, after a long dormant period. In 1946, Ferdière released Artaud to his friends, who placed him in the psychiatric clinic at Ivry-sur-Seine.[6]

Artaud was encouraged to write by his friends, and interest in his work was rekindled. He visited an exhibition of works by Vincent van Gogh which resulted in a study Van Gogh le suicidé de la société [Van Gogh, The Man Suicided by Society], published by K éditeur, Paris, 1947 which won a critics' prize.[10] He recorded Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de dieu [To Have Done With the Judgment of God] between 22 and 29 November 1947. This work was shelved by Wladimir Porché, the director of the French Radio, the day before its scheduled airing on 2 February 1948. The performance was prohibited partially as a result of its scatological, anti-American, and anti-religious references and pronouncements, but also because of its general randomness, with a cacophony of xylophonic sounds mixed with various percussive elements. While remaining true to his Theatre of Cruelty and reducing powerful emotions and expressions into audible sounds, Artaud had utilized various, somewhat alarming cries, screams, grunts, onomatopoeia, and glossolalia.

As a result, Fernand Pouey, the director of dramatic and literary broadcasts for French radio, assembled a panel to consider the broadcast of Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de dieu. Among the approximately 50 artists, writers, musicians, and journalists present for a private listening on 5 February 1948 were Jean Cocteau, Paul Éluard, Raymond Queneau, Jean-Louis Barrault, René Clair, Jean Paulhan, Maurice Nadeau, Georges Auric, Claude Mauriac, and René Char. Although the panel felt almost unanimously in favor of Artaud's work, Porché refused to allow the broadcast. Pouey left his job and the show was not heard again until 23 February 1948 at a private performance at the Théâtre Washington.

In January 1948, Artaud was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. He died shortly afterwards on 4 March 1948, alone in the psychiatric clinic, at the foot of his bed, clutching his shoe. It was suspected that he died from a lethal dose of the drug chloral hydrate, although it is unknown whether he was aware of its lethality. The clinic is located in Ivry-Sur-Seine, which is a commune in the southeastern suburbs of Paris. Thirty years later, French radio finally broadcast the performance of Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de dieu.

Jerzy Grotowski.

Jerzy Marian Grotowski 11 August 1933 – 14 January 1999) was an innovative Polish theatre director and theorist whose approaches to acting, training and theatrical production have significantly influenced theatre today. He was born in Rzeszów, in South-eastern Poland in 1933 and studied acting and directing at the Ludwik Solski Academy of Dramatic Arts in Kraków and Russian Academy of Theatre Arts in Moscow. He debuted as a director in 1959 in Kraków with Eugène Ionesco's play Chairs and shortly afterwards founded a small Laboratory Theatre in 1959 in the town of Opole in Poland. During the 1960s, the company began to tour internationally and his work attracted increasing interest. As his work gained wider acclaim and recognition, Grotowski was invited to work in the United States and he left Poland in 1982. Although the company he founded in Poland closed a few years later in 1984, he continued to teach and direct productions in Europe and America. However, Grotowski became increasingly uncomfortable with the adoption and adaptation of his ideas and practices, particularly in the US. So, at what seemed to be the height of his public profile, he left America and moved to Italy where he established the Grotowski Workcenter in 1985 in Pontedera, near Pisa. At this centre he continued his theatre experimentation and practice and it was here that he continued to direct training and private theatrical events almost in secret for the last twenty years of his life. Suffering from leukemia and a heart condition, he died in 1999 at his home in Pontedera.

Biography

Jerzy Grotowski was born on 11 August 1933 in the city of Rzeszów, Poland. When the war came in 1939, the strong familial bond that the family shared was severed. His father entered the war and did not return, and his mother, brother and himself moved to the small village of Nienadówka. It was in Nienadówka that the young Grotowski had several essential experiences that would shape him and his work in the future. His mother was also of great influence, with her strong opinions on unity and community.

source: wikipedia