week 1 - introduction wb 1/9/14

For this unit we are performing a piece of contemporary theatre using physical theatre and we have been given two potential options. The first is 'The Fire Raisers' by Max Frisch and the second is 'Streets of crocodile'. We are looking at an adapted version by Complicite but it was originally a collection of short stories written in Polish by Bruno Schulz. Before we even looked any further at these we explored physical theatre to increase our knowledge and have ideas of how to incorporate this into our performance. We looked at doing various lifts and twists, some successful and some not so successful. These could be used within performances but we would all have to be professional and trust other or they wouldn't work and someone could get hurt. Personally being a sporty person I found all the lifts and twist quite easy to do and I was fully comfortable doing them, this is also down to working with Matt as I do have a lot of trust in him. I feel my professionalism was good during this work as I was fully concentrated on all the tasks given also I was in the correct rehearsal wear so this gave me no limitations. Next time we do a physical theatre workshop I would like to do lifts I'm bigger groups. Moreover later in the week we did a workshop with the epilogue and prologue of 'The Fire Raisers'. We were split into two groups and my group was given the epilogue and we had to improvise a scene using inspiration from the script. We first had a read through as a group and I was given the part of Biedermann for the read through and I kept this part for the improvising. I feel this part was fairly limited in epilogue as he didn't say or do much on the script but I challenged that by making little things really big. There was a physical theatre movement by the rest of the group walking together creating a bike and they all walked in time. During this my character and Drew's character followed behind and we then started to create unison by walking in time with the rest of the group. I felt at first I was a bit lazy because the script didn't tell me much about my character but once I got into the flow of it I feel as a group we created a nice and engaging piece of work.