Movement in Performance: February 2016

Over the course of the past few sessions we have come together as a full company in order to start exploring possibilities for our performance.Using music used by Frantic Assembly themselves, we began with two chairs on stage, and one duo sat in them. This pair would loop their own chair motifs twice through, and then the next pair would come in and disrupt them, remove them from their seats and sit there themselves and perform their duet. The idea behind this was that should the duo not be removed, they would continue to loop their movement indefinitely.

In this video, we watched one another's motifs and aimed to highlight moments which presented opportunities to create unusual transitions to remove people from the chairs.

In the following session, we continued to develop this idea, now taking it a step further with the remaining pairs travelling in pedestrian manner, mirroring the monotonous, somewhat exasperated dynamics our duets intended to invoke. At different moments, those walking around would transition into the position of the base from our trust exercises, also inspired by Frantic, signalling another to complete the exercise. This became more difficult with the hip lift, as we were unable to use verbal communication to signal to another our intentions of performing it, and who was to be lifted, nor could we simply stop still in the space and wait for someone.

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In the following video we are much more confident and accustomed with the improvised nature of the task, for there is a significant increase in the amount of material we are performing from the last video where there was much more walking.

Now confident with the concept we were exploring, we began to incorporate the table and a single chair, so that we could begin to explore the idea using the other movement.

We then added in the idea mentioned in Frantic's book of Devising Theatre of placing a television at the front of the stage and all performers needing to maintain their focus on the television throughout the performance. On top of this we rotated our performance so that we were unable to look at ourselves in the mirrors whilst performing, which meant our sole focus was able to be on the television. This posed more of a challenge for contact work as we had to further implement means of non verbal communication.

Having fully consolidated the possibilities thus far, we began to look at how we could end the performance. In one session we explored several of these practically, and also mind mapped further ideas. We also turned the performance around in the space, so that we could not watch ourselves in the mirrors and had to rely more on eye contact and peripheral vision. We focussed on one of the ideas presented in Frantic Assembly's book of devising theatre, whereby performers maintain a sustained focus on the television

In first of these, we started from a point of climax, whereby we were running in the space, and gradually sensed coming to stillness as a group without verbal communication. In the second, we explored ending the piece with one person left on stage. We then explored what would happen if we followed the speed of the music, so that by the end, all was done in slow motion. Our fourth exploration was simply improvising in the moment.