Frantic Assembly Workshop

Frantic Assembly

“Start with movement and write a story from there”.

“Always move forward not backwards”.

What we did in the workshop…

Lifts

·         Leg lift – Stand hip to hip with feet in a parallel second position. Lean into each other’s hips, trying to create a vertical line between your bodies. When ready, lift the two feet in the middle and balance.

 

·         Side lift- Again stand side to side with feet in a parallel second position. The person who is lifting holds the others waste and the person being lifted applies pressure with their hand on the lifters shoulder (the one that is furthest away from them). The lifter lifts sideways and upwards. Once mastered they can then start putting the person that they lifted down in a different place that they picked them up from.

 

 

·         Clamp lift- The person being lifted bends their arm and places it behind the shoulder of the lifter. They then apply pressure so that they can support themselves. The lifter then bends their knees, keeping a straight back, and lifts the person whilst holding their waist. Again you can start to move the person a couple of steps and place them down somewhere else once you have mastered the lift.

 

 

Partner routine

We had to touch our partner’s body, using the head and torso only, five times each and then squeeze the part that we touched. Then using the same movements, we then took it in turns so that she would touch, then I would touch etc. We then started to rehearse the routine, taking out the squeeze to make the sequence more fluid, but still lingering long enough to keep the significance of the movement. We then added a push and a pull in the middle of the routine to create a more interesting transition between the movements. Once we had rehearsed this we then included a side lift and clamp lift for more transitions between the movements. We then rehearsed and perform this sequence of movements in front of the class and watched other pairs. Then, as a class, we commented on each other’s pieces sharing if we thought we had seen any stories/themes/moods emerging from their movements. This is when we could experiment with speed, dynamics, focus/eyeline,  and adding other people and props (e.g chairs or a full cup of water) to see if it changed the qualities of the movement or the stories that we had originally thought of.

Summary…

1)      Touch, squeeze, move

2)      Make movements  fluid, take out squeeze

3)      Add push and pull

4)      Add X2 lifts

5)      Rehearse

6)      Perform

7)      EXPERIEMENT!!!

 

 

Group lifts

Front lift

Back lift

 

 

Wall walking

 

Rhythm game

·         8 jumps turn 8

·         Repeat but  add: clap and 4

·         Repeat but add: reach up and 6

·         Repeat but add: right leg forward back on 1,2

What have I gained from this workshop?

From this workshop I learnt that you don’t always have to have a stimulus when you start devising. You can create movement and work with that: seeing where it takes you and what stories emerge from this. I think this is a really interesting way to start devising as different relationships and dynamics may emerge that you may not have been thought of or come to life if the initial idea hadn’t started with movement.

 

“Frantic assembly” and Peter Brook recap

“Frantic assembly” and Peter Brook recap

Peter Brook

“Once within a theatre an audience cannot whip itself into being 'better' than it is.”

Ø  Performers must accept the fact that there is nothing that an audience to do to ‘better’ themselves. The audience contribute the amounts of enthusiasm and interest that they want and it is up to the actor to read this and adapt to the situation.

“The audience had seen itself in action, it had seen how many layers silence can contain.”

Ø  If a piece of theatre is engaging, the audience can be silent and not react at all. The power of their silence is what speaks for them.

“Theatre is always a self-destructive art, and it is always written on the wind.”

Ø  Theatre inevitably self-destructs as what it is and the reactions of people are constantly changing. What was once a great piece of theatre can never truly be recreated again as the moment has passed where the audience are ‘right’ and the context and content of the piece are exactly ‘right’. Theatre is written for the time and once that time has passed, it loses its initial impact.

“The theatre has often been called a whore…whores take money and then go short on the pleasure.”

Ø Theatres are much like ‘whores’: as in they love taking people’s ‘money’ but ‘go short on the pleasure’. Theatres charge great deals of money for people to come and their watch shows, the people come with high expectations from the price they’ve paid, yet leave without the feeling of being entertained or satisfied.

“If you just let a play speak, it may not make a sound. If what you want is for the play to be heard, then you must conjure its sound from it.”

Ø  You can’t expect to simply read the words of a play for it to speak. It is your job as an actor, director etc. to bring life to it in order to have the message of the play heard and understood fully.  

 “The theatre has no exact place in society, no clear purpose, it only exists in fragments: one theatre chases money, another chases glory, another chases emotion, another chases politics, another chases fun.”

Ø There are many types of people in society and they all view the theatre in different ways. For this reason, theatre then aims itself at these different types of people who chase different things and therefore it fragments itself: making it less powerful.

So, what is deadly theatre?

In my opinion, any aspect of theatre has the potential to become deadly theatre. Deadly theatre is: the critics who don’t speak up, the young man acting Shakespeare in a way made long before his time, the box office whores who sell their audiences short and take the money pleasures for themselves, the attempt to recreate the same impact of theatre once the moment has passed and many, many more.

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Frantic Assembly

What do they do?

Frantic Assembly creates “thrilling, energetic and unforgettable theatre”.

They create works that reflects contemporary culture. They do this using a unique physical style that combines movement, design, music and text.

They have performed/created/collaborated in 30 countries across the world.

The company was formed by Artistic director Scott Graham and Artistic Steven Hogget in Swansea, Wales (1994) where they met at university. They “formed the company with the desire to do something different”.

Recent Productions:

Ø  “Things I know to be true”

Ø  “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”

Ø  “Lovesong”

Useful links…

Frantic Assembly Masterclass: Building Blocks for Devising

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUqZPfGIX6U

Frantic Assembly Masterclass: Learning to Fly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4mXhW7TXQ8

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O704ld5WQnk

Devising/Performance Art Introduction

Devising/Performance Art Introduction

What is devised theatre?

It is an idea that comes from a stimulus. These ideas then undergo a creative and collaborative process (whereby there is no “official” positions, e.g a director, everyone helps with everything) to create a performance. It is also free form meaning that it crosses multiple disciplines and can include other aspects such as dance, multimedia and puppetry.

What problems can it throw up?

Ø  You can become stuck when you run out of/ lose track of ideas.

Ø  You can have too many ideas, making decisive decisions hard.

Ø  You may not have a stimulus.

Ø  You may not know where or how to start.

Ø  Too much focus on imagery can result in a lack of content.

Ø  As this area of theatre is more subjective, it is more open to criticism.

What is exciting about devised theatre?

Ø  It is an experimental process

Ø  There is no right or wrong way

Ø  Group may create ideas that you may not have thought of yourself

Ø  There is no set out “ending” so you don’t know where your group will end up

Ø  Every piece is unique and original – you have complete ownership over what you have created.

“Devised theatre can start from anything. It is determined and defined by a group of people who set up an initial framework or structure to explore and experiment with ideas, images, concepts, themes or specific stimuli that might include music, text, objects, paintings or movement… A devised theatre product is work that has emerged from and been generated by a group of people working in collaboration…devising is liberating and allows you to create anything.”
                                                                                                                                                     - Allison Oddey.

The Framework of devising includes:

Ø  Structure (episodic, linear etc.)

Ø  Style/ form (physical, natural, epic, total etc.)

Ø  Practitioners (relating to particular chosen style)

Ø  Genre (comedic, tragedy, horror, dramatic etc.)

Examples of devising companies include…

Forced entertainment

The Wooster group

Idle motion

Station house opera

From watching these companies I realised that devising doesn’t always have to make sense and it doesn’t necessarily match up to the stereotypical conventions of what people perceive theatre to be. For example, the Station Houses Opera created a piece where dominos are toppling over around London, and the word or concept of ‘theatre’ didn’t even cross my mind.

Classwork

 In class we redid our short devised pieces but added aspects of physical theatre to my groups piece. We did this by adding aspects of mirroring, shared speech and physical representing an argument by pulling the person trapped in the middle of it from side to side. Different groups had different aspects to embellish their original pieces, so as my group worked on physical theatre, other groups focused on adding aspects such as multimedia puppetry and performance art.

We also looked at making a puppet with five plastic cups. From this short exercise we learn that it can be quite difficult to bring objects to life and make all the different parts of it move with perfect synchronicity.

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We also looked at the roles that different people take within a group.

What role do I take within the group?

According to Meredith Belbin’s ideas on the roles within teams…

I am a plant:

®     Introverted but intellectually dominant

®     Source of original ideas and proposals

®     Very imaginative and intelligent

®     Resents criticism