Lesson 3 - Story and Character

In today's session we started creating some material for our piece. A lot of the practices we used centred around the ensemble work, story telling, character and Yoshi Oida energy and natural progression (Jo-ha-kyū):

Clapping - In traditional Japanese theatre they believe in performance there should be an element of beginning slowly, speeding up, reaching a peak then losing it to then start back up on this process. This simulating with a simple clapping game. We all started off clapping slowly out of time then slowly came together reached a climax, petered out then started the process. This exercise was really good at demonstrating how this natural flow is present within the natural world thus it should always exists within the theatrical world. It also helped us as a cast to get in tune with each other. We can use this progression within all areas of our performance.

Object inspired character - This part of the session didn't go so well. This was because as an ensemble we weren't comfortable enough to just throw ourselves and take risks with spontaneous characterisation. It is quite scary when you don't have confidence in what you are about to experiment with. I personally feel like the character I created was too complex to create a simple and interesting story with. This isn't all entirely negative though. We learnt that in order to be comfortable within our own performance unless we have a strong character to pair it with. We now know if this piece is going to work we are going need to have well mapped characters within this bar.

One sentence story - In order to get our minds into the mind space for creating spontaneously. This did actually help with getting our heads ready for bigger things. There were some really interesting moments in this exercise most of them comedic. It is much easier to create funny moments on the spot than predetermined. If we wish to use comedy within our piece it should definitely come from an improved place.