Workshop 3

Workshop 3:

In this lesson we were working off an exercise inspired by the teachings of Forced Entertainment who are an experimental contemporary theatre company made up of six people.

5 Pictures:

I was presented with 5 random pictures in front of me. From these I had to create a story. I took a more philosophical approach to the task and instead of creating lots of parts I set it on one topic that allowed the audience to ponder.  My story was the following:

A dog sat on a chair and thought to himself... We live in a world so self centred that we pass thousands of people everyday and yet never vary our path... We see the world changing but do not wish to act, why does mankind around him destroy and not create?

I chose to almost write a part of the script. My choices varied massively to the class, as everyone else seemed to create characters or first person responses. I found some of these very interesting however some seemed generic and obvious. I think the key to this task was to think how your photos are un linked and work of this rather than how they are linked. I enjoyed working of pictures as a stimulus; it was an exciting change to text and showed us a new way to create scripted work rather than writing from scratch. We only had a short time to create which I feel helped as it meant I reacted with my first thoughts, making something rather experimental.

10 Pictures:

I combined my pictures with my partners and we decided to take a completely new approach. The picture that stuck out to us was a building with a door on the second floor and a dog on a lead. We felt we would flip this and create a parallel universe where people are slaves and dogs are the leaders. We decided to use the song ‘New Slaves by Kanye West to immerse our audience. Other groups took a lighter approach making it more comedic and veering away from the experimental stimulus. I feel ours was effective in showing a juxtaposition of roles and giving the audience a new outlook on who is to tell what in life.

Initial Ideas:

We began choosing initial ideas for our Tate Modern inspired art duets. We chose to base our piece on a video we watched at the exhibition about blind artists. The thing that pulled me towards it was the concept of how thy perceive things to look in life they have never viewed. From this Will and I began to think of what we could paint. I came up with the idea of painting heaven and hell, as this is blind to humans. We do not know what it looks like but only have influenced thoughts. This is the break down of our performance:

Performance break down:

•Start off in foetus position, we will be covered in paint with blindfolds on.

• Break out of position and begin to unwind into position.

• Go to opposite positions and begin to paint.

• Audience will be in cardboard boxes with slits.

• Painting with feet and hands.

It is early days but I am pleased with the progress we have made and ideas we have come with in regards to our duet performance.