Mystere
When my younger brother and I were little we used to draw maps of fantasy islands in old exercise books .'Miss Herville, Upper 3 Religious Studies' metamorphosized into the strange land of Glodongy. We mapped out the mountains, the prophets lair, castles and drew the strange creatures that inhabited this world with biology textbook arrows pointing to their different parts, (leopards paws, owls beak etc.)
More than twenty years later I'm doing almost exactly the same, which is in some ways a little worrying and in others extremely satisfying.
We have left the territory of grotesques and have gone back to our original white bodies but are re-exloring them as strange creatures with a slightly different lilt. They have never been human, but dressed in human clothes, mocking human behaviour and society they became more humanistic. Now they're being stipped back to their inhuman nakedness and added to.
We had a fascinating lesson with Krikor, who is amazing, on thursday. He brought different materials; cardboard; brown paper; sheets of clear, floating plastic; thin wooden sticks and tape. Our brief, as usual, was to change our bodies.
Even with only 15 minutes to work on them people came up with some very exciting propositions, espcially those who did the LEM last year.
(To red herring for a moment, we had a very amusing talk today from two ex-students currently doing a play at Theatre du ront-point. They talked about how their set consisted of one small box placed on the stage and how that they never felt sure about where it should go. 'Where should we put it?' one says to the other. 'We don't know, neither of us did the LEM'.)
Going back to changing our bodies, the most effective were those where you couldn't see any body at all. C**** and S**** nearly had it. The creature created (creature and create - look at how similar those two words are linguistically!!) from stretchy, slightly shinny fabric stretched over a frame of poles moved in two parts and was almost alive until the poles started falling down or the arms lifted too high revealing S**** self-conciously giggling.
L** did one with three different colours. Grey on her head, a block of purple paper in an oblong block that she held in one hand and a smaller blue one in the other. She covered herself entirely with the translucent plastic, so you stopped being aware of her manipulating them and saw the three coloured shapes moving, which did somehow become a creature - until the clear plastic sheet fell off and then we saw L** holding bit of crunched up paper with a grey, netted hat on.
I find all this very exciting theatrically. As though it's something that I really will be able to use in the future in work I create and in my teaching. What I really want is to be able to take it further. Not just stop with what is proposed by the teachers. They give you a taster, but how much more exciting and interesting is where you go with all of this when you leave. My head is already jumping forwards to when I leave in June and what I'm going to do. As the moment although I have some ideas overall, as Krikor would say, 'on sait pas'. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Oh, and just to finish off, a little advertisment. I went and saw one of the most moving, life changing pieces of theatre I've ever seen, espcially (in my opinion) if you're a woman. So if you're in Paris check out 'Les Ephemeres' at the Theatre du Soleil.
More than twenty years later I'm doing almost exactly the same, which is in some ways a little worrying and in others extremely satisfying.
We have left the territory of grotesques and have gone back to our original white bodies but are re-exloring them as strange creatures with a slightly different lilt. They have never been human, but dressed in human clothes, mocking human behaviour and society they became more humanistic. Now they're being stipped back to their inhuman nakedness and added to.
We had a fascinating lesson with Krikor, who is amazing, on thursday. He brought different materials; cardboard; brown paper; sheets of clear, floating plastic; thin wooden sticks and tape. Our brief, as usual, was to change our bodies.
Even with only 15 minutes to work on them people came up with some very exciting propositions, espcially those who did the LEM last year.
(To red herring for a moment, we had a very amusing talk today from two ex-students currently doing a play at Theatre du ront-point. They talked about how their set consisted of one small box placed on the stage and how that they never felt sure about where it should go. 'Where should we put it?' one says to the other. 'We don't know, neither of us did the LEM'.)
Going back to changing our bodies, the most effective were those where you couldn't see any body at all. C**** and S**** nearly had it. The creature created (creature and create - look at how similar those two words are linguistically!!) from stretchy, slightly shinny fabric stretched over a frame of poles moved in two parts and was almost alive until the poles started falling down or the arms lifted too high revealing S**** self-conciously giggling.
L** did one with three different colours. Grey on her head, a block of purple paper in an oblong block that she held in one hand and a smaller blue one in the other. She covered herself entirely with the translucent plastic, so you stopped being aware of her manipulating them and saw the three coloured shapes moving, which did somehow become a creature - until the clear plastic sheet fell off and then we saw L** holding bit of crunched up paper with a grey, netted hat on.
I find all this very exciting theatrically. As though it's something that I really will be able to use in the future in work I create and in my teaching. What I really want is to be able to take it further. Not just stop with what is proposed by the teachers. They give you a taster, but how much more exciting and interesting is where you go with all of this when you leave. My head is already jumping forwards to when I leave in June and what I'm going to do. As the moment although I have some ideas overall, as Krikor would say, 'on sait pas'. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Oh, and just to finish off, a little advertisment. I went and saw one of the most moving, life changing pieces of theatre I've ever seen, espcially (in my opinion) if you're a woman. So if you're in Paris check out 'Les Ephemeres' at the Theatre du Soleil.
posted by lecoqblogger at 10:55 pm
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