Click on the title above for information on the Exploratory Session with Olya Petrakova and Bryan Brown (ARTEL): Discovering Trickster energy in the Creative Process.
Starting at 10.30am this morning
CPR has invited some of the most exciting and diverse Wales based and international theatre directors to Aberystwyth for an intensive participatory project that offers a rare opportunity for both experienced and emerging directors to gather and share the methods, approaches and skills of professional directing practice via laboratories and presentations, demonstrations and dialogue.
Today we had another exploratory with Olya and Bryan. We started with a quick warm-up and then moved on to some exercises. For the first of these we were given the short text, “Oh the Thames”. We explored this, firstly using impulses from within ourselves, internal impulses, while thinking out imaging our dreams. We then explored the same phrase and dreams using external impulses, impulses from outside ourselves. Finally we tried to find a place in between these two, taking from both the internal and the external impulses.
ReplyDeleteWe then did a second exercise. We were given a text by Daniil Kharms. It was split into sections, of which we all read one. We then voted on which section the group would work on for the morning. After deciding we re-read the text individually and had a brief discussion about it, and our thoughts relating to it. We then improvised around the text, not speaking the words but moving in the space. Much of this improvisation was working with the absurd. Olya who was standing out and watching gave some suggestions or directions as we carried out this.
What Olya and Bryan were working with and what was discussed in this exploratory was the idea of focus. How the focus functions in relation to the impulses, pulling from the internal and the external impulses, and how this works in relation to fiction, or the fiction of the text. We were trying to find the zero point in the exercises, that point somewhere in between the internal and external. The performers were aiming to speak from where they are in moment. They were trying to remove some of the fictions or masks that they use. Trying to discover which impulse works for them and why. Pulling from those impulses and pushing that as far as they can, in order to see where that takes them. This had some very interesting results in the last exercise described above