Physical Theatre sections

Today we created our physical theatre pieces within the play.

We started off by creating the dream sequence. We moved around the space exploring our whole bodies. We then started to push our hand away whenever we touched a part of our body. We then all had different ideas in our heads. My one was the fear of closing your eyes and not being able to distinguish between what was a dream and was reality. With this idea in our heads we carried on exploring our bodies. It was very interesting doing this as it felt like a very spiritual thing and it was very interesting to explore.

The 12 then carried on doing this dotted around the space. Watching it from the sides was fascinating. It visually looks very impressive and poignant. The movements of the 12 naturally had some kind of journey that they created. There were moments when certain people would move at the same time, or someone would bend down as someone else on the opposite side would stand up. All of this was very effective and the atmosphere that was created really did feel like they were trapped in a nightmare. I noticed that it looked even more effective when they were all faced in different directions.

We then created the party scene at the end of Act 1. The idea behind this was that it was a student street party; we had all found a place to party after the protest. A group of us come on and start the party then the 12 come on and join in. The 12 have this idea that they are remembering a time in the past where they were at a party like this. The combination of us dancing and the 12 wondering around remembering makes the scene look visually very interesting. To me this scene feels more poignant then I thought it would be. It feels quite chaotic and at some moments it almost feels as if we are inside the nightmare.

The next piece we devised was the riot scene at the end of Act 4. At first the idea we explored was that the people around us were the windows we were smashing etc. So we would do these movements at someone and they would carry that ‘injury’ for a while. When we explored it, it didn’t feel like a riot.

The next thing we explored was having 5 different actions. These were:

1. Escaping from something or someone
2. Punching someone
3. Kneeing someone
4. Jumping up and down, shouting
5. Stand still staring at a burning building

We would then explore these movements within the space. Doing this it felt more like a riot then what we had previously explored, but I felt as if we could do a lot more with it. The idea of having a set list of actions to explore worked really well, but I feel we could make the whole section more atmospheric and poignant for the audience.

I think we worked really well today and we have got a lot of great, visually interesting and exciting material. It was a lot of fun creating these sections and I feel it has got us all excited to start running everything together.