Physical theatre creation- 21/02/23

Chair duet based off work by Frantic Assembly.

What was my initial response to the stimulus and why?

The stimulus which was given to us was a picture of a man sitting alone surrounded by rubble and broken buildings. Me and Zack looked at all the different possibilities this could be, we looked at having a futuristic approach to creating this and making it very dystopian, When I first looked at it, I thought of the idea of the man discovering a new planet which is completely different to the one he previously was in. Me and Zack the idea of someone else being within this scene but not in the picture almost as if the man was reminiscing on the times and feelings he had. We then though about this being a past relationship and how although they are not together, their life still goes on as if they are.      

What were the key stages in developing your physical theatre piece. 

 When creating our duets, we decided we liked the idea of chair duets and how intricate we could be with them. We kept the first section form a sequence we created earlier in the lesson and kept adding on to create this sequence. We wanted our moves to be in unison, one section where our moves weren't in unison was the section where Zack is on the chair, and I am standing next to him whilst he moves my arm around his upper body, we then repeat this little section with me being on the chair and Zack is standing next to me we then finish this little section with Zack pushing me in one direction and himself running in a different direction. We really like this little section within this duet as it symbolized the stimuli of the man sitting alone, we helped create the loneliness by putting our chairs back-to-back. 

What were the physical theatre practitioners that influenced you and why? 

The physical theatre practitioner that influenced our work the most was Frantic Assembly as we really like a technique they use called 'round by through'. We watched a video of how this is done at the start of the lesson and it's as simple as placing your hand onto your partner and them finding was to move around, beside it or through it. In the exercise we did before creating our duets, we had to choose out of our pairs who would be A and B and A had to place their hand 3 times on B or move a body part of B, this was repeated with B doing 3 hand and arm movements, we carried on doing this until we could to 15 moves and after the 15th move, we had to use one move to get back to our starting position to repeat the phrase again and again. I really liked this technique as it makes you explore moves like going through each other arms which wouldn't really do in any regular face in dance. It also builds your performance with such simple moves which I really liked, and thought was really effective.