Day One

Day one of this year's project was spent discussing what we want to create at the end of the project and we spent a long time brainstorming ideas. We started with a rough description of what we want to achieve

"create a number of short performances using spoken text, poetry and monologues while incorporating live music and some movement and physical expression work."

As a musician I am looking forward to spending the week trying to enhance the text using music, as well as experimenting with other art forms. However, as a classical musician with two left feet, yesterday's email telling us to wear clothes we can move around in and to be prepared for a physical theatre workshop was a little terrifying!

We began the day with some movement exercises. Shadowing in pairs and increasing the difficulty until we were all moving in a large group, copying each other's intentions and moving as one without words. This was an excellent start to the day for me, proving that as performers we can all communicate through movement and preventing me from spending the week intimidated by my lovely group of dancers and musical theatre students!

We returned to brainstorming and looked at other groups, such as DV8 who are doing similar style performances. Here are the ones I found most effective, we spent a lot of time dissecting what made each one so powerful and entertaining. 

  

A shot of us creating our short piece in the 10 minute slot!

I could see us spending a long time discussing ideas, so we decided to just split into small groups and create something completely disposable. We knew we wanted the end piece to be relevant so we ransacked newspapers to find topics. Our group decided to use an advert for a free bird feeder, using text from the paper then building up to the speaker's excitement for birds and the freedom they had. I played the flute to create bird imagery, with trills and fast motifs that build in pitch and tempo. The speaker and I also joined the dancers in bird like movements and experimenting with the newspapers themselves to create sound.

The afternoon was spent on workshops that, upon reflection, weren't directly suited to our final piece, which is to be performed in Greenwich pubs. We spent an hour using technology to experiment with vocal effects before a physical theatre workshop. Although these skills won't be venue appropriate they encouraged the whole group to be creative in new ways and to consider what effects we can create.

Some shots of the physical theatre workshop. Slightly terrifying but a lot of fun!

I found that today encouraged me to think about aspects of performance that I don't usually come across as a classical musician. Including movement, extremely active warmups and space. I was really impressed with how we worked with each other, there are already a lot of great ideas in the group.