Just to let you know, Andrew and I wont be able to make it tomorrow night unfortunately! Hope everything goes ok! x

Stories, Status and Space

Ok. New People. Gina, Giedre, Andrew, Pierre, Gina, Kendra and Marlo.

Hopefully we have all the emails now.

We are looking at Stories again. Anna and Bryony re-tell their school-stories from last week. Again, we listen o them. We notice the way that they're told as well as what the stories are. About the physicality of the telling. The gestures of the tellers. The faces of the tellers.

In between times, we contact improvise and , later, non-contact improvise.

But today's stories are more centred on an elder us. In the realm of a first kiss. Or a first love. The older us. Everyone has something to tell. Marlo telling about a boy in American school called Randy. About how they hugged. But she's not sure whether they ever kissed... About Paul offering to give some gloves to one girl who always wore her sleeves over her hands... and how she then just disappeared from school one day. Kendra plucking up the courage to text a boy who wouldn't give her a straight answer....

We look at status. Everybody is given their own number from one to nine - each written on a scrap of paper. That is their status. One is lowest. Nine highest. The situation is a some kind of party. They have to mingle. And then, after, to guess the number each had on their scraps.

Next time round, I whisper a status in everybody's ear. Most are 1. Two are 9. Not much conversation. Then, we change the situation. The first day of school. Everybody is a one. Everybody WANTS to talk. But everybody is shy. Hesitant. Tongue-tied. We play with this for a while. We practice AWKWARD.

Finally we look at telling stories in space. By where we are in space. And how we are in space. The idea is simple. Two people. One on either side of the room. The only instruction: negotiate the space between yourselves. Andrew and I begin. Later pairings include Kendra and Bryony and Marlo and Pierre. And each time is unique.

It raises questions of: who is the most powerful one of the two at any point in the exercise. About what physicality tells which story. About whether this is a 'story' of people who know one another or not. Whether it is two stories rolled into one. About openness and closed-ness.
About what we 'feel' as the performer and what is seen.

And many others.

This post is meant to be a guide to remind me when I come to think before next week's session, so please feel free to write a posting of your own thoughts, however short or long.

Week Two

This week the group is bigger.

We look at Stories. Apart from Contact and non-contact improvisation, we begin to get to know more about one another.

We play World Map. We locate where we were:

1. This morning when we woke up
2. Where we were on the Millenium and
3. On our first day at school.

We play two true, one false, after we've spent time telling each other about our lives and, in particular, about school experiences.

From this, each of us takes it in turns to tell another story about ourselves at school. Tricks we played, trouble we got into with the teachers, accidents, embarrassments. Insects, horses, blood.

None of this is acted out. We just tell it sat in a chair.

Christian tells his in Italian. Anna in Ukrainian.

We note the energy involved. The delight of the storyteller. The delight in recalling. The delight of the telling.

(The image above is an illustration for 1001 Nights.)

Week One

Drew, Joseph and Me.

Contact Improvisation...

We work on the Dumb Show from Hamlet. We perform it with two performers, although there are at least three characters....

We try transforming from one character to another - from the queen to the poisoner, and then the dead king to the poisoner - THEATRICALLLY and with no exiting or time-gap or costume change.

Hello and Apologies

My Internet Connection has been down all week, so I've been unable to set up this blog until today. I will invite everyone now who's email address I have and then we can all start posting...