Exercises

During the course of the devising process in which we learned about Artaud , we did a series of different exercises that helped us understand what Artaud wanted from his audience. The exercise 'Slow Motion Tennis' Helped us to understand how he physically pushed his actors to extreme lengths to achieve an emotion or an objective on stage. This was also to promote the honesty of actors/characters emotions on stage. We had to play tennis at an unnaturally slow pace which was very physically demanding for us as actors. This exercise also was about keeping concentration throughout the duration of the task as it is very easy to slip out of character or loose focus. An excercise that promoted near enough the same values was the 'Walk The Grid' excercise as it was about walking while keeping concentration and energy even while being tired. The  key to all these excercises is maintaining focus even while doing physically demanding tasks and physicality. The 'No Language Argument' also promotes physicality as it is about managing to portray emotions without being able to use words. An excercise I especially found interesting was the 'Emotion Line Task'. This is because I found myself facinated by how the physical actions got bigger and bigger as each emotion was explored. The emotion line that I found myself in was 'Love'. This one was interesting as there are many different forms of love that could be portrayed (Which was said in the feedback). I started with the idea of 'partner' love and I found it really interesting to see the physicality increase up the line.