Finally We Finished the Story!

We finally got to the end of the story.  It took a while, but we have worked slowly and carefully, and spent time developing our physical and sensory repertoires.

This evening was a lively and funny evening.  I decided to be more challenging than usual, and asked more of the group members than I have done previously.  They rose to the occasion, and we had lots of fun, as the session was full of humour, which offset any anxiety around completing some quite challenging tasks.

Toungue Twisters
In order to get people to think about pronunciation I made up some tongue twisters.  I used similar sounding letters to make them as difficult as possible, but in practice, once people had finished laughing at some of the ridiculous sentences I had some up with, they didn't have too much difficulty saying the sentence.  the most silly, and difficult sentence was "Don't Try To Turn Tim's Tractor Too Tightly, Tractors Don't Terribly Tightly Turn", and the others weren't much better.

Once we had each mastered a Tongue Twister, we took it in turns to stand on the stage and take on a role.  The group gave each person an age, gender, occupation and mood.  I went first and was given 6 years old, a boy, a lumberjack and sad.  Again there was a lot of humour.  At this point the humour is a good thing, because people feel they are sharing in a game rather than being put to the test.

Finally, we each spoke our sentence again, in role only this time another member of the group had to go onto the stage with the actor and give them a verbal prompt/ motivation to say their line.  This would normally be a question, to which the line would be an answer.

Evolution
We then did a physical warm up before going through an excercise that I devised last night, and which would be very good as a therapeutic session, although here we didn't enter the realms of therapy, it was easy to see how it could be used in terms of self exploration, personal role development, story work etc.

At the start everyone was asked to curl up into a ball - that was the egg stage.  Then they placed themselves into a random position, one body part at a time, which was to be the fully evolved stage.  By degrees they found three other positions that would gradually take them back to the egg stage.  In each position I asked them to commit to memory how the position felt, what thoughts were going through their minds, and to label the position with a word.

Finally, each person, simulaneously went into the egg position, and then moved gradually, to the sound of 10 slow soft drum beats, to the second, and then the third, fourth and fifth.  Each position was held for some time in silence as the group members focussed on the sensory, emotive and cognitive experiences that the sculp suggested to them.

At the end we chatted about it, and each person had had quite a personal journey through the sculpts.  It had also been an enjoyable experience, which of course, was the intention.

I pointed out the connection between this task and the method we are using to perform the Japanese Fairy tale that we are currently using.

The final half hour was spent improvising the rest of the story, and instead of going through it one move at a time, I read the story in segments, tapping the drum, or one of the actors tapping the drum 10 times between each segment, as the cast slowly moved into what felt to be the right sculpt for that part of the narrative.

We did this twice, and then the session had to end because of time.

As we now have a complete cast of regular attenders, we will now focus further on role development, and begin to rehearse the piece as a complete work, rather than one part at a time.  Each actor will end up with a sequence of movements and sculpts of their own, rather like a dance.  These movements and sculpts will interact and connect with those of the other actors, and reflect the unfolding story.  The final piece will be mostly slow and meditative, with a very energetic and noisy section in the middle, when there is a storm.  Now we have a definate physical structure to the performance, I have said that I will mark out the story into sections, and we will have the physical movements scripted into the story, so that rehearsals will become more focussed.  I envisage that the other two stories that we perform will take less time to rehearse as we now have a definate method/style of performance that has been devised through the previous rehearsals.