4th July - Faries, the Elements, Thunder Gods and Peasants

Most of the group turned up at 6pm, which was great as we had time to focus in detail on one of the characters.  We focussed on one of the narrators, the fairy, who will be reading "The Good Thunder". 

It is amazing how as time passes the connection that people get with the role sometimes fades.  The choice here is to develop a new role, or to try to re-connect with the original.  It has been a long time since we worked on the 'fairy' narrator, and even longer since we last read "The Good Thunder", and the time we spent re-making contact with the role was needed.  Now we have cast the roles, it is up to each individual to ensure that they keep some connection with their roles between workshops, and also up to myself, and the rest of the group, to ensure that we have time during workshops to keep working, developing, refreshing the themes of the stories.

The props used during the 'elements' workshop.  Discussed later. 

I have found it useful in the past to cast the whole group in roles that support the one that is being developed.  To this aim, as a group, we created a scene, a clearing in a forest, by a stream, in which we all became fairies.  I chose to become a fairy in this, and I'm not sure whether this was the best way to facilitate the experience.  Would I have been better staying out of role and coaching the actors into role, helping them to develop them from 'outside' the scene, facilitating the play, or is it better to join the actors, and to draw them into role from 'inside' the action, being a part of the play.  feedback from the group would be useful here.

Enrolling and derolling the actor playing the fairy narrator involved, as in dramatherapy practice, choosing a space in which she would take on the role, and before she entered the space, asking her some characteristics of the role, and what was different between her 'self', and the role she was about to take on.  By focussing on the differences, the person is able to choose elements of action and behaviour to modify in keeping with the role, and also, the risk of 'overinvolvement' with the role is reduced.  In addition, I am using a ritual during the enrolling process in which the actor enters the space after circling it, gradually taking on the movements that the role would produce.

( nb This would be very important in a clinical population of, for instance, people with certain mental illnesses that make their own role boundaries hard to maintain, such as schizophrenia or some personality disorders.)

A group member gives a workshop on the 'elements'

Tiredness is occasionally an issue for people who have been working all day and travelled to the session in the evening.  Warm ups that facilitate increased energy would be very useful before the practical work, and this is something that I will want to incorporate into future sessions.  Space limits the physical work we can do at present, however we can be creative here because there are several spaces, and though small, warm ups could be done between the spaces, making the physical element of the warm up more dynamic.

Today one of the group gave a workshop, and her chosen subject subject was the elements.  She introduced the session with a table of props, which are photographed above.  The session took the shape of 5 guided visualisations, in which the subjects were the colours, time of year, time of day and physical properties represented by each element.

http://www.compassionatedragon.com/five_elements.html

Astrological symbols could be seen as archetypes, in that they have meanings that are embedded in our cultural zeitgiest.  Today we were introduced to symbols that were slightly different to those we are used to, which added an interesting slant to the experience.

Spiritual symbols or themes, including astrological symbols, bible stories, tarot cards, are all rich in personal and collective meaning, which makes them great for arts workshops.  For dramatherapy practice, however, I would not use them.  For two reasons - firstly, vulnerable people may be seduced by the percieved power held in the symbols, (which are in fact merely props), and may see them as being the vehicle of some transormative power of the session, or even frightened by the percieved spiritual properties - (one person's go(o)d is another person's d'evil).  Secondly, some people think that dramatherapy is much more mystical (or tries to be) that it is (does).  Dramatherapy is based on some pretty firm academic and practical foundations, but it would be a shame to encourage the idea that there is some magical element to it, and using these props may encourage this idea.  Saying that, I am very happy to use these symbols in a drama workshop, and we certainly got some interesting ideas through the visualisations.

In the final part of the session, we returned to The Good Thunder, and began our extensive reworking of the sculpts.  We did some shuffling of roles - due to having possibly lost one group member and gained a few others.  We also, having learned from the developmental techniques used in the other stories (which were still being worked out when we started with The Good Thunder), have simplified the approach that we use to portraying the stories.  The idea of this is to make the performance smoother, less laboured.  There are also less characters, as we did not feel the need to show every element of the story and some parts, that were just mentioned, did not need to be shown.

All of those who were present in our early days liked these changes.  However it was acknowledged that some of the dramatic intensity that had been previously contained in the sculpts had been lost, and we need to return to some of the earlier exercises in movement, balance and focus in order to regain some of this.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/15693951@N00/4330226831/

Because some people will be playing roles that are quite similar in 'feel', we will also need to do some exercises in distinguishing between the roles, to ensure that they do not leak into each other, creating confusion of purpose in performance.  This is what happens when people become typecast, and they end up just playing one role, which is boring for the actor and to the audience confusing and lacking in authenticity.

http://patrickmccoy.typepad.com/jic/folklore/

This is one of the representations of Rai Den, the Thunder God, that can be found.  There are various depictions of Rai Den, which reflect to some extent the cultural views of the time and the artist.  This one appeared to be the one that suggested the era and the ideas of Japan when the stories may have first been written.  I don't know when these stories were first told, but they were first translated into English in the late 1800s and early 1900s.  This meant that many of the illustrations available to us tend to be from England during this era.  Whilst they are very beautiful, I wanted to try to delve a bit further back in time, to see how the Japanese people would have depicted the characters at the time the stories were first told.