Creations and Transformations

As a facilitator, I am starting to learn to be able to use whatever energy I bring into the session, be that angry, apathy, lighthearted, downcast, troubled...

I also try to encourage others in the group to use whatever energy that they bring into the session.  There is no bad energy.  There is energy that blocks us, energy that we get confused by, frightened by, energy that releases us, energy that drives us.  I call energy that we can use "energy", and energy that we can't use (or rather haven't learned to use yet) "difficult energy" ...

Starting the session with something personal, such as 'the most interesting thing that happened to me today', brings our personal emotional responses to the session.  These emotional responses are the expression of our energy, whether this mostly expressed inwardly, by the physiological experiences we have - churning stomach, racing heart, inertia, or the opposite, restless agitation, or mostly expressed outwardly - e.g., by our non verbal communication - how loud do we speak? how much eye contact are we making?  Is our posture open to the group or are we physically closed off and guarded?  Language wise, we may be critical of others, or eager to please,  we may mumble our words, or enunciate clearly.  Do we sing when we speak or do we have a dull, flat monotone?  Difficult energy - maybe sadness,or fear, might block communication, as well as our ability to be creative and expressive.  This happens when we are trying to work against how we feel, for instance, surviving a day at work whilst in grief, we try to mask our feelings, or block them out of existence, in order to survive the social and practical demands of the day.  This is exhausting and debilitating.

Drama, the way that we do it, aims to release some of this energy.  Allows emotion and all the expressions that go along with it.  Fear, death, love, craving, conflict ...  all of these things can be acted out.  Now the barriers to expression are lifted, we have permission to be how we feel.  Unfortunately, days, weeks, months and years of denying ourselves this inner liberation, mean that we have great difficulty in allowing ourselves, we feel we cannot create, or express, sometimes we have convinced ourselves we do not feel, or we have replaced one emotional response with another, the result being a conflictual, unconvincing presentation that confuses, angers or bores our audience.  So in the workshops that we do, we work with transformation and personal experience, in order to become more aware of our own inner experience, and our outward presentation, taking ownership of ourselves and becoming more comfortable in our expression.

This also results in some really good drama.

In turns, we sculpted the group into a picture, that represented some element of our personal experience.  Having done this, we told a story, a snippet of a story that was represented by the picture.  Each character devised a movement and sound for their improvisational motif.  Then, the creator said "3-2-1-Action!"  And the scene came to life.

As the scene was described, in the positions of the sculpt, the actors began to have some inner experience of their role within the story.  When they devised their motif, they imagined ways that they could describe, physically, their inner experience, as well as move the plot of the story.

After some time, the creator would shout "Freeze!"  or "It's a wrap!", and the characters would once again become statues.  the creator would then take the position of one of the statues, releasing this person to be the next creator.

However this time, the new creator did not make a new sculpt...  They would interpret the existing sculpt in a new way, and describe the new story, and the new characters that it contained.  Whilst this re-creation was occuring, the actors would, in thier frozen state, respond inwardly to their new role, and whilst these physiological changes were occuring, they would use this emotive response, and the cognitive element of "knowing the story", in the decisions that they made in producing their next motif.

There were many themes explored during the session, conflict, monsters, the mob, crime, nature.  These are common themes for our current group to engage in.  We have 2 more weeks left of this terms work.  All the sessions have been improvisations based on the notions of birth, death and transformation or evolution.  From January we will start thinking about our next performance, the theme of this will probably be horror.  Who knows?  Only time will tell.

Seasons - life cycles

 We used lots of props today, which is unusual for konnektiv, but there was a good reason.  I wanted lots of colours, cloths, and sound making implements for the group to map out the four seasons onto the workshop floor.  This would provide us with a space with an ever changing dynamic, and external, physical, shared cues to mood, movement and transformation.

Four Seasons - Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn

Equating with - death, sleep, rest, recuperation and preparation, breaking down, slowing down (winter); beginnings, hope, new life, dance, sun, green shoots, (spring); fruit, productivity, leisure, (sun) decay, colour, harvest, (autumn).

We can make a lot of this cycle as a metaphor for our own experience, in terms of our life, our love and our ideas.  Also many other things, but these were the notions that we focussed on.

We had plenty of people today, so went into groups.  3 groups, one worked with "life", one with "love" and one with "ideas".  Each group devised a movement sequence that describe the theme, in terms of the cycles of the four seasons.

This of course was just the beginning of the workshop, although as far as the group knew, it was an exersise in itself.  this was built up on, because once the groups had performed their devised pieces to each other, and each commented, we continued to use the dramas, along with sculpt, to bring about and experience dramatic transformation, the magic of theatre, on a personal level.

Each group devised a set of sculpts, one for each season, that described the story that had previously been shown in a very fluid manner.  They decided quite randomly at which part of the cycle they would begin and end.

Once they had shown four sculpts, they stayed in position in the last one.  This gave the rest of the group the opportunity to join in, each new person adding a new dimension, or strengthening the original one.  The last person, once everyone else had taken their position, told a story, based on the picture.

This is where the transformation came in.  The picture had been built up based on a shared understanding.  The story teller changed the picture, so for instance, a group of creatures evolving from a swamp became zombies in a horror movie; elderly people walking next to some autumnal shrubbery, were now fleeing from a burning fire; young men, distressed by ardent female attention, became a group of bitter, disappointed carnival competitors, who all blamed one person for their failed attempt to win the cup.

As the story teller described the new scene, the actors sometimes felt an inner shift, a transformation, so that once the story had been told, even though their position had not changed, their energy had done, and the movement reflected this change in energy, and the picture, once moving, was very different dynamically and graphically, to the original story.

I was very taken with this transformative nature that the workshop took.  Not everyone felt it the same, though most people entered into the spirit of it.  In terms of personal development, personal themes were played out, and an unexpected variety of personal experience was felt, shared and communicated, which helps to broaden our own expressive abilties and range of potential dynamic responses.

Story making, birth, death. Horror.

At the start of tonight's workshop, 5 of us sat in a circle, with a selection of instruments.  I instructed the group that they were to create a story.  The story was to begin with the birth, and end with the death, of a being.  The instruments were to illustrate the narrative as it transpired with sound effects.  I gave no other instruction.  We sat in silence for some time before the first threads of the story began to come forth, awkwardly, hesitantly, and eventually, the story came to life, as creature was born that became an object of horror, fear, pain despair and eventually, death.  None of us guessed at the start of the story, that it would be so horrific.  

As the story was told, individuals in the group attempted to steer it this way and that - at times attempting to stem the flow of the horror, to bring redemption to the tale.  But it was not to be.  A blind, kindly priest was drained of his blood and innards, his skeletal remains being found later by the terrified congregation.  An exorsist came, and drove the evil from the creature, leaving the creature nothing but a mass of impotent pain and torment, and who then crawled into a corner and died.

We then took it in turns to direct a short phrase of action from the story, taking on a character in our own story.  One phrase showed the exorcist driving the spirit from the creature.  The evil spirit was destroyed, leaving the creature drained and heaving for breath.  

Dark, cold nights, tiredness, burden of life, dissapointments.  These were some of the themes that we had brought with us to the session this evening, and it was fitting that we ended up creating a tale of such pain and despair.  

I am glad that we don't feel the need to only create nice pretty things, but that we can dig into the darkest parts of our souls and drag out the things of pain, despair, anger, revenge and tragedy.  

The surprise to me, looking back, was that the birth was full of pain, horror and torment, whereas the death came as a peaceful relief, the end of an agonised struggle.  In life, we often think we see it very differently, that birth is a joyous and wonderful event, and death a great tragedy, even, in our culture, being seen as an unnatural event that we must defend ourselves against with great vigour.

In one of the scenes, the final death of the creature was depicted, with one director, describing the action, and one actor physically depicting the words of the director, who reflected the movements of the actor.  We got great satisfaction out of making the death as painful and drawn out as possible, and the ending, when it came, was one of peace and release.

This is sometimes the case with horror.  The object of horror is a tragic accident of nature, that cannot experience anything but pain. It is unlovable, rejected, often starved, sometimes beaten.  When someone does offer kindness, they are repaid with suffering.  maybe the person who offers kindness has their own disability - for instance in this case being blind.  The disability brings empathy for a fellow creature in suffering, and also prevents the kind person from perceiving the true nature of the object of horror.

 Through horror, by breaking the rules of the natural world, we can explore fear of death, superstition around disability and physical difference, the terrible consequences of the self fulfilling fear of people who percieve evil in ugliness, malevolence in difference.  The tragedy of rejection, cruelty and neglect.  Through the experience of the monster, we can feel our own experiences of rejection and cruelty.  Through the revenge of the monster we live out our own need to be cruel, and then, through the death of the monster, we kill our scapegoat, and can bury the secrets hidden in our most vulnerable selves.

We also explored the role of the exorcist.  Calm, confident.  Funny enough, no-one had considered the monster evil until the exorcist turned up.  They just thought it was horribly ugly and frightening.  The response of the creature to the predicament of it's birth, though shocking, was in a sense, understandable.  Once the exorcist drove out the evil spirit from the creature, the creature had lost it's last defence.  It had nothing but it's pain, and could only exist, in a state of torture, until death came.  This was a tragic horror.  In the final scene creation, the father of the creature silently, thoughfully, walked onto the stage, holding the wrapped up creature.  He slowly waded into a river, and placed the creature, in a basket, onto the top of the flowing water, watched it for a while, as it drifted up river, and then walked silently away.  Disappointment, loss, fear for an object that was almost loved, but could never be nurtured.

From mud to mud

Following the theme of 'birth and death, today's main them was the notion of being a created object, and being initially ignorant of one's purpose, working it out as a group by a series of experimental responses to an original sculpt.

Today's warm-up consisted of some sound and movement.  Each person chose one sound and one movement.  This became their personal 'motif', they did not change it, but changed the texture of the sound by altering its tempo, pitch, or volume.  What they could do, is to group together and join with another person or people.  This created an interesting piece of music and movement, as the sound drifted, shifting but remaining true to it's original form.  In this picture, the group was all walking behind and reflecting the sound and movement of one member.  A fifth member chose to remain with his own sound and movement, which was not altered during the piece.  This of course is allowed.

By the end of the piece, the group decided to break the rules, and take up different movements and sounds.  At this point the warm up broke down, as there was confusion about whether rule breaking is ok or not.  It is actually allowed, but it was an interesting experiment while the rules were being followed!

Creating with intent

For the main part of the session, we played a game in which everyone started lying down on the floor, as mud.  At some point, one person would 'come to life', and become the Creator.  They would wordlessly sculpt the other group members into an object, or a set of objects.  In this picture the group are being sculpted, at this point not having any idea about what they are supposed to be.  

Once the  creator has finished forming the object(s) into shape, they 'breathed life' into the object.  At this point it started to move.

As the group members experimented with different sounds and modes of movement, they imagined what they might be.  In this picture, the group gradually came to realise that it was a merry-go-round in a children's fair.

 What I was interested in during the game was the process of experimenting with modes of being - and wondering, as created objects, what our purpose was.  Also, in the case of the creator, what was their response while the group experimented, and made guesses, sometimes right, sometimes wrong, about what they were supposed to be.

If the group really had no idea, then they would create some sort of cohesive movement.  Rules may be implied in the original positions, such as in one case, the sculpts were placed facing outwards from four corners.  Each person sensed from this that we were not supposed to interact; they all responded differently to the positions they were placed in, yet all obeyed the rule of no interaction. 

In this sculpt, the group were bell ringers, and again, this was guessed following the movement suggested by the original position, to move up and down in different intervals.

These games are good for experimenting with sound and movement, but also for continuing our work with group cohesion, as each individual member, as well as finding and testing their own hypotheses about what they are, also responds to the actions of other group members.  

As human's, unlike other animals, we often question the purpose of our existence.  Why are we born?  What to our parents/teachers/bosses etc want from us?  As parents/teachers/bosses, we communicate with varying degrees of success, what it is that we want from our children/students/employees.  We hope that they will understand our intention.  We hope that we correctly interpret the intention of others, when they indicate that they want something from us.  The guesses that we make depend on the clarity of the original instruction, along with our comprehensive skills.  That's just the cognitive stuff.

What is happening emotionally?  What happen's when we don't make ourselves clear and people misinterpret us?  Do we get frustrated?  angry?  Do we blame them?  Ourselves?  Might their interpretation of our request be as valid as our request and thus acceptable, or do we stick rigidly to a request and insist that only the correct interpretation is valid?  What happens when a complete lack of understanding occurs?  Is there fear?  Do people worry about 'letting someone down'?

There are many many more questions that are posed during this game, but ultimately, it's success, as in all of the work that we do, is based on how much people are enjoying themselves.