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.