Impro Stories, and More Experimenting with Machine ideas

Last week we developed our technique for the story tent.  It was slightly different to how I had invisaged.

Orignally I had thought we would get all of the ideas for the development of the story at the start

 In the workshop we did things slightly differently.  The narrator would begin the story, and create the themes and characters as they went along.

Occasionally the role of narrator would change, with one person coming in to take over the storytelling role, leaving the previous teller with a choice to leave the performance area or to become incorporated into the story.  
This shows how much more confident we are becoming as performers, being able to spontaneously come up with ideas, and take over the storytelling role, without waiting for permission or having specific rules about how this is done.  
There is also a feeling of generosity in the group.  Very important, both in terms of taking over the narrative, as this involves a certain degree of risk, and in being able to give up the narrator role, or have one's ideas modified mid flow, without feeling that something has been taken away.

The pictures show how the stories unravelled - in one, four cities, each with a different characteristic, love, war, peace and sweets, end up in battle, over competition for the sweets.  Luckily love and peace win the day, and war learns a good lesson in sharing. 

In another, a poor apple tree with no blossom, a bumblebee and a golden eagle all make friends, and the golden eagle goes to find some magic potion with which to magically cure the apple tree.  The tree becomes full of blossom and gets many friends, and through this realises that his most important friends were those that loved him even when he had no blossom.

The themes are both ridiculous and archetypal, and the stories use original ideas and juxtapositions to basically retell traditional themes, such as journeys, quests, battle, morals, friendship, loyalty and so forth.



We hope that on the day, the audience give us lots of different themes for characters, settings and plots, and in practice, I'm sure that they will.  However should we get an audience who really have no ideas to feed and stimulate our narratives, after this session, I feel very confident that we will be able to come up with original and imaginative themes on demand.

There are many skills for us to develop - and each as important as each other.  First there is the skill of engaging with the audience.  The person who takes the first narration role will be initially responsible for this.  I think that the first few seconds of a performance are very important. If you get the attention and interest of the audience at this point, then they will be very friendly and much more accepting and appreciative of whatever turns up in the performance next.  This is also the time to put the audience at their ease, and to encourage them to become involved in the story, both as a contributor of ideas to the plot, and, for those very brave audience members, to take up roles and perform the story as it is told.  

Another skill is to be able to tell the story with a dynamic emotive energy.  This is especially challenging in that the narrator will be making the story up as he or she goes along.  Not just are they making it up, but they must put in all the details that the audience have mentioned, not missing anyone's idea out.  If they are really enjoying themselves, they can play with the audience and the actors, using the story as a tool to make people respond and behave in certain ways. This has great opportunities for comedy, which of course goes down very well in this style of performance. 

However we should also, I think, also use themes of tragedy, pathos, romance etc, because it is good practice for us, and will ensure a varying dynamic through each day of performances, which will be good for both us and the audience.

Another skill that we need is to be able to take up any character, and perform this physically, in response to the story as it is created. This should be really enjoyable, and certainly everyone in Konnektiv is very capable of this.  However our space on the day will be much smaller than our nice, roomy workshop space, and we have to be very careful, whilst being lively and energetic, not to squash each other or the audience.

Sensitivity needs to be used throughout.  Characters must compliment and fit each other, a subtle and important skill for us all.  I don't expect that all of the members of the group will be at any of the days that we have booked.  In addition to this, they will not be performing all of the time - especially if we have a great audience who all want to perform themselves!

Should it happen that we have more actors than we need for the performance, no-one will have wasted their time by turning up, as those of us who are not narrating or in role as characters, will be creating sound effects, or encouraging audience participation by calling (e.g., boo, hooray, gasps of surprise, shock, fear, etc), so no-one will be bored.

Now you may be wondering about the machine that I spoke so much about last week.  We are still devising this, and half of the session was spent physically improvising around our ideas for the machine.  The group used basic shapes such as circle and straight line.  These are not intended to be used in the actual performances, but are really so that we can get an idea of how it looks when a movement is sequentially overlapped between characters (have a look at the vid if that seems a bit confusing).

Due to lack of technical skills and an important cable, I havent' been able to put the video straight onto the blog this week, however thanks to Damon, they have been put onto Youtube, and here are the links.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peJ_r0WvkKM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=jehaR7aw9KY&feature=endscreen

If you have any comments or questions about anything that we are doing, please post them onto the blog, we'd love to hear from you.

Free Impro Rules!

This must be one of the most amazing Konnektiv sessions ever, and once again I am reminded of several things.  The learning process is quite incredible, and some of the deepest learning happens when we don't even know that we are doing it. 


We learned a way to juggle two balls and two hoops, as a group.  We realised towards the end of the 3/4 hour excersise, that we had not just learned to pass a ball and hoop in a certain way, but that we had learned something of our relationship to the rest of the group, and we hadn't even known that we were learning it.


I watched sometimes and sometimes I was in the thick of a dynamic, flowing improvisation that really seemed to take on a life of it's own at times.  I wonder what someone who isn't a member of the group would think if they saw us rehearse.  

Hopefully they would see the skill, the interactions, the energy, the friendliness and generosity, the ability to take risks.  We are now a very mature group.  The main danger is that we may, if not careful, get 'stuck' in certain roles.  It is normal that we have an 'improvisation character', though we ideally have several, that we can move between, because in free improvisation we can become entrenched in one form of expression, which is contrary to expectations, because of the variety of dynamics that is available.  It may be that it is just this variety that causes the entrenchment, as there is literally too much to choose from, and people tend to stick to the one that is familiar.  

This is hopefully assuaged by the giving of a theme.  In a sense, by giving structure, we may actually increase the available options, because there is a framework on which to hang our choices.

In this case, the structure is the machine.  We have worked with this theme in many ways, and have been through different ideas about how it will eventually be expressed in performance.  At first, the machine was very rigid and robotic. 
 Gradually it has become more human, and thus more interesting, both in terms of performing and watching.  The humanness of the machine requires us to be more observant of each other, and aware of the part that we play in the ever changing dynamics in presentation.  The whole is greater than the parts, but only if there is a homeostasis, that is all of the parts are in balance and there is a true synergy of expressions.  


Much of our rehearsals will not be about precise choreographed routines, or learning exact orders of events, but they will be around gaining an increased sensitivity and awareness of each other, and how we all work in relation to each other.  They will also be around play - a very important creative medium - play does two things, firstly it takes away the fear of being wrong - and we have sometimes to relearn this after years of trying to play by the rules, we now discover that we can play without rules.  This is safe.  

Of course there are some rules we choose to keep - we are respectful of each other, we are inclusive, non-judgemental, and open.  within these rules, we have a great amount of freedom.  The other good thing about play is that it makes it safe to work with themes that may be challenging - death, fear, the unknown, power, rivalry, and so forth.  We become familiar with what these themes mean to ourselves, and what they mean to the group, and we begin to feel that we have mastery over them.

Rhythm
Rhythm is of great importance.  From the rhythm of our heartbeats, our lungs, the seasons and the years, to the rhythm of our footsteps, synchopated by words, tears and laughter, the often conflicting rhythms of the ticking clocks that we try to live our lives by, and those of our emotional cycles, that we often try not to (but perhaps we should!).

Much of today was around creating rhythm.  When we start to use vocal sounds, our movements change, our movements take on a different life, and we at once increase the range of opportunities for expression before us.  This doesn't work for words, but with a small exception.  Short sentences can be used repeatedly to good effect 'she owns that'; 'these people are crazy'; are two of the phrases that were repeated over and over, to great effect.  

The rules of music apply - Repeated phrases, varying phrases, turn taking or vocalising as a group, with one breath.  The importance of indispersing variety and surprise with some predictabiltiy and repetition.


Movement
The dynamic of the movement has two main themes - firstly integration, when all of the group are integrated into the machine, there is a strong, predictable, regular rhythm.  
Parts may be doing things, but they will be in precise time with everything else, bringing about a balance of what the viewer sees and hears, and seeming very complete and satisfying.  The other theme is chaos.  The chaos is unpredictable and exciting, it will do unexpected things, it may be funny or frightening, it represents breaking down of order, and leads to the birth of a new expression.  Because when the chaotic energy subsides, the regular, mechanical rhythm returns, but the beat is rather different, bringing about a new expression.  As the needs of the group or the environment change, the new expression should be able to meet these needs better than the original one, which becomes ill fitting.

Prolonged predictability.
What happens when a rhythm is kept the same for a very long time?  Maybe it becomes boring, or maybe something else happens - a different state.  

There is something of the shamanic in this.  A very regular, repetitive set of sounds could be tedious in the extreme, but also could lead to entrancement.  What is it that decides whether we are bored or entranced?  Ourselves?  Our social situation?  Our environment?  The precise physical nature of the beat itself?  This is an interesting train of thought to me, and one that I might well return to at a future time!

Park Evening

Once again, Konnektiv Drama, those brave, committed people, are kicked in the parts by fate, and our venue is taken from us like candy from a baby.  This time must have been a record though, as I was told at 4.45pm that the room would be unavailable for a workshop starting at 7pm.  That is the shortest ever time that a room has been cancelled on us.  

So, with a razor sharp mind, I swiftly formed a back up plan.  We would workshop in the park.  God bless Stafford Council and their lovely park, which really isn't very far away from our house.  

Workshopping in the park is actually not a bad idea given that we are devising a piece of street theatre.  This very public form of rehearsal becomes a form of entertainment, as members of the public walk by, wondering what the heck these portly middle aged people are doing, with their strange hoop passing and odd walking activities.  We are always a little bit silly, it's how we get our fun.  But siezed by the moment, the sillyness really flowed, as we played with the ridiculousness of our situation.

I used two basic methods of warming up - each designed to get the 'machine' working in unity with itself.  We passed the hoops, in a circle, aiming to make the movement of each hoop around the circle smooth and seamless.  This meant getting a really good group focus.  

We are also being very honest with each other, in a good natured way, as we point out when someone is out of synch with the rest of the group.  We passed the hoop round in various ways and only injured ourselves a bit in the passing.  luckily there were no facial wounds, and people did get better at passing the hoops during the play.  And I think my fingernail will grow back soon.  Don't bother using this exercise if you are a bit delicate, it is surprisingly painful if you get hit by a fast moving stray hoop.

After a while we decided to move on, and begin to think of how the machine would look as it moves around.  It could move around in a group shape (in this case, as there was 5 of us, in a pentagon) or in a line - we practiced with both.  The line was good, as we found an amusing way to start the line moving using the back person, with everyone bashing into each other before the machine starts walking, adding a slapstick element, and reminding one of a desk toy.  

We used funny walks.  We do these without even thinking now, and gradually each part of the machine started to devise it's own characteristics.  This gave the overall image an endearing idiosyncratic feel.  Over time, we will do more work on the characterisations.

After a time, a pattern had been devised which was similar to the machine that we created at the performing arts centre at the end of last year - that was a really long time ago!  However this is a much more lighthearted version.

Basically, the machine parts march along in a line, at some point, the marching stops, and the machine will move in a semi random, semi choreographed pattern.  Then the machine will get into a line, and march again, in a different order.  

The leader of the march, and the first and last part of the machine to march, will appear random, to the public (hopefully!), but in fact, there will be a pattern of events, so the performers will always know who is leading and who is finishing, which part.  The idea of this is to add to the magical feel of the performance, as though it is comedic, and the performers look rather ridiculous, haphazard and frankly none - too - bright, there is in fact, a carefully planned, rehearsed and executed performed routine.

I enjoyed workshopping in the park.  It was a great confidence builder, which we need, as street performance takes a special kind of courage and character.  It was heartening to see how quite a simple set of ideas, played out by a willing and generous spirited group, can be really very effective in terms of gaining positive attention.  Finally, a video to show how we ended the session.