Autumn Leaves - 3rd October 2013

Autumn.  A new season.  As 2013 begins to decay, the new academic year begins.  Hopeful students embark on new courses, eyes shining, pens full, pages empty.  Leaves begin to fall off trees.

A drama group of people who know each other well meet up as arranged, as is now usual, at Gnosall Community Fire station.  They share news.  Each has stories to tell.  It is already getting dark outside.

I'm the facilitator.  I facilitate.  Sometimes I don't know what I'm going to facilitate until it happens.  Plans go awry.  Sometimes, and this is a total secret; I don't have a plan.

We talked about Autumn.  There's a start.  I ask people to walk around the room, and think about the autumn, saying all the words they could think of that describe Autumn.  "Leaves"  "Chilly"  "Wind" "Boots" "Dark"  "Acorn". The words come out randomly, in flurrys, like falling leaves, layering, making little heaps.

We are beginning to immerse ourselves in the themes of this season.

Next, I ask people to perform a movement to go with their word, everyone is to reflect the movement back.  Now everyone is beginning to act as a group.  The words come out one by one.  We have time to focus our concentration on each word, and to  internalise what it means, physically, so it is more than just a string of letters.

Now I ask the group to stand at one end of the room, and one by one, each make up part of a group image, saying their own word, and creating an accompanying sculpt.  Now other things start to appear, "squirrel" "mud"  "boots" "rain" "hedgehog".

At times members come out of the picture, and gaze in on it for a while, before joining it again in a different role.  The picture changes, morphs, stories come and go.

I change the task once again.  An image gives itself to me.  A pile of multicoloured fallen leaves.  I ask  each member of the group to become a leaf.  They all describe which leaf they are - oak, chestnut, willow, beech, a green leaf and a fir cone.  I tell them to imagine they are hanging on a tree.  What is the tree like?  What is it like on this tree?  What can they see?  What are the other leaves like?  What about animals in the tree?  What can they see when they look down?  Are they firmly attached to the tree?

After some silence to consider this, I move the story on.  They begin to change colour.  Slowly the stem that is holding them to the tree is wearing away.  They know they are soon to drop to the ground, leaving the tree.  How does it feel to know that they will be leaving the tree?  

A little more silence, and then I describe the last few strands of stem breaking.  The leaf falls.  How does it fall?  How does it land? 

The group are lying on the floor.  A heap of leaves.  Multicoloured.

Night falls. An owl hoots. It is a warm night.  It rains, quite heavily.  The leaves get wet.  In the morning the sun comes up, and they begin to dry.  As they start to dry, they start to notice each other.

________________________

At this point the group all look round, noticing each other.  I divide them into pairs.  In the pairs, they share their stories, about their life in the tree, the moment of leaving the tree, and how they feel now that they are lying on the floor, in a little pile of leaves.  I let them know that they will be reading each others stories, and tell each person to let their partner know the three main things that they should remember in their story.

After some time in preparation.  The group are all lying down.  They take it in turns to read their partners story, in this way;  in random sequence, one member says "Once upon a time..."  At this point, their partner gets up, and hears their leaf-life story being read, whilst they move through the events physically.  One by one each person's story is told.

_____________________________________

We spend some time reflecting upon the experience, of telling, sharing, hearing.  The conversation changes.  Someone notices with regret that we didn't include the Yew tree.  We talk about the Yew tree for a while and I suggest that the group can make one.

Everyone lies in a ball on the floor.  Slowly they get up, and move in towards each other.  They twist their legs around each other to form a great big trunk.  Then they stretch their arms out, slowly, in all directions.  this forms a single large Yew.

I ask someone to find a poem about a Yew tree on their mobile phone, she finds one - by Sylvia Plath.  Group members take it in turn to read the poem, as the rest of the group forms the single tree.  This is done three times, each time the tree grows closer, legs more tightly tangles, arms finding smaller holes to stretch out through.  We form a hot damp knot of humans, all heartbeat and breathing.  there is some giggling, though this reduces over time.  

______________________________________

As nature prepares for the long winter sleep, Konnektiv start to plan our next season of activity.  More changes are afoot.  Big changes.  It's going to be an interesting time.

 The Moon And The Yew Tree By Sylvia Plath

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to. 

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky --
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection
At the end, they soberly bong out their names. 

The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness -
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes. 

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness - blackness and silence.

Secret Goings on and Photos from the Past

It's all gone a bit secret here at Konnektiv, because we are finally working exclusively and deliberately on The Machine, our streetside humanoid installation that will bring delight and wonderment to the heart of our dear town on September 7th, the date of Stafford Arts Festival.

We have been trawling the internet looking for interesting bargains to be had to embellish our costume.  We are seeking novel interesting and very economical ways to create the half machine half madness performance.
Also the fortune cards.  They will be very very special, and a wonderful thing to have, for anyone who has a spare £1 coin rattling around in their pocket.  It's not much to ask for such a thing of great beauty and magic.

As always, we incorporate many different art forms into our performance, here we have the drawn image (art), we have the art of sound (percussive, shrieking, hissing, general strangeness in a machine like way that explodes into a fireworks night of cacophony), we have movement, almost dancelike in it's ritual and precise display, then chaotic, clownish, bizzare, maybe a bit frightening.  (Grotesque laughter....).  And finally the art of the written word, as we draw on the souls of the six dimensions of time, to bring us the dreadful and wonderful predictions that will embellish our fantastic fortune cards.

And for now that is all.

Speaking of the six dimensions of time, here is a randomly produced photograph from our past, with a little story:

Here is the 3rd ever Konnektiv workshop.  Konnektiv started on 10th January 2011.  The members were Lauren, my mum, my daughter Sophie, and Sophie's then boyfriend, Josh.  Oh, and me of course.  The workshops were held at the Spiritualist church, which I was slightly apprehensive about initially.  In fact, the space ended up being lovely, and we had a really nice time there.  And it was free of charge, just what we needed as we had no money whatsoever.

Lots of time and events have gone by since those early days.  Many changes of venue, and a few different members (tho all those original ones stay in touch).  My mum was, and still is, living with cancer, other members of the group had their own health issues.  

From being a band of 5 people with a generously donated space once a week, we have now grown, we have several projects on the go, and currently meet 3 times a week. We provide dramatherapy and mental health awareness workshops for adults with mental health issues, drama for health for children and adolescents, as well as these, we produce performances, stories and generally fooling around in public places. Most excitingly, we are about to become the proud proprietors of a community hall in Doxey, Stafford.

There have been many changes in our group, and many more to come, watch this space ...

Konnektiv Drama: Group Juggling, group energy, sub groups

Konnektiv Drama: Group Juggling, group energy, sub groups: I love doing the group juggling.  It is a really good thing for us, as it brings out the side of our group that is playful, adventurous, a...

Group Juggling, group energy, sub groups

I love doing the group juggling.  It is a really good thing for us, as it brings out the side of our group that is playful, adventurous, and unpretentious.  I think that it would be fantastic to incorporate these into the routines we put together for The Machine.  Only one problem, at least half of our group can't throw or catch. 

But we can practice!

This is great  - a way to test the theory that anyone can do anything if they really want to, and another theory, that practice makes perfect...

Note to self - check that everyone in the group wants to be able to learn to throw and catch.

Also, just to be on the safe side, we will also invest our time into choreographing the physical movements of the machine, which is something that we are all already quite skilled at.  The actual period of the Machine Project starts next week, as we begin to rehearse at Gnosall Fire Station.  The group juggling isn't just a way for us to learn to throw and catch rings and clubs, it's mainly a way to bring about the important group complicite that will be essential for us to perform The Machine.  It's also very physical, and entails us using and developing our group energy. 

The Group Energy
This is something that the group produces and it is extremely important in performance.  We want to entertain, above all.  We want to attract audiences, and having attracted them, to hold their attention.  Initially, we attract audiences by our presentation, in the case of attending family festivals, this presentation it intended to be quirky and amusing. 

The Group Skill
Having attracted members of the public to watch us by having a quirky and amusing energy, we then need to keep them engaged in our performance.  This is where the skill factor comes in, and we need to really play to our strengths, using the tried and tested techniques in performance that we know look good.  However we also need to be constantly testing our personal boundaries, and making sure we don't get trapped in inhibiting comfort zones.  In this way we hone and develop our skills over time.

Sub Groups

Whilst we played with the juggling equipment in the park, we experimented with using sub groups.  That is three of us stood in the middle and juggled clubs, and four around the outside juggled rings.  This gave the impression of quite a complex whole, despite the fact that the individual subgroups weren't doing anything that complicated.  We did video this, but due to much hoop dropping, I've decided not to put the video onto the blog.

Watch this space - hopefully next week we will be able to show something.

Costume
Billie has started to think about putting costumes together.  We are on a tight budget, and so need to be economical.  Saying that, the costumes are a really important part of this performance, so we are really grateful that Billie has taken this on at this point, hopefully giving her time to come up with some really interesting steampunk/clockwork/automata styles.  I'm sure the rest of the group will all be helping her with ideas.

Promotion
Thanks also to Sara who is putting together a small sound byte each week or fortnight, in which as a group we describe a bit of what we are getting up to.  She will be sending this off to Stafford Radio in the hope that we get some promotional airplay.

Konnektiv Drama: Devising Stories at Home

Konnektiv Drama: Devising Stories at Home: Konnektiv Drama workshop – 17 th July 2013 Devising Stories Once again, konnektiv are ‘floating’.  The Performing Arts Centre is n...

Devising Stories at Home

Konnektiv Drama workshop – 17^th July 2013

Devising Stories

Once again, konnektiv are ‘floating’.  The Performing Arts Centre is no longer open to us, as it now the summer holidays.  Happily, unlike our previous experiences of having no workshop space, we feel reasonably safe in the knowledge that (strategic hiccups notwithstanding) we will have access to Doxey Community Centre from September.  

For the duration of the summer we have booked Gnosall Firestation up to 3 times per week, and so thankfully we are not actually homeless at this time.

However, this session, there was no venue, and so, we ended up devising stories in our Peel Street living room.  Fortunately the room is reasonably big.

Stories.  

Me and Merv devised a story last week in the Lake District, and told it to a bunch of friends around a midnight bonfire.  It went really well, everyone liked it.  It’s a story that wants to be retold, developed, and retold again.  We read the story again at yesterday's Konnektiv workshop.  It didn’t go quite so well.  It was ok, but seemed to lose something in the second impro. A lesson in not resting on one's laurels!

We explained how the story had been devised – simply from a couple of location based inspirations – old tumbledown stone cottages; being lost in the winding thinning roads atop the lake district hills (or are they mountains?); sat nav playing silly buggers, sending us the long way, changing its mind; a cow that roars to the morning sun, making a noise more like a dinosaur than a bovine creature.

All of these stimuli became features in our Lake District story.  Our group of friends recognised the features and through this identified with the story, engagement was high.  This was different with the second, Stafford reading, which was with a group that didn’t have the automatic engagement as the location was different.  Maybe a more thorough description of the scene would be useful, but then, maybe not…  people create their own images.

I think that we will be performing a story at the next Staffordshire Knot Storytelling club, (though I am not entirely convinced of this, having received mixed messages from the organisers.  Need to chase up!?)   The theme is going to be on Stafford folklore.  I have bought a book on this, which has lots of stories.  But Konnektiv are a group who devise to perform, rather than learn prewritten script.  And we didn’t want to tell a folk tale as such, rather, we wanted ours to be a ghost story.  However, like our Lake District story, and the folk stories in the book I have started to read, we wanted there to be a connection with actual reported facts, or gossip, or old wives tales.  Anything to tap into the local folk ‘zietgiest’.

We had been talking about this previously, and had decided that with Staffords history of ghosts, that this would be a good subject matter.  It has to be said that Stafford is not the most interesting place in the world.  It is extraordinarily ordinary.  Quite grey, but not too grey, that would be seen as extreme.  Just averagely grey.  Stafford.  But ghosts!  Wow, what a plethora of spooky sightings and goings on have been reported.  

Just the other week, my eldest daughter came home from work, with a story of a cleaner that had been found hysterical in one of the bedrooms of the Swan Hotel.  She had seen, it transpired, an apparition.  A man sitting in one of the rooms, who said to her the words “spit on the bible”.   

This was fantastic inspiration for us.  A quick internet search confirmed Stafford, our little town full of hanging baskets and litter free respectability, as a Very Haunted Town.  One of the most haunted spots, we discovered, is the Swan Hotel - this was built on the site of a Drowning Pond – used to put an end to people found guilty (or not) of witchcraft. 

Armed with these two facts, the group devised a plot.  It involved a priest with a dark, guilty secret, and a young girl accused of witchcraft.  It also involved the drowning pond, the witchfinder general, and the words “spit on the bible”.  Once the group had devised the basic plot (which I’m not describing in detail here, in case any of the blogs readers comes to the reading), I split the group into 3 pairs of readers. Here my creative input, apart from taking photographs, ended.  However, for the pairs of readers, the process had only just begun.  

Each pair had to work their own version of the story.  Adding detail, and, if they wished, changing detail.  

They didn’t have much time – 10 or 15 minutes.  After this each pair collaboratively performed their story.  Each story was engaging in detail and had some lovely moments of performance.  We got to see in less than an hour, how stories become adapted over time, sometimes with changes to detail, other times with great big structural changes to the whole tale.  The three stories, whilst similar in theme, could have been written in very different places, and under very different circumstances from each other, reflecting the variety of characters and interest of the people in the room.

Each story will be further developed, and at least one, maybe all, will be performed, at some point, at the storytelling club.

Another exciting development at Konnektiv Drama.

Workshopping our storytelling technique

Aim of the Session

The aim of this session was to work further on developing our improvisational story technique.  Last weekend, our debut Story Tent performances at Doxey Day was a great success, everyone enjoyed the sessions and we had lots of children being very creative.  However it did get a bit chaotic at the end, and we are not a group to rest on our laurels.  

There will always be learning experiences, and we can always improve the way that we perform the stories, and facilitate the engagement and  of the audience.  We have much to learn in terms of how to modulate the energy levels in the tent.  In addition to this, we need to remind ourselves of the methods of telling stories in an engaging way, to be as entertaining as possible, without seeming forced or stressed.

Energy Ball

We started the session with the energy ball.  This is an exercise that I have devised that is designed to focus our awareness and energies.  It is loosely based on a sort of yoga or tai chi exercise, and has a similar effect.  We have done this as a group several times, and after a comment from a group member about its usefulness, I will do this at the beginning of each session.  The group is becoming more familiar with the exercise, and as this occurs, the potency of it to facilitate a focused energy and state of calm alertness. 

I led the energy ball part of the session slightly differently to usual, when I do the actions as well as instruct the group.  This time, I just instructed the group without doing the movements myself.  This worked well in that I was able to watch how people did the movements and remind them of certain elements of style, however it was surprisingly difficult, given how many times I’ve done the movements, to remember precisely what to do, including when to breathe in and out, without actually doing it.

Once the group had run through the sequence once in this way,  I then joined in with the movement, and each person did it in their own time, some of us closing our eyes.  I find it useful to close my eyes, as it increases my ability to really concentrate on the physical sensations and movements.  We don’t all move together, but rather, on this run-through, each person absorbs themselves in their own movements and breathing.  I tell them it doesn’t matter if they don’t do it exactly right, and they can make up things if they forget what to do.  After all, I just made it up in the first place.

At the end of this element of the session we stood in silence for some time.  I felt reluctant to speak and break the silence, it felt very peaceful. 

Physical warm up – co-ordination, complicite, focus

In the physical warm up, we passed juggling rings around the circle.  Everybody had a ring, and passed this to the person to their right, at the same time, so the circle of rings passed around, creating their own circle, each exactly in time with the other.  There were five people in the circle, and each person was told to watch and follow the person two places ahead of them, and because of this, each person in the group was linked to another, and the whole circle was linked to itself, and the timing of the passing of the rings was very tight.  We played with it, passing the rings at low and high levels, and passing them flat, or turning them during the passing.  

I love the way a simple action, such as passing a juggling ring from one person to another, can become complex and visually interesting, by developing it in relatively basic ways, such as adding more people doing the same movement, carrying out the moment at different levels, and so on

Voice and story warm up – improvisation.

The first game was basically the group telling a story in a circle, one word at a time.  This was difficult, and generally a long, senseless sentence was produced.  However this was difficult enough, and so I decided not to enforce a rule in which the story had a beginning, middle and end, and made sense, however, in future weeks, this will be the ultimate aim.

In the second game, each person made a statement, but didn’t complete it, requiring another person in the group to complete it.  This time, we didn’t go round the circle, but each person came in to the story as soon as they had thought of something.  At first this worked really well, and we were snatching the story from each other, so great was our enthusiasm and energy.  

However as the stories went on, we got tired, and this really showed in the telling of the story.  The plot dragged on; more and more characters and twists were added, and eventually we just seemed to run out of steam with it.  

Watching this video, of the storytelling, I am aware of good storytelling techniques that were present in the improvisation.  There was good use of vocal intonation, displays of empathic reflection and the story was passed between the tellers rather smoothly.  However, the tiredness of the group shows, and this affects two elements of the telling.  First, and importantly, there are times when it doesn't really feel that the tellers are interested in their own story.  Improvising stories is very difficult - not only must the story flow, and appear very natural and easy in the telling, but it must be interesting, to both the teller and the listener.  Part of the problems of engagement in this session was the fact that tellers would bring in a detail that had nothing to do with the initial themes that the story contained.  Doing this is destructive to the process - engagement is lost because the listener doesn't know what they are listening to, the spell is broken. Using technique to sound like the story is interesting, is pointless, the story may end up sounding strained.  Two important lessons are learned:

1. Keep the threads of the story simple, you don't need more than 2 or 3 themes.
2. Keep it interesting.  To yourself as a narrator, and to the particular audience.

Keeping interested in the story, and telling it in a relaxed yet engaging style, are of utmost importance, and 

Entertainingly Emotional

We ended up with a game of expressing emotions and empathy in story style, which involved playful exaggeration, and a lightness of expression.  If expressed in this way, even emotions such as sadness or boredom, can be engaging.  This is important, because we want the audience to engage with the emotion contained in the story, without being personally

affected by it.  So being tired, is played by large, loud yawns and stretching, and falling asleep always involves loud snoring noised and maybe a bit of lip smacking.  In the game, one person expressed an emotion (e.g., I feel naughty), and the rest of the group had to reflect the emotion, displaying both empathy and engagement, creating a conversation in which some part of a story is played out.  

While we are doing the stories, each person does not merely have to tell part of the story, but they also have to be very engaged in what everyone else is telling.

Closing Reflections

There is a sense of positivity following the success of the Story Tent at Doxey Day, however we acknowledge that we still have much to learn.  Continually reflecting on our performances and techniques, and practicing new and used methods, we will reduce the likelihood of performances going awry, and increase our competency, meaning that over time, we give better shows for our audiences.