Negotiated Study Development Portfolio

Development Portfolio

My main job role within the piece was to collate the material that we came up with within the rehearsals to create a coherent script. We looked at the research that each person had managed to find on cellular memory and then going from there began trying to piece together a storyline, taking in the consideration the group we were looking at, The Wooster Group.

'Othello' Frantic Assembly

'Can We Talk About This?' DV8

We decided on basing a story around a heart transplant and how someone can change because of one. We had decided to do a fictional piece, involving physical theatre and movement with influences from frantic assembly and DV8.

Within my research I looked at Cellular Memory within the media and programs, looking at films such as repo men and looking at one episode of The Simpsons in which they deal with a hair transplant changing someone’s personality. 

Each of them focused around the negative part of cellular memory, focusing on people picking up bad traits and typically going on some sort of murder spree, or remembering something horrific.

So we decided to create something that seemingly revolved around the donor and the donor receiver but would eventually display their different stories on different levels. We decided to really try and think about how the donor receiver family would feel if he began to change. And also how the family of the donor would feel if they found out this person was taking on traits of their dead relative.

'House/Lights' Wooster Group

This brought us to the Wooster Group who is notorious for layering up their pieces to display a deeper meaning. The Wooster Group run by Liz Lecompote use multimedia to layer up and distort their pieces to create a new meaning for them. Often within their pieces the actors will act in front of or mimic the media, which is often a black and white abstract film. After viewing their performance of House/Lights I was interested about their use of a narrator.

“And in the evening's master of ceremonies, the magnificent Kate Valk, we have a creature of astonishing artificiality, a tin-voiced 1930's-style beauty with marcelled hair and bee-stung lips who might be a digitally manufactured composite of movie stars. She's the ultimate screen siren, happiest in two dimensions.”

Ben Brantley (1999).

 It occurred to me that within a chaotic story line, the use of a narrator might be useful to keep the audience grounded. It also occurred to me that although cellular memory is known by a lot of people there are also a lot of people who have no clue what it is.

Our Poster for 'Heartless'

After going through these factors and considering everything that had been brought to the table we came upon the storyline that our play is at now.  'Heartless' revolves around two brothers who go through the heart transplant process. One of them starts to change slowly and throughout the piece we toy with the idea of who is dead, who is alive, who is imaginary and so on, to really keep the audience thinking. We display lots of things that could either make them discredit cellular memory or make them believe it even more.

I really wanted to look at the media and look at what role that was going to play within our piece. Some of the scenes have been written to merge with the media, and some have been written to completely feature on the media and not in the live. I kept trying to make sure that everything had a meaning but remembered that this isn’t always necessary because some of these things just happen with no proper meaning at all.

“You don’t have to worry about meaning it’s all here it’s like this space is an extension of our lives”.

Page 51 Breaking the Rules:  The Wooster Group David Swan (1986)


By Joshua Williams 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BRANTLEY, B. (1991) THEATER REVIEW; A Case For Cubism And Deals With Devils. New York Times, 3/2/1991, pg1. Available from: http://theater.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=980DE0DB1338F930A35751C0A96F958260 [28/12/2011].

SAVRAN, D. (1986) Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group. (P 51) 

THEOPHANES (2012) Inherited memories in organ transplant recipients, WWW. Available from: http://theophanes.hubpages.com/hub/Cellular-Memories-in-Organ-Transplant-Recipients  [26/12/2012].


Watch this video called 'Transplanting Memories' at this link http://vimeo.com/10254374 for more imforation. 

Devising 2 Logbook 3: Pina Bausch

Pina Bausch 

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Pina Bausch was German modern dance theatre performer and choreographer. Her pieces look mostly at emotions and risk taking when on stage. Her best known works are Café Muller in which the dancers run around the stage bouncing off walls tables and chairs and The Rite of Spring a thrilling piece in which the whole stage had to be covered in soil.

Bausch’s work has a deep emotional root to it which we have been looking at while learning about her in Devising 2. She will often ask her dancers quite personal questions about their life and then she uses the answers to create a dance. This created a deeper quality to the movement because they weren’t just dancing something that meant nothing to them.

In an interview with Valerie Lawson in 2002 she stated. "I loved to dance because I was scared to speak. When I was moving, I could feel.'' 

This shows a greater meaning to her dances and proves that she is creating work because it’s she’s creating something to make the dancers and the audience feel.We took part in a task where had to think of a song and then think of a memory that connects with that song. We then had to write it down and pass the piece of paper to another person to have them read it out. 

I found it really strange to hear someone reading about my life and telling my story to the whole class. We then had to work with that partner and create a piece surrounding our stories to communicate them to the audience. I felt that the piece that I and my partner came up with was really well thought out and was set around her story. When we revised the piece we added things to accommodate more risks which made the piece better.

“Pina Bausch had already gone way beyond any previous concept of the ‘interpretation’ of any libretto. She did not ‘choreograph material’, but took instead individual elements of the plot as a point of departure for her own associations of wealth”.

She puts together her dances in a completely different way from any other choreographers of her time making herself one of the most innovative dance theatre choreographers of her time. We looked deeper into the ways her pieces are put together and although there doesn’t seem to be any linear order to her pieces they all seem to tell a story.

'Cafe Muller'

In Café Muller there is this one point where a coupe are stood looking at each other and then someone else comes and starts manipulating them into positions. The male one of the couple keeps picking up the woman and dropping her. This is all part of the way she works and risks that she takes with her dancers. You can see the physical strain of the dancers as they give everything to the movement and the pieces that they are in.

“Rite of Spring for instance returns to Stravinsky’s root of a pagan fertility ritual …”

'Rite of Spring'

In our final piece we looked at all of the techniques we had learnt about Bausch and turned it into an ensemble piece. We looked at the ritualistic feel of some of her pieces and thought about how we could adapt that for our piece. We focused a lot on one part of Rite of Spring in particular which is when the women seem to be choosing someone to take a red artefact up to the a man. We looked at the movement and the sounds they were making using, their own bodies, to layer with the music.

We started off by asking us about our worst nightmares and the way we reacting to them. One theme which was common in all of the pieces was the theme of death so we decided to go with this loosely for our piece. There was a point when we turned on one of the group members and gave them up as an offering to the ‘Angel of Death’. We showed this by throwing her up in the air and then running around the space as if offering her up.

I feel that we worked well together as a large group and used a lot of the techniques prominent in Bausch’s work. We learnt about taking risks and putting all of our effort emotionally and physically to create a highly polished innovative piece.

By Joshua Williams

Bibliography

CARTER, A. (1998) The Routledge dance studies reader. London, Routledge.

CLIMENHAGGA, R. (2009) Pina Bausch. New York, Routledge.

LAWSON, V. (Year) Pina: Queen of The Deep WWW. Available from:  http://www.ballet.co.uk/magazines/yr_02/feb02/interview_bausch.htm  [6/2/2012].

Devising 2 Logbook 2: The Wooster Group

The Wooster Group


Artistic Director: Elizabeth LeCompote 


Introduction

We have been looking at the Wooster Group and the devices they use to devise a piece of theatre using things such as theme, discourse, media etc. The different materials that they use rarely go together, but usually have some relation to the on stage action.

House/Lights

We viewed their performance ‘House/Lights’ which starred Kate Valk as the traditional narrator in the piece. I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of the piece and felt a bit lost at times but her character especially interested me. She was the picture of the perfect black and white movie star and at times she appeared as if she was part of the media. Ben Brantley from the New York Times wrote.

“And in the evening's master of ceremonies, the magnificent Kate Valk, we have a creature of astonishing artificiality, a tin-voiced 1930's-style beauty with marcelled hair and bee-stung lips who might be a digitally manufactured composite of movie stars. She's the ultimate screen siren, happiest in two dimensions.”

Ben Brantley (1999)

Even though her character was part of the madness she made me feel as an audience member like she could be trusted. She created an anchorage point for the audience to come back too.

Kate Valk in House/Lights (1999)

The Cherry Orchard & Classwork

“You don’t have to worry about meaning it’s all here it’s like this space is an extension of our lives”.

Page 51 Breaking the Rules:  The Wooster Group David Swan (1986)

What this quote is explaining is that we as actors and devisers may look at a space and say what can we add to realistically portray what we mean? We had a tendency to do this when working on the Cherry Orchard.

The Cherry Orchard

We have been working with The Cherry Orchard to create a piece in the style of the Wooster Group. What we have been doing so far has all been about creating a piece that looks good instead of just going with something. We were going to add a horror discourse to our piece, but we realised we were being too literal. We were just finding clips that were scary but we weren’t looking at the relationship to the cherry orchard. In this case we were taking the some of the devices of the Wooster group, but not really working in the style of Wooster group.

We started again with our plans for the project and really tried to go back to the tasks and get too the root of the Wooster group. We really had to focus on not getting a good mark but on getting to the bottom of their techniques. Once we did this I think we produced performance that with more polishing could have been really good.

I found working with the techniques of the Wooster group really hard as I found it difficult to understand what they were doing and why they were doing it. So I decided to do some research into their other projects to understand them further.

Route 1&9

Because I struggled to grasp what the Wooster Group was and what they were trying to do I decided to look into one piece that not only intrigued me but offended me at the first glance. With its bold images of caricatures of afro Caribbean people acting in stereotypical ways at first, I thought this was hugely racist something in league with ‘Gollywog’ toys. But after further research into the production it was apparent that it was rather a display of the stereotypes.

The images deemed as racist from 'Route 1 and 9' (1981)

In The Wooster Group and Its Traditions it says:

“At the time the group knew that the black face Pigmeat Markham sequence was objectively racist, but they believed it simultaneously assumed a confrontational stance towards the audience’s racism as well as their own, that it was an attack on self-congratulatory liberalism (Vawter, qtd. In Savran, 1988: 14)”.

Johan Callens (2004)

This explains that the Wooster Group was challenging the views of the audiences and themselves on what they think is racist and what isn’t. They were looking at how Afro- Caribbean people were viewed in that time, social and political culture and making people face what was happening, basically saying what no one else would say.

I think one of the reasons the show was jumped on and why their funding was dropped was that the culture wasn’t ready to face up to themselves and their own views. It made them uncomfortable to have to think about and so they condemned the company for simply stating and displaying the performance.

Conclusion

So In conclusion The Wooster Group is a company that is challenging the views of Performance and Theatre, with their techniques for devising. They may not be a company I would follow for devising purposes but I can respect them for the inventive work they do and the pieces they create.

Bibliography

SAVRAN, D. (1986) Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group. (P 51) United States, Theatre Communications Group Inc.

BRANTLEY, B. (1991) THEATER REVIEW; A Case For Cubism And Deals With Devils. New York Times, 3/2/1991, pg1. Available from: http://theater.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=980DE0DB1338F930A35751C0A96F958260 [28/12/2011].

CALLENS, J. (2004) The Wooster Group and Its Traditions. (P 165) Brussels, Peter Lang