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].