DECEMBER 14th - Monday

SCRATCH PERFORMANCE, FEEDBACK AND MOVING FORWARD:

14/12/15

I performed to an audience made up of my class peers. The piece was a short movement excerpt I had been working on and had been influenced by previous rehearsals with Jacques Lecoq's 'Seven Tensions' exercise. The piece involved me attempting to physicalize some symptoms of post-natal depression that my character experiences within my project. 

The purpose of the excerpt was to physicalize and visually represent the effects post-natal depression has on the body. The physical movements and gestures are stylised and abstract.

[VIDEO] Visual representation of post-natal depression symptoms. 

The feedback I received - 

1.   ‘The music did not match or represent the scene.’

The lyrics were distracting and gave off the wrong connotations regarding the content of the scene. As the subject matter I am using is very serious and effects real people I do not want to cause offence or portray an undignified style or performance. Therefore I have to be more careful when using music or songs.  To move forward, I will spend more time finding avant-garde style music or scoring that will compliment my movements and also help tell the story.

2.   ‘Some of my movement had elements of contemporary dance.’

I do not want to incorporate contemporary dance into my project therefore I must evaluate my performance further and work on how I will develop it so that this does not happen. My reasoning for not wanting to incorporate dance into my performance is that I am still very much focused on actor training. The vast majority of my piece is physical theatre and has stylised gestures however I still want my acting to be believable and authentic and by incorporating dance this might then get lost.  To move forward – I will focus on mixing my physical theatre training with my acting training to ensure I am giving an honest and believable performance. Hopefully the dance elements will fade away when my actions become more purposeful and will not follow the beat or lyrics of the music as I will not use music like this again.