Week 4

This week we were supposed to go for a theater visit to Stratford circus but this did not happen and instead we did some interesting work on narrative in the lesson, an exercise related to the reading that i had done in this class i found that it that benifitted me and helped me perform the best, fully embodying the topic and assisting me further into linking it with academic research. During the beginning before the interval Soloman asked for each individual of each group to come up with some conditions that best described our outlook on the course thus far. Soloman then returned back to us with a poetry piece created from the feedback given, we were then instructed to begin laying down on the floor with our eyes closed and use the suggestions from the poetry to create graphics within our minds to then use as a activation to create dynamic action from. This type of exercise is inspired and taken from the art of Butoh-fu.
 
Butoh can be best described as an imagistic dance form. The dance has a wide range of techniques and these techniques that began to appear during 1950′s Japan with dance teachers Tatsumi hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. It involved us creating movement actions from narrative. The narrative was retold in the form of a step-by-step story read out by out tutor Solomon at a tranquil pace and accompanying relaxing music. I very much enjoyed this exercise and felt like i was thinking with the mind of a caterpillar, my wants were the wants of a caterpillar (or what i myself perceive the wants of a caterpillar to be). This is a different approach to the Stanislavsky type model which involves a more analytical, and somewhat polarizing 'systematic' approach similar to the 'inside vs outside emotions' we learned in the previous lesson.