Week 5

Another great warm up game today, STUCK IN THE MUD! this again brought about feelings of childish enthusiasm from which the core foundation of the lesson could be built upon, relating experience to memory and physical movement. Now that I've been in class for more than 1 week its also interlinking with ideas of how we use our bodies in space i.e when we play stuck in the mud we must spend time distancing our selves from one another (running from the 'tagger') and also coming together (the movement used to free one another from the grip of the mud).

Another exercise today - PROGRESSIVE RELAXATION. I was unsure about this one as we had just had a warm up that made me feel ready to take on the world, i was on a high and feeling like creating something, maybe in groups? But i let myself get fully into the mind-state and began to lie down and follow the said instructions.
I must admit i did not really understand the point to this exercise. I found it profoundly similar to the caterpillar exercise, except without purpose. Which made me feel like i was drifting in and out in terms of my attention focus to the point where i had to stop myself falling asleep. There were some positives however, like centering my thoughts - i felt like my thoughts were very clear in this state and i was able to think about devising but this did not come across my mind until the ending minute or so, if this had been a topic that had been placed in our minds before the exercise began i think the exercise would have been additionally beneficial.

I learned a new word in class today - ETHNOGRAPHY = 'the scientific description of peoples and cultures with their customs, habits, and mutual differences.' And this is what the reading by Quetzill E. Castaneda was about, it talked about Auguso Boal's 3 ''moments'' that are the sum of his work on the 'theater of the oppressed' and the idea of  ‘Invisible Theater’ (the 2nd of the 3). The reading detailed how his type of street theatre was a powerfull tool for revolutionary, social change, in a non invasive or violent way using the ideas of ethnography in the process. Castaneda shares that 'ethnographic field work' can be understood as an art form in itself describing the similaritty between Augusto Boal's productions and fieldwork inherent  performitivity. As theatre is the art of reflecting upon ourselves and our cultural community, first observing, then reflecting and this reflection can then be made into art (or is art already).
This reading, i felt linked into the game of stuck in the mud we played earlier, a game we played as a child that in some ways established our cultural standings amongst our school life not just how good we were at the game but also how creative, how artistic we were with the game (e.g doing a roll between someone's legs to free them). And here we are a decade or more later re-visiting this normal activity to generate art and ideas.




Castaneda, Quetzil E. (2006) ‘The Invisible Theatre of Ethnography: Performative Principles of Fieldwork’, Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 79: 1 pp. 75-104.