Key practitioners

Jaques Lecoq

He was a french actor and coach, he was best known for his teaching methods in physical theatre, he taught movement and mime. He developed an approach to acting using Severn levels of tension. This changed and developed during his practice and have been further developed by other practitioners. There of course can be as many few levels of tension as you like ‘how long is a piece of sting’. This is a guide line that can be adapted. you can use this exercise to train actors on movement but also characterisation. Jacques Lecoq was one of the major figures of Western theatre in the second half of the 20th century he has created much work however I have only ever known him for his use of Severn levels of tension. “The body knows things about which the mind is ignorant”(Lecoq,2013). For me using this technique I found that my body sometimes showed the audience how I felt more than my speech. For our performance we used this as a exercise to portray our frustration with each other on stage, we wanted to explore different ways of showing our annoyance towards each other without just playing one note throughout the performance. For us characterisation was key especially in our song therapy we needed those range of levels to make it comedic and with doing this our choreography for this song developed from using our bodies to explain how we felt.

Jacques Lecoq (2013). “The Moving Body (Le Corps Poetique): Teaching Creative Theatre”, p.8.

Zoo Indigo

In the show we decided to explore recreating adverts. At first we did not really know where to go with it or how to do it. Then we remembered a performance we went to watch by Zoo Indigo. Zoo indigo are a duo theatre company created by Ildiko Ripple and Rosie Garton this duo create performances that involve multi-media theatre that uses humor as a mechanism to explore the realities of unimaginable experiences, and juxtaposes the realities of the everyday with the grandeur of the cinematic one is German and the other English and they combine the two languages together and the work examines cultural identity. They created a performance called’Celluloid Souls’ in this performance they investigate “the desires that movies evoke, desires to find love, to find a happy end, to be a hero, to be a villain, to be a sexy villain, to be a sexy German villain in long leather boots.” (Zoo Indigo, 2020) However for Shannon and I its about how they recreate the movies that helped us create our idea, Zoo Indigo use live cameras and screens to project the actual movies and then next to it their comedic remake of the movie. This is the element we deiced to take from this performance we want to use cameras and screens to recreate popular food adverts. When we saw this performance we remember it because we could not stop laughing at how they re-created them it was hilarious and we want that exact same effect on our audience.

Zoo indigo, (2020), Celluloid souls. Arts council England, available at: https://www.zooindigo.co.uk/about (accessed 12/5/2020)

Steven Berkoff

Berkoff is a British practitioner whose career has spanned from 1965 to today.His physical, exaggerated style of theatre is both popular and controversial, defying the norms of naturalistic theatre. Berkoff’s approach to theatre is incredibly physical. Kenneth Reah titled an article, “Like smoking, naturalism can damage your health”(Craig Rosen 2000) which sums up Berkoff’s approach to naturalistic theatre. His style is non-naturalistic, often focusing on movement rather that voice. According to him, the only purpose of a script is to help “minimalise and physicalise”(Robert Cross 2004) the story; stripping it down to its most basic components. We started watching a video of one of his performance called ‘Decadence Berkoff (the restaurant scene)’ this shows him sat on a sofa talking about food and pretending to eat it, almost like he is in a dream. We liked this idea because it is on a sofa and we thought we could use it to recant eating our favorite foods that we cannot have but want. His work is very physical and we were struggling with how to make our performance physically whilst being on a sofa and this gave us plenty of ideas in fact this is where we got our idea of creating a piece of physical theatre on the sofa fighting over a box of chocolates or possibly food menus.

http://www.iainfisher.com/berkoff/berkoff-study-a4.html : ‘Creating the “Berkovian” Aesthetic’ by Craig Rosen, Ph.D. (2000)http://dramaandsuch.blogspot.com/2013/02/steven-berkoff-theatre-technique.html (accessed 11/5/2020)

Berkoff, S. (2004) Steven Berkoff and the Theatre of Self Performance. Manchester University Press. Robert Cross.  (page 115) 

Flo and Joan

As we are a duo performance group we wanted to research and see if we could find a female duo that creates the same kind of work that we want to. Comedy duo’s have been around forever and there are so many but we wanted to find a pair that matched our performance style. We came across Flo and Joan, these are a multi-award winning British musical comedy duo, and sisters, Nicola and Rosie Dempsey. The piano/percussion pair have headlined and played to sold-out audiences across the UK, North America and Australia. They have become a very popular duo all over. They create their own songs based on life situations that they have gotten into or they sing about serious situations and make light of them. We want to take this aspect by using songs and turning them into parodies of situations we get into with food that are relatable. We like that the duo don’t really move a lot because what they are singing about is so entertaining that they don’t need to add many other layers to their acts, this is an aspect we would like to add in some sections where it is just stillness and what we are signing about is more captivating to the audience.

Konstantin Stanislavski

“love art in yourself, and not yourself in art”(Stanislavski). Konstantin Sergeievich Stanislavski was a seminal Russian theatre practitioner. He was widely recognised as an outstanding character actor and the many productions that he directed garnered him a reputation as one of the leading theatre directors of his generation. He was a committed follower of realism throughout his working life. Naturalism is often used to refer to the same things but it can also mean the belief that a human character is formed by what they’ve inherited from their family and environment. Yes our performance doesn’t follow his philosophy to a point however I feel that our performance we aren’t playing characters we are being us in the acting world. Everything about our performance besides breaking out into song is naturalistic we are creating our current state on stage. I think this was an element that happens naturally we automatically did not play characters when we started structuring our performance we were 100% ourselves and we answered each other the way we would normally answer with out own words. This is why at the time we weren’t sure we wanted to script our piece.

Constantin Stanislavski Quotes. (n.d.). BrainyQuote.com. Retrieved May 10, 2020, from BrainyQuote.com Available at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/constantin_stanislavski_155183 (accessed 12/5/2020)