Tag: Class

So… What now?

Martyn Horner-Glister / / Class, Depression, General, Thoughts

In today’s lesson we went through some of the finer points of our essay criteria and what we should be looking at doing. This makes me feel better!

However, we also talked about the final performance itself.

Now as we went around the room sharing thoughts and ideas for our final pieces, I suddenly found myself wondering who has read this blog. I’ll be honest it was un-nerving. I’m not sure why but I got the feeling that a few people had read it. Up until today (as a narrow minded individual) I presumed that hardly anyone had read it, just because there were very few comments on any posts.  I can now see that this was wrong. Ah well.

The ideas I came out with in class are slightly different to those I’d posted earlier. I’ll tell you them now now:

I want to be open and almost autobiographical in my piece. I still want to address the issues around depression and how I’m suffering with it, but I’m doubting the idea again and wanting to revert to my original plan of the  Grumpy Old Men style of show.

Donald asked me why I was concerned about my piece. I confessed it was a case of worrying about people’s perception of me combined with managing to do the piece about depression with sensitivity and possibly getting it wrong. It was then pointed out to me that if the piece is about myself, there are no wrong answers. Fair point, I suppose. Then it was also pointed out to me that we leave University a few days after the show anyway, so why worry about what people would think? We’ll see.

We’d been made to think recently about the staging and atmosphere we wanted to create in our shows. This has made me think about how I’d stage my piece.

I’ve been thinking about having a projection of myself constantly against the back wall which could just comment along with what I’m saying on stage, almost as if it was my inner voice or my conscience. I’m not entirely sure, perhaps I’ll have it completely contradict me. This will be an ideal way of getting in material I have previously written along the lines of Grumpy Old Men. I’ve also thought that the whole space of the studio could be a performance space, so there would be no set place for the audience to sit or stand. For example, perhaps I could have props and set in different corners of the room and then something central, but then the whole time the projection is there on one screen. Always there, always judging whatever I do. It would be almost as if the audience was in my mind with me. I could even limit the audience, restrict the numbers by issuing personal invites and sharing an improvised experience. There is no reason for not imposing a condition that each invited member of the audience wears a certain colour.

All of this is food for thought. I’ll refine it and get back to you.

 

Martyn

 

Essay time.

Martyn Horner-Glister / / Class, General, Thoughts, Uncategorized

I’ll be honest. I’m stumped. I’m struggling with the essay for this module. There is a choice of five possible questions and they all rely on having seen some solo performances. I think I’m going to plump for the last question with regards to space, traditions, liveness (which I’m not sure is a real word), acting and non-acting.
Any colleagues have any thoughts?

Wait… what?

Martyn Horner-Glister / / Class, General, Thoughts

This week we had a very surreal sort of experience in our session.

‘Words, words, words’ said Donald (and Hamlet), ‘I want you to think about words’. The idea being that they didn’t have to make sense. Donald wanted us to understand that whatever we perform for our final solo performance it could end up being art for art’s sake. Or Gibberish, as I prefer to call it.

We each came up with a setting, a short sequence of lights and sound to create a mood for the beginning of a piece. It could be anything we like. We also had to introduce a human being doing something.

So, I came up with the following;

 

A dark space. Dry ice or smoke rolls across the space as a tight white spotlight comes on from directly above R. and goes out as ‘Aerodynamic’ by Daft Punk begins to play loudly.

Another tight white spotlight comes on from directly above L. and goes out after three seconds.

A third tight white spotlight comes on from directly above C. and goes out. 

The three spotlights flash intermittently and then cease after fifteen seconds. The music fades down to a more acceptable level as a General Wash fades up dimly to reveal a horseshoe shaped wall with three doors along it’s length. The music continues as a woman bursts through the centre door wearing a straight jacket which she is tied into. She has an itch on her nose.

 

We were then asked to hand what we’d written to the person next to us and let them continue the sequence. I handed mine over to David Halliday and he continued with the following;

She attempts to scratch her nose on her sleeves calmly. A slow beat starts.

The spotlights from before come up one at a time and in time with the beats. The beats speed up and the spotlights keep pace as her attempts get more desperate.

As the tempo increases the colour of the spotlights change. This continues for a minute.

The woman screams as the lights and sound snap out.

In the darkness there is a sniffing of the woman’s nose. This combines with the sound of water dripping.

 

We now were handed back our pieces of work and told to add text to it. This could be anything we wanted. A recipie, a speech, dialogue, a poem, a dictionary. So I chose to write;

The poem ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling is delivered calmly by a male voice in the darkness.

 

This all seems nonsensical, and believe me, other people’s work was far more absurd than this. However, this simple exercise got the point across to the class that whatever we wanted to do, we could do it. Certainly food for thought.

Solo performance, or indeed any performance, doesn’t have to make sense. It can be art for art’s sake.

Musings

Martyn Horner-Glister / / Class, General, Thoughts

Hello,

I’ve been giving a lot of thought of late as to what I’d like to do for my Solo Performance. As you do. I’ve had a great many thoughts on how best to relate to the audience to make the piece work.

My initial plan for this module was to create and perform a piece on the struggles and strifes of being a mature student trying to fit in with the status quo. Lately, however, I’m finding all sorts of other ideas in my mind.

We’ve done some work in our workshops looking into autobiographical styles of performance. I’ve toyed with this a little and will be presenting it in our next workshop, because I like the idea that it would be interesting to my peers to know a little about me and how I came to be at university. I also like the idea that what I do would not be what is expected of me. Reading this back it all seems a bit mysterious, doesn’t it? Good. That’s the idea; keeping you guessing so you’ll come back with comments and ideas!

But in all honesty, I think that unless I do something genuinely autobiographical in a sincere and engaging style, I don’t think it will work. Especially when we’re only doing a piece of eight to twelve minutes.

I’m now thinking of blending my original idea with another and raising some awareness of issues. More on that later!

 

Martyn