Stage Combat - 19/10/16

This session looked at two parts of Antigone: the chorus and the fight between the two brothers.

It was during the half-an-hour warm up that we looked at the chorus, trying to create a synchronised cast doing odd movements together through following someone. To create an effective Antigone chorus we need to be able to move in distinctive ways as one, therefore we need to work on coordinating with the rest of the cast whilst following the leader's movements. A bit ropy this week, I reckon that the synchronicity and inventiveness of our movements will improve quite rapidly over the next few weeks.

Moving on from the chorus, we began to look at stage combat in relation to the brothers' fight learning moves such as the punch, slap, hair grab and strangle. This was extremely fun and I think that I got the hang of the punch pretty quickly as well as the strangle though I think I need to work on the hair grab and slap a bit more. Using these movements, we had to put them into a sequence alternating in our partners: left-hand block, punch in the stomach, punch to the face and swap and repeat. With the help of my partner who had some experience in stage combat before, we managed to get a good rhythm going though I often found I lost coordination or our place in the movement.

Using this routine we then slowed the movement down trying to access the basic movement of the fight and softening it. This required a huge amount of concentration especially in coordinating our movement with each other and because of this I found I kept leaving out precision or aggression in my movement.

Stepping this up, we distanced from our partners and start adding frenzy to our movements gradually which I found meant I lost control of my body, and got confused as to where I was in the movement meaning that I often flung punches in the wrong place but tried to get the pasic to and thro of the movement whilst just making it fast paced.

All of this was combined together in a sequence: combat sequence real-time, slow motion, distance with real speed and gradually gaining frenzy. The performance of this is shown in this video: