We began the whole weekend with a trust exercise in which the class had to follow a blindfolded student around the room and stop them from hurting themselves, even walking over chairs in the auditorium. A very effective team exercise requiring a lot of concentration, it felt quite urgent for most of it as you tried to stop the person from falling over. It laid the foundations for the themes of the day and around Antigone with one person blindly walking despite obstacles and the others trying to stop them from hurting themselves. The next exercise built the idea of desperation and fighting against the barrier stopping you from reaching the thing you need to fulfil as a single person had to break through the circle formed by the others with their arms linked. I loved doing this, both stopping and trying to break free (especially as I was the fastest to break out, not to brag or anything) and it really gave the sense of trying anything just to get free.
Triangle of Emotions
It began like so: three points far from each other with one representing love and comfort, one fear and one anger and we had to walk between them. Quite simple at first and gradually began to build the intensity of the emotion until it was extraordinarily difficult to move to each emotion. I really loved this exercise and found the emotion love/comfort and fear quite easy to express but actually found anger quite hard to intensify without someone to let it out on and found my intensity of emotion for that one was much weaker than the others.
The next part added in a partner with whom you shared each other's paths and helped each other understand their emotions and the paths they were walking, and how it affected them. I found this quite moving as my partners emotions almost amplified my own and gave me a great desire to comfort her. Adding to this, we began to try and drag our partners on our paths and not let them take you on theirs, I was quite shocked at how desperate this made me as I had a huge determination to stay in my place of comfort and keep my partner there also. Megan was basically sobbing as she tried to drag me on her path and I found it quite hard to keep her in mine but the desperation to stay sort of took over and wouldn't let me shift from my spot.
Walking the paths again on our own was quite isolated after that, despite keeping eye contact with our partner, though I did feel a great connection reaching over the room to my partner. This feeling of comfort from the partner was amplified hugely in the next exercise where we lay on the floor with our eyes closed and had to find our partner on the ground. Luckily, me and my partner somehow managed to find each other within 30 seconds and stuck together taking comfort from each other and I was surprised at how comfortable I felt being so personal with Megan and the level of safety I found in her presence. This was especially true when Mr Chipp came up and dragged my foot as I immediately just grabbed Megan and took her with me and it actually strengthened our bond and made me hold on even tighter to Megan. This is until Mr Chipp began to place a niggle of doubt in our minds about the other's integrity which made me feel quite isolated and hurt.
Using this whole sequence, we had to condense the movement into one minute, which I found quite difficult as there was so much content to go through and it took a lot of restraint to choose the most interesting moments from the sequence. I felt that the sequence was quite good though perhaps I could have spent a bit more time on the emotion/ walking around than the finding comfort on the floor.
Finally, in a three we had to condense movements again into five favourite moments from the sequence and react to each other: one would do a move then hold eye contact with the other, then again with the next. This was quite intense and the performance was quite good though with hindsight I think it would have been better if we had done something like Kieran and Caitlin by reflecting each others' levels and continuously staring at each other, or like Harriet and Emily who linked theirs together rather than just reacting.
Lunch - Amazing
You wouldn't think it, but you can add so much drama to lunch.
I absolutely loved this: the table was laden with food and one place was set for the 'master' who was tied to a chair and had two 'servants' feed them food. On top of this, the two parties had portray an emotion whilst doing it. Absolutely fantastic to watch, it was even better being the 'master'. I had to show the emotion 'lust' whilst being fed a salad sandwich, wish they'd been more adventurous with the food they fed me as I was up for anything right then, so the hardest thing I found was chewing in front of an audience especially as I was very conscious of the fact that some crumbs were on my chin.
This exercise was about creating interesting methods of travel across a room as with a partner we took it in turns directing the course of our movement through applying pressure firstly through connected hands, and then through touching left shoulders. It was interesting doing this not only in trying to create an interesting path with turns and such, but it also took a huge amount of coordination from both parties in understanding what the other wanted, moving with each other and then avoiding the other students in the room. I found leading this exercise extremely difficult perhaps because I didn't have the best ability when it came to putting pressure into someone at the point which indicated an instruction. I somehow also managed to create a lot more collisions than any other person in the class.
Using this idea, with a different partner, we took the idea of the relationship between Antigone and Creon firstly exploring it with Antigone as the hero and Creon the antagonist. Within our partners I acted as Creon and Megan (again) as Antigone. We came up with a set of movements which I felt were pretty effective though we may have incorporated something a but more fast-paced and passionate, though I was especially proud of one move we came up with which was Creon pushing Antigone back and simultaneously down as it looked very dynamic. We then swapped the roles and made Creon the hero and Antigone the antagonist (controversial) therefore we adapted the movements, making Creon seem more concerned and comforting of Antigone whilst she ignored his help and care and pushed unreasonably against him, the main aspect of this being Antigone pushing back on Creon's hand as he pushed her down and eventually ending up above him.
I really liked our sequence of movements and it was one of the rare times you get excited at sharing your ideas with the rest of the class as I felt we clearly managed to portray the power in the relationship, the intent of both characters as well as making it aesthetically pleasing to the audience. In our performance we had to run the sequence twice and the first run through was perfect, but the second time we went through it, something went wrong and me being clumsy and confused lost my train of thought and completely lost where we were in the sequence.
I definitely need to work on my coordination, memory and recovery. I may be at a disadvantage in this respect as I never did drama at GCSE level so haven't had the same experience as most of the class and I notice I struggle more than a lot at remembering moves and actually coming up with effective pieces in the first place. It actually more likely to do with indecisiveness and clumsy, disordered nature.
Using this idea, with a different partner, we took the idea of the relationship between Antigone and Creon firstly exploring it with Antigone as the hero and Creon the antagonist. Within our partners I acted as Creon and Megan (again) as Antigone. We came up with a set of movements which I felt were pretty effective though we may have incorporated something a but more fast-paced and passionate, though I was especially proud of one move we came up with which was Creon pushing Antigone back and simultaneously down as it looked very dynamic. We then swapped the roles and made Creon the hero and Antigone the antagonist (controversial) therefore we adapted the movements, making Creon seem more concerned and comforting of Antigone whilst she ignored his help and care and pushed unreasonably against him, the main aspect of this being Antigone pushing back on Creon's hand as he pushed her down and eventually ending up above him.
I really liked our sequence of movements and it was one of the rare times you get excited at sharing your ideas with the rest of the class as I felt we clearly managed to portray the power in the relationship, the intent of both characters as well as making it aesthetically pleasing to the audience. In our performance we had to run the sequence twice and the first run through was perfect, but the second time we went through it, something went wrong and me being clumsy and confused lost my train of thought and completely lost where we were in the sequence.
I definitely need to work on my coordination, memory and recovery. I may be at a disadvantage in this respect as I never did drama at GCSE level so haven't had the same experience as most of the class and I notice I struggle more than a lot at remembering moves and actually coming up with effective pieces in the first place. It actually more likely to do with indecisiveness and clumsy, disordered nature.
Some of the other performances were really memorable, especially Caitlin, Hannah and Jenna's as the movement as three created a really lovely mirroring effect as Caitlin and Hannah were Creon trying to stop Jenna and they made some really eye-catching shapes with the two Creons.
Antigone - The Word
We started to explore Antigone's reasons and emotions involved in defying Creon: we were told to think of a reason completely detached from saving or changing the world that you would die for. I put this into a similar situation as Antigone as I wouldn't let little brother's body be left to rot even if it meant risking my life and being told to put it into a word I defined it as Closure, though I found it really hard to define as I felt there wasn't a certain emotion that defined it. Using this we were told to rise from lying down, writing the word in the air in the emotion and determination we felt linked with our reason to die, getting bigger and bigger as we got more desperate.
Using this idea, we were put into partners where one was Creon, trying to stop Antigone from hurting themselves whilst the other was Antigone trying to write the word, using any means necessary, Creon had to try and stop her whilst again, any means necessary, Antigone had to keep going. Hannah was my Creon and she was pretty hard to get free of at points and it was quite striking how much the determination took over my body and I fought against her constantly, never giving up - it was very exhausting doing this and felt as bad as the last mile of my marathon, but doing also funnily made me feel stronger at the same time as the need to fulfill the writing meant that I was fulfilling a moral duty and that somehow gave me strength despite only spelling a word in the air.
Next, Mr Chipp shouts, "Holly's Antigone, the rest of you are Creon" so suddenly I'm fighting against 12 teenagers as they try to pin me down, this elevated the need to write the word and I thrashed and thrashed against the oncoming students, accidentally kicking one of them in the jaw as they resorted to taking arms and legs and lifting me up. This was immense fun and I was quite proud of how I did and I do feel that it gave me a good insight into Antigone's reasons and her need to keep on fighting no matter what, (maybe not quite death though).
Sequence of the Activities of the Day
Using the idea of our one defining word for Antigone, split into groups we tried to combine our ideas to come up with one word. We ended up deciding on 'closure' as the others' in the group kind of fell into that category. Using aspects from each activity of the day, we came up with movements to portray this idea. I loved this creative process as it took a lot of thinking and trial and error to finally come up with the finished piece which I thought looked very effective in the end with different levels, fast and slow movement, story line and weird shapes from Caitlin. One constructive criticism from Chipp that I agree with is that we could have done something with the strange shapes at the end as we came together with Caitlin making shapes which I could fit into when I moved.
Free Flow Writing
To sum up the day, we spent ten minutes doing free flow writing, it was my first time doing this and I'm not sure I did it completely right but it did feel like it freed-up a lot of the ideas I'd had all day though it ended up being pretty unreadable:
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