The Amygdala: Our Skeleton Running Order and Blocking our Scenes

This lesson we began to form the beginnings of our piece by gluing together various parts of improvisation last week. Stuart took notes on what moments where the most bold and we comprised them into an order. It looked something like this:

1. Fairy lights, party rings, jaffa cakes
2. Octopus movement
3. Dolphin movement
4. Moonfish movement
5. Hokey Cokey
6. Airplanes
7. Piggy backs
8. Number game
9. Eden angelic singing
10. Snuggle train
11. Joe tormenting screaming
12. Mummy Help me exercise
13. Find pair
14. Brain holding
15. Tribal dancing to Jimmy Hendrix

This was the first attempt at created a proper running order for the piece, and although it is not set in stone, it is likely the finished product will resemble this order. The mummy help me exercise was based on an Artaud idea called the Theatre of Cruelty, and involved creating an extreme physical and vocal stimulus to evoke a strong internal emotional response. We knelt down, lifted out heads above our hands as if in chains and screamed "mummy help me". I imagined it as being as if I was a young child who had awoken from a nightmare and calling to a mother that would never come. This evoked a powerful emotional response inside me, and made me cry. I took the lead in this part of the final production.

In Chris' class we worked on blocking our own scenes based on extract from Oliver Sachs' novels. Our piece is on a man with Alzheimer's who can remember memories from his life when listening to certain music, so we created a piece in which a guitar replaces various elements of important life events, such as becoming the baby at a birth or the bride at a wedding.