Pavel Semchenko

We also studied the practitioner, Pavel Semchenko, at the very beginning of this project, where we spent our first lesson looking at how an object can influence a whole piece.

We spent a while studying and just looking at one of our stimuli, we chose the picture of the soldiers who had been gassed, and we sat in silence taking in every aspect of it. The colour, the background images, the facial expressions, the intricate details that you might not normally see. We really focused in on the picture and then shared with each other and wrote down our initial thoughts, which we ended up reflecting on, when we started to develop our movements, based on what we'd seen.

This was a really helpful exercise and really emphasised to us, Semchenko's ideas that a whole piece can come out of a single object, if you take the time to study it and focus your complete concentration onto it. We also then allowed the object to become the key part of our performance. For example, in the picture, the men have bandages over their eyes, which gave us the idea to use the scarf, which the majority of our piece revolved around.

Complicite

We looked at Complicite to explore the space. We did an exercise where we had to become a character and get into a lift. One by one in our groups, we had to enter the tiny lift as our characters. Then the lift broke down and we had to decide how our character would react or move in this tiny space.

It was interesting to see how even if you are left with very little space, you are more than capable of still moving a lot and create an interesting piece using just small gestures and mainly your facial expression. This exercise made me very aware of the use of space, but also how important your facial expressions are, as you are still in a performance and you need to convey emotion towards the audience.

We then did an exercise where we had to pretend we were on a busy, packed train and we had to all be as tightly woven together as possible. We then had to move together all in the same direction at the same time. This was a very comedic exercise, but also made me very aware of how we can use our bodies to create interesting shapes and move in an intriguing way.

Magdalena Tuka

We also looked at the practitioner Magdalena Tuka. In this lesson we focused on exploring the space in a more playful manner. We really experimented and explored the room we were in and all of the ways we could move around the space. We did this in a cat-like way crouched down, using our hands and feet to contact the floor, which allowed our flexibility to be heightened and allowed us more freedom to experiment with the room. 

We explored the boundaries of distance and closeness. We got into partners, I was with Nora, and we had to move around the space, never breaking eye contact. It was like a trance-like dance between two people and the connection between you was lost if you broke eye contact. We had to try to keep our balance and experimented with different levels, such as moving on the floor, crawling, walking around the room, including turns and spins - always keeping eye contact, which allowed us to find the ability to play and create an atmosphere in the room, which would be perfect for our piece. 

Our Performance

I think that our performance went well. We rehearsed more and incorporated all of Tim's notes into our performance. We made sure that we were always moving and doing things in a certain way to explore what we could do with the scarf. I thought that our piece went well, although I was happy with our mark, I think it could have been higher, if we'd started devising in classes earlier, so that we could just start making our pieces, so that we could show them to teachers and other students to get lots more feedback and really improve our piece, but we were ready to perform our piece and I think it went well. The movement just could have been a little more developed.

Rehearsals

This is a video of our first rehearsal together where we started to come up with some of our piece that revolved around our stimulus. We chopped and changed the majority of this and added a lot more to our final piece, but it was an effective start, which led us to complete the rest of our piece. We also incorporated a scarf into our final piece, which was my green one, because it was meant to resemble the gas.

Tim's Feedback

We performed our piece to Tim, so see what we could improve on for our actual assessment. He really liked the majority of our piece and thought that the music juxtaposed well with the gas and was really appropriate for our movements.

He gave us some constructive advice, just to make sure that we were always moving and using our prop, the scarf, when possible. This would allow our piece and our movements to flow more, whilst also creating more meaning out of simple movements. This will also leave no sections of our piece looking like we haven't spent as much time on them, or that they look a little under-rehearsed next to some of the sequences we have.

This was really helpful advice and it has definitely benefited our piece. We will work on making sure that our piece is as effective and relevant to our stimulus as possible, whilst using our prop effectively to it's full potential.

Music and Sound

For the music and sound in our piece, Nora suggested that having a happy and cheerful song, might juxtapose what we're doing quite well, but we wanted our piece to be taken seriously, so we decided to have a mixture of songs.

We also wanted the sound of gas to come in at some point, so that it made it obvious to the audience what we're talking about. I went home and downloaded a program I have used before to mix songs together and add sounds over the top, so we have a sad piece of music and the sound of gas playing throughout and at the end, where our piece is quite deep and emotional, we use a cheerful sounding song, "It's a Long Way To Tipperary" by John McCormack.

We chose this to juxtapose the sadness of war, with the proud, happy moments that soldiers felt during some parts of the war.

Gas sounds:

These are the sounds that I cropped and altered to fit together to play over the music and to fade in and out.

Sad Music:

This is the sad music that I found to juxtapose with the more cheerful song at the end. I think the music sounded effective and really added to our piece. It felt a lot better when we ran it with the music and created more meaning, so should connect to the audience more.