Frantic Assembly

Monday 3rd October - Lesson

We started the lesson with an exercise where we walked around the space and chose someone who we would feel safe around and want to be with and someone who we'd be afraid of, and let this affect the way we moved and responded to the people in the space. For example as we were told to make the feelings more intense we became aware of someone following us as well as being more fearful of the person we had identified and more desperate to be close to the person that made us feel safe. For the character I made, I felt the panic building up as the person I felt would protect me was with the person I feared and I found this created confusing mix of jealousy and desperation in my character, I wanted to find a way to split them up so I could have that person to protect me but was scared of the consequences.

We then discussed how the theatre practitioner Stanislavski used the idea of everybody having different objectives/motives in different situations and how, as actors, we can use them to make the characters we are portraying more realistic. These objectives could be small things - as a simple example if someone wanted a cup of tea the reason they would go into the room is to make it, therefore they'd go straight to the kettle and that is what they would be doing in a scene - their objective explains their actions.

We also talked about Stanislavski's "super objective", the end goal of the character and what drives them in day to day life, not just in a certain situation, and is most likely linked to the outcome of the play. If an actor can identify a character's super objective they can portray the character more accurately and realistically as this would affect their decisions and actions in different situations and how they would go about overcoming different barriers. Stanislavski believed in naturalistic acting and I think the idea of objectives could be very useful in showing a character in a realistic way because if you know what your character wants to get out of a situation, it will subtly change the way you behave as the circumstances change. If you engage with the emotions of the character and react spontaneously, as if you yourself were in that situation, your acting subsequently becomes more realistic. By not choreographing every response, the scene becomes more natural as each character is reacting in a genuinely and not in a generalised fashion - as in deliberately doing something sadly, or angrily etc. 

With this in mind we created a short scene with three characters who each have their own different objectives - to be close to one person in the scene, to avoid (out of fear) another and also to get rid of the person who is slightly unnerving in the attention they're giving you. In our piece we tried to use proxemics to help the audience understand the relationships between the characters as we didn't use any dialogue. We did this by having my character sat on a chair angled slightly away from Megan's character and on the opposite side of the stage, the furthest away we could be, to symbolise the fear my character had for Megan's. I made my posture very rigid and turned away from Megan which I think was quite effective in showing my anxiety about being in a room with only her. When Jenna's character entered I visibly relaxed and turned towards her to illustrate how I felt comforted when she was near me. She however barely looked away from Megan and slowly closed the distance between them until she was stood directly behind her. Megan jumped when she noticed Jenna then swiftly moved away and placed a cup of tea she'd made for me on the table by my side, which I flinched at, then stood semi-awkwardly in the middle of the space.

If we were to do this scene again I think we should add some dialogue as it seemed quite unnatural to not speak to each other and our actions became more like a mime which meant the audience saw it as a comical performance rather than a realistic one. We would then be able to use our tone of voice and inflection to also convey how we felt in that situation which would also make the scene more believable.

Moving away from that scene and doing something completely unrelated, we stood in a circle and made an abstract, improvised physical sequence to describe what the person next to us was wearing. At first we used fairly big exaggerated movements, then we did the same actions but made them much smaller and more discreet and played with mixing between the two.

We then went back to our groups of three and substituted that movement into our short scenes. The only thing we could do to convey what we were doing/how we were feeling in the scenes was change the way we did those unrelated movements.

We watched each others and I found that for some of the scenes it changed the storylines and created a different, still engaging scene whilst for others it really worked and enhanced the story already in place. For example in one piece when the movements were accidentally in sync, the connection it made between the characters and how they spontaneously reacted to each other made the scene much more engaging for me in the audience. I also thought the physicality of the piece and when they chose to use big or small movements actually told the audience a lot about how they were feeling, without having to use any words and still keeping a believable tone to the characters, even though they were acting in an abstract way.

Similarly in another piece there were moments where the timing of certain movements just worked and was really effective in showing how the characters related to each other. This pair had staged it so the girl was stood on a riser and the boy was stood on the floor, pacing around her and looking at her then sitting next to her on the riser; at one point in their separate movements, the girl looked down at the boy just as he looked away from her face and mimed putting a hood up as he turned away. This unintentional coinciding movement suddenly held so much meaning and conveyed the almost guilty desire the boy had to be close to the girl and the contempt she had for him, it was fascinating to watch.

This way of devising is similar to how the company Frantic Assembly devises theatre - by experimenting with physical movements and sequences and then applying them to a storyline or play text. I think that by creating the movement first, it allows for more creativity and freedom and challenges you into fitting an interesting physical sequence into the story and adapting it to help show what you want it to. I think if you were to try it the other way around and have the story first and then try and make a movement to tell the story, it makes it too structure and much more difficult because you overthink it and almost try too hard to make the movements mean something, instead of using them to help tell your story... if that makes sense! I think story telling through movement and physicality is a very interesting way of making theatre and can really intensify how the audience responds to a piece of theatre.