Session 2

Tuesday 13^th January

Slow Motion Images

Whole group forms the shapes within a 5 or 10 second time limit (slow motion focuses their movement and their eventual freeze). This is a non-verbal exercise.

Warm up – A mountain

Images evolve from one to the other as guided by the teacher with music playing. The changes are given a specified context

Image 1 Cathedral - bombed

Image 2 Bridge – flooded/washed away

Image 3 Merry go round – fire/burns

Image 4 Ice Skating – ice cracks/drowns

Image 5 Children in playground…

Following the final image ‘Children in playground’ – students are asked what happens next?  Think do not speak-commit that image in as much detail as possible to your memory.

Discuss the images, what people imagined and why.

We can be reluctant to admit negative ideas for fear of what others will think of us.  If we are capable of thinking such things then it follows that hypothetically we are capable of doing them and in extreme circumstances we may commit extreme acts that break society’s rules.  Artaud explored these ideas in his book The Theatre and its Double – he draws our attention to the behaviour of people during times of plague.  In extreme situations, human beings are forced into sometimes brutally honest responses in order to survive.

“Life has in it a lot of ugliness and evil, which are both natural and man-made. Instead of shielding spectators from their impact, he would expose them, put them through the experience of a danger, then free them from it.”

Albert Bermel, Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty (London: Bloomsbury),1997

TATE MODERN VISIT