9

Performance and Evaluation. 

I think this was probably the most strange, fun, enlightening pieces of theatre I had ever produced. The audience enjoyed it and were a little disturbed which is what we wanted, so I think that was a success. 

My first character- Alice and her sister worked quite well in relation to Experimental Theatre as there were elements of violence and surrealism as well as it being almost erotic. However I wish I had more confidence to go even further with it as I was held back by my costume. 

My second character- painting the roses red worked better then I'd previously practices it because all the props made the scene come to life more. And I also think my connection with the audience was quite good as I interacted with them as well as my abuser. Which worked well in relation to experimental theatre as we dealt with taboo subjects such as abuse and self mutilation wile breaking down the fourth wall and asking the audience for help. I just wish I had come to that climax much earlier in the devising process as I always seem to manage to do it on the night but never before. This has been the same in many of my performances and I think it's down to nerves. So I still think I have a long way to go, getting my confidence up and believing in my acting. Finally I think I will never be able to lose myself in a character if I'm thinking about myself even slightly. So I still need to work on completely embracing a character. 

In my final and main scene, I feel that it was so much better than what we started with although we still could have given so much more in relation to working with the audience. But we did use some very experimental ideas, such as actually hanging me and choking me. I know we all worked so hard on the scene and I felt it correctly portrayed the court scene from Alice and all the insanity included. But I know we could have just pushed the boundaries even more to disturb the audience which was the main objective from the start of the term. 

Overall, this was my favourite term so far in year 12 because experimental theatre opened up a lot of new doors and ways of acting for me and I thoroughly enjoyed working with them and learning about new practitioners who saw the world similarly to me. 

8

Taboo Subjects. 

The whole idea of experimental theatre was to look at reality- not this false fantasy we want to see. Which means confronting and dealing with taboo issues. Which we explored over a number of lessons. 

Some of the taboo subjects we looked at included:
-necrophiliac 
-bestiality
-incest
-mental illness 
-cannibalism 
-drugs
-rape
-child abuse

And we included these within our whole piece. In the lessons previous we devised small minute long performances about these subjects. I particularly remember one where I was a farmer who liked to have sex with my animals and we realised that we all found it funny. We thought possibly it was because to look past the awkwardness of it we laughed or maybe some taboo subjects we couldn't take seriously. So when we added these to our piece, we picked ones we thought we could portray honestly and well. 
So we picked:
-Self mutilation, which I did in a scene but cutting my wrists and painting the roses read with my blood.
-Rape and Cannibalism, in the Mad Hatters Tea Party. 
-Drugs, in the Artaud Drugs scene. 
-Child Abuse in the opening Scene. 

I felt like we managed to explore these subjects in a safe environment and it helped me get over my fear or acting out mental illnesses so I was grateful of that.  

7

The Court Scene. 

The scene we chose to devise was one of the most memorable in the 'Alice in Wonderland' story. The Court Scene. 

Our teacher was very adamant about us keeping some of the original text from 'Alice in Wonderland' so we added in the most memorable lines but put an Artaud twist on it. Therefore we decided in the end of the scene we could kill Alice in front the audience by hanging her. And to exclude the fourth wall, the audience themselves were part of the court. 

Through out the devising process we were told we need to make it more and more disturbing and include the audience more. So every time we performed the piece to the class we improved upon it. 

6

Promenade. 

We all like the idea of creating a promenade so we could take the audience on a disturbing journey. So we had 4 main rooms with 4 main scenes and some small linking scenes which looked at other aspects of English culture. 

We had our main 'Alice' scenes which included:

-English Bulldogs.

-The Tea Party

-The Court Scene

- Artaud drug scene

 And then we had some more English links to the story, using some of the Alice characters. 

Such as:

-football game with the white rabbit. 

-the market with tweedledum and dweedledee. 

-and a whole scene dedicated to soap opera. 

5

Clowning. 

During lessons we did a lot of work on clowning as we wanted to include a sibling rivalry in our piece, which was relevant to to the story of 'Alice in Wonderland'. An example of clowning is the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy who we spoke a lot about in class and used as a sort of stimulus to create our own comedy duo pieces. 

Before actually splitting off into a duo we got into small groups and explore 118 type characters- as they are a more modern take on clowning and uses a lot of the same slapstick as Laurel and Hardy. These pieces also included lots of violence and mime. 

My group did a lot of work in unison as we were competing to become models. We started out as friends but we got more and more angry with each other as we competed more and more. We had to practice being violent in a smaller space and worked out our reactions. As they had to be very exaggerated and almost like melodrama. 

In new groups we added a grotesque take on it. Focusing on the artuad element. Me and my partner created sibling rivalry during a game of tennis; in which we ended up dramatically slaughtering each other which our teacher really like as it would freak out the audience out. 

In conclusion, clowning was on of the most enjoyable lessons because it taught me that comedy can also be very dark. Also, since I had never been taught clowning before it was interesting and the skills I learnt helped me in my final performance with Ffion as we opened the show. It was also a very easy going way of opening us up into the dark subjects included in experimental theatre. 

4

English Stimulus. 

What is English?

To begin with me brought in little props that made us think of England. Some people brought in: newspapers, pictures of buses, English poems, English money, pictures of fish and chips, crowns etc. I brought in one of my Harry Potter wands. Because to me, personally, nothing shouts English more than the Harry Potter series. (Also possibly because Harry Potter is my favourite thing.) In the end we all agreed that we would like to create a piece of drama from 'Alice in Wonderland' as it was extremely English and has lots of potential for Artaud.

In the next lesson, we were told to bring in some picture stimuli surrounding our chosen piece 'Alice in Wonderland' however our teacher wanted us to put an Artaud twist on it. So this was the picture I had. 

This picture became the whole basis to my small solo piece between the main piece. There were images of bloody wrists and white roses running through my head and I expressed these to my teacher who loved them. 

Other picture stimuli below gave us inspiration for lighting, scenes and costume ideas. 

3

Antonin Artaud 

 Antoine Christina Joseph Artaud was born on the 4 September 1896 and he died on the 4 March 1948. He was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director. Antonin Artaud suffered from bouts of chronic depression and in 1916 he was sent into the French army but relieved due to a self induced habit of sleep walking. After which he was prescribed some drugs to help him which ended up turning into a lifelong addiction to other opiates as well as the prescribed medication. 
He moved to Paris to peruse a career as a writer and found his love for the theatre. He believed that theatre should represent reality- and affect the audience as much as possible. Obviously, he had a different view of the world as other people as he had had a lot of negative things happen to him. 
So to affect the audience he used a mixture of strange and disturbing forms of lighting, sound and other elements.  
He started something that we all know as 'The Theatre of Cruelty' however by cruelty he didn't mean exclusively sadism, pain and violence but sheer determination and shatter 
this false world we call reality. 

Artaud's aim was that a performance should make an audience member look deep inside themselves and look at their own fears whereas Brecht's techniques was to make an audience member look outside themselves and at society- examining political affairs and so on. Artaud's rehearsal process was normally extremely tiring as he asked his actors to look inside his/her primal emotions to help create a role. He liked to explore the use of sounds to express emotion and even dialogue such as: grunts, screams, cries. 

However, all of his work was extremely influential on modern theatre and his techniques are still widely used today to help create characters. 

2

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My thoughts prior to this term were that it was going to be difficult. We were going to be working with some subjects that personally for me would be a challenge but I hoped this would be a good thing as it could stretch me as an actor. This was a brand new creative process, so as well as being utterly terrifying it was slightly exciting too- as we were told we would be pushing the boundaries of theatre. 

We openly discussed the practitioners that we would be looking at during the term and they included:
- Samuel Beckett
-Bertold Brecht
-Peter Brook
-Jerzy Grotowski 
- and finally Anotnin Artaud (who we explored most fully throughout the term.) 
Looking at these many creative and different practitioners I felt like we had a solid ground to start work on the experimental term. 

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Experimental Theatre, beginning in the late 19th century was a general term for movements in western theatre. It was new, different and exciting with no rules and drawbacks. Experimental theatre is a way in which you can break the fourth wall with the audience- pushing the boundaries of theatre and entering a new era of theatre. Experimental theatre alters the traditional conventions of:
-space
- movement
-tension
-language
-symbolism
-as well as others. 

Our goal by the end of the term is to fully explore experimental theatre and create a performance that will leave the audience shocked and uncomfortable. Also quite possibly making them feel isolated and insecure or on the other hand, explore giving the audience too much power and seeing how they react.  This will be different to any performance we have done before and I am quite excited for the term ahead.