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Back at the base

Students brought their experiences back into the ensemble room, sharing their thoughts and ideas through a series of workshop activities. By this point the two workshop leaders, Fenella and Chloe had begun to explore the practitioners of Laban and Anne Bogart through their work and students were beginning to piece their ideas together through a framework of a performance structure. They also created the human version of the Lotus temple through movement captured below. 

Students were using their experiences and what they had seen to form the basis of their performance ideas. This would now form part of the final performance. 

The festival was under way and the students were really in the process of devising original theatre. 

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Lotus temple and Lodhi Gardens

The out and about were to the Lotus Temple and Lodhi Gardens and the festival participants had to use the spaces to explore the theme and bring something back into the ensemble group that would build on their piece. Most of the visiting students had not visited Delhi before and were quite taken aback by the sounds, traffic and chaos of Delhi. The Lotus Temple is a place of silence and it was wonderful to have that contrast of the outside with the noise, smells and madness with the inside of the temple with its silence and serenity. 

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First day of the festival

During the first day, students were taken through an array of activities which would develop them as an ensemble group, this is something that is so important to the IB Theatre course and so naturally we were intrigued in the activities and how such a large group of students from different parts of the world would come together in such a short space of time. Using the outdoor space, the group were taken through yoga exercises and physical warm up games that would loosen their limbs and inhibitions.

Using outdoor space was really good to see. 

Yoga with your shoes!

The group then spilt into two and moved into their ensemble spaces to discuss the theme and begin building on a final performance which would take place on sunday, the last day of the festival. 

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A traditional welcome for a visiting teacher from Usukdar American School Istanbul

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Off to a magical start

The opening festival was a hit. The huge puppets wandering around greeting the visiting students were one way to wake everyone up. Students and visiting teachers were greeted in the traditional Indian way, a Tikka and a Puppet??? The drummers and puppets interacted with the guests as they moved around the courtyard, it was exciting and energising! 

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The opening festival for ISTA Bonsai Ship of Theseus, New Delhi, The British School

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Bonsai ISTA

It is ISTA time and we have the fortunate opportunity of hosting the ISTA high school festival. We have students visiting from Istanbul and Egypt as well as our own British School students. It is an exciting festival and we the starting theme for the festival is Ship of Theseus. We choose this theme for its incredible potential to be explored from a practical basis as well as a great discussion for the students visiting from different parts of the world. the students all arrived on a thursday evening and were lucky to be hosted by parents of the British School. Everyone was excited and ready for the festival to start. Our teacher Ms Galton who was hosting and arranging the festival was ready for some sleep after months of planning but had powered herself with coffee and her love for Theatre and ISTA. The opening to the festival was planned. Visits to The Lotus Temple and Lodhi Gardens were part of the 'out and about' around Delhi. We were all set to go!

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Wayang Kulit Ukur by ‘Mpu’ (maestro) Sukasman

Details of the Wayang Kulit puppets - AA

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Behind the scenes of our Ramayan

-ZZ

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This is my own puppet. It is supposed to be a Balinese version Supernakha (Ravans sister) -ZZ

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These are some of the puppets we used in our class. We have the characters Ravan Sita Angad We also have the tree of life and a deer. This is what the puppets look like in a performance. Even though you only see the shadows, the puppets are very colourful . -ZZ

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UNESCO: Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity - 2008 URL: http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/RL/00039 Description: Renowned for ...

Just a little background information that we got on Wayang Kulit. We watched a lot of videos to understand the traditional way of performing and the technical details.

-ZZ 

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So I'm doing Cagebirds for my highschool play, I'm the Gazer, do you have any tips for my character?

Hi anonymous,

Sorry for the late rely, not sure if this will help anymore but I'll still try.

Im ZZ and I played Gazer in our production. If you do want to still ask, send me the question again and I'll give you some tips that worked for me.

Thanks. 

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A New Year

Hello to all. It overwhelms me when I realise that we have reached our second year in the IB theatre course. To recap last year, we learnt about: 

-Kubuki Theatre

-Artuad

-Brecht

-Pina

And we even had our own performance of Cagebirds by David Campton. If any of you have any questions about the above topics, please do let us know. This year we have started with Wayang Kulit and will upload our journey on the blog as we go through the course.

We hope you enjoy :)

-ZZ 

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Summary of The Theater of Cruelty (The First Manifesto) By Antonin Artaud

The primary objective of

The First Manifesto

 was Artaud's end with subordination theatre text, and establish andpromote a unique theatrical language that is halfway between gesture and thought. A unique theatrical language can be defined as its possibilities for dynamic and spatial expression, rather thanusing dialogue as it does in theatres. "

 Here too intervenes (besides the auditory language of sounds) the visuallanguage of objects, movements, attitudes, and gestures, but on condition that their meanings, their physiognomies, their combinations be carried to the point of becoming signs, making a kind of alphabet out ofthese signs

" (Artaud, 2000:1). So, it's not a direct challenge to the metaphysical idea of the stage, but this is a newkind of temptation. Such theatre evokes a variety of art (music, dance, pantomime, or mimicry), but only if theycan contribute and lie great stress to the central expression without advantage for any particular art. This kind oftheatrical language creates witch-crafts, encourages voice, uses vibrations and frees meaning from the words.Finally, Artaud interrupts intellectual subjection of the language.In order to achieve this by spectators,

Theatre of Cruelty

 evokes themes such as dreams, crimes, erotic obsessions,savagery, ghosts, cannibalism ..., all with the desire to show us the eternal conflict and spasm. After a brief theory of the theatre as it should be, I resume some of Artaud detailed analysis of the areas that set upa show in

Theatre of Cruelty

.

Directing

 is considered the starting point of all theatrical works. The director is a unique creator, who isresponsible for the production and action, and must create a spectacle. The director himself is theatrical work.

The language of the stage

must give to words approximately the importance they have in dreams.

Instruments

 would except just for playing music. Given that weighs to unusual shapes and sounds (scary,unusual unexpected screams, noises, moaning, chopping rhythm) and vibrations, there is a need for making newsounds, and the use of old instruments. He wanted to put sound along with visual perception.

Lighting

 devices that are used in the theatre before was not longer adequate. He added to the lighting equipmentnew functions (thinness, density, and opaqueness) to produce sensations of heat, cold, anger, fear, etc.It is suggested

costumes

 resembling ceremonial character. Artaud decided to remove all barriers from the

stage

 and replaced them with a kind of a unique place. In this way,he established a direct link between the spectators and the performance. The spectator is placed in the centre ofthe action, surrounded and intersected it. Accordingly, he left off the typical theatre stage and suggested atypicaltheatre space (e.g. hangar or barn). These spaces would be transformed by the principles from churchesarchitecture and holy sites in Tibet.Dolls, hieroglyphics and ceremonial costumes, huge masks and objects of unusual proportions are typical oftheatre of cruelty, and represent mythic consciousness. Artaud,

actor

 considered the most important. From his performance depends efficiency, but it also needs to bepassive and neutral. He wants to give to the words the same importance that they have in dreams, but alsohighlights sign language, facial expressions, gestures.

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Discussion for Artaud piece

- hospital - affected by the plague 

-comparison to volcano - liquid?

- one person assaulted with different substances like goo, slime and so on 

- uniform of white 

-cellophane wrapped environment

- another environment to perform in? unusual setting?like the corridors or stairs

- take something normal and distort it, shake people out of complacency, corrupt them 

- birthday party? offer another perspective 

- start the piece without warning as if someones birthday

-involve the audience 

- then suddenly have the birthday girl appear tied to a chair and her mouth taped, cut the cake - filled with something? and them assault her with it, slapping her with the goo 

these are the notes so far..... 

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In what could be considered the craziest/most creative drug experiment ever, artist Bryan Lewis Saunders pushed himself to the limit when he decided to take a different drug everyday for a few weeks.

This isn't  theatre, but in class we were talking about the troubled pasts of many artists, drug abuse, etc. & we also spoke about how those pasts/drugs/addictions can influence their work.

so i found this link of this artist that drew self portraits while he was on different drugs. 

-AA