MUSIC AND CHARACTERS

In today’s session we looked at music as a form of stimulus and how characters and worlds can be created through listening to music and responding to it. We listened to three different songs and with each song we spent time letting our imaginations react instantly to the music. After listening to the song once, we played it again and started to move around as our characters and explored how they walked and lived within their world. We also exaggerated and under-exaggerated our characters and noticed how this affected or changed our characters. This is a Steven Burkoff technique and we are exploring him more through these exercises.

The first piece of music we listened to was a very fast pace piece and when listening to it I instantly got the image of a congested train. This simple image led me to create a character that would be around during rush hour on the trains and combining this with the fast tempo of the music I thought of a constantly busy business man. When I got up on my feet, my walk and rhythm as a character fell into the tempo of the music and this really helped me to set the pace of my character and to find objectives that would fit this tempo and this character and what their headspace was like. Although I had created a fast person when I exaggerated this character I found myself moving slower as my body and physicality got bigger, I felt this created a slightly more stereotypical business, suit wearing, male character. However when I went down of the exaggeration scale I found myself folding into myself but moving quicker, in a mouse-like movement, and this created a shyer, more introverted, slightly older, bit awkward business man. I thought that this was really interesting to see as from the same stimulus two very different characters were born even though they had similar qualities such as their profession.

The next piece of music we listened to was a more metal, heavy, slightly violent piece of music and for most people this created a defiant, outcast character that was a bit more negative. However oddly for me I found the music exciting and intriguing and immediately a child-like character was created and I wanted to explore the world around me. When I got onto my feet with this character I constantly wanted to move around in a bouncy-light way, looking and searching for everything and anything. Contrastingly to my first character, when I heightened and lessoned this character I felt the core of her didn’t change, she was still a child exploring just got more and more excited as I exaggerated and slightly more cautious when I lessoned her physically. Interestingly I felt that the character didn’t change but perhaps the circumstances and environment around her didn’t, resulting in her being more cautious or more confident.

The last piece of music that we listened to was a lot slower and lower of tone and instantly I felt more negative and alone when listening to it. Consequently the character that I created was one I felt that was suffering, I felt suppressed and isolated and so the physicality was slumped and enclosed to itself. This one I found the hardest to exaggerate and under-exaggerate as I was doing very few movements already but I changed and experimented with my positions and as I exaggerated I moved more and more into myself and scrunched up even more to hide away from the world, where as when I went down on the exaggeration scale I opened up a bit more and wasn’t as alone.

I found music really helpful and interesting to use as stimulus to create characters as it opens up your imagination to feel instinctual reactions. It also gives you so much to work off of, for example you could go with the tempo or the lyrics to create a character or you could go against the music to layer a character. I also think that it gives you a really strong core of a character and that you can then develop these characters through exaggeration and exploration.