Space

In our lesson we looked at space and the effect of it and how it can change the meaning of the story. This was really interesting to explore as with our duets and solo’s we cant encompass all the space all the time, so it was helpful to see how we can use our bodies to tell the story or present a relationship in a smaller space and how this changes or develops the piece and characters in anyway.  

We first looked at the conventional setting of a lift and in the confined space we had a number of people and were given different circumstances to explore. The first was that there was a bee inside the lift, what made this really interesting was that as strangers we had to touch each other and often were all clumped in one of the corners closely touching. This was a good exercise because it made me think about reaction and how one can move or react to another in a small space and how that effects the way that I could express myself physically. I found that the small space made my reactions more intricate and detailed and that I was showing my emotions through my hands and areas of my body that I others couldn’t see so clearly. I also found that the tension in my body went to these areas and that I was having to hold the emotions in me so I became a lot stiffer in my body and that the effect of my suppression of emotions came out through my body as it became more rigid.

The next exercise that we did was taking a large story and seeing how we could tell it in a small space. This showed us how we could create space even out of the smallest spaces. For example one group had a person on each corner pointing outwards, this was effective as it gave the impression that there was more space around them and it created the illusion that they had more space then what they really did. Another group showed 4 soldiers going over the top; this also gave the impression that there were more of them but what I think it achieved was a close up camera shot on stage. I though this was really useful for a theatre piece because it allows you to extract the details from a large story and am able to tell a personal story and create characters that are full of detail that have been part of a larger story. I think that this could be really helpful for our performances as WW1 is a massive part of history and loads of people were involved but we can use the small space to show that we are zooming in a personal story and showing the intricate, sometimes forgotten part of the war.