Monday 21 May 2012

Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through - Mary Shelley


Moving your puppet creations around will not be sufficient to be entertaining.  You must inhabit the characters.

The puppets should have lives, stories, habits, gestus, personality.

As such, each team should take a post and should make a series of posts that bring their character to life in words.  

You will need to respond to each other's posts.  Agree and change details.  Develop each other's points.

Prizes available for best responses.

Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through - Mary Shelley


Moving your puppet creations around will not be sufficient to be entertaining.  You must inhabit the characters.

The puppets should have lives, stories, habits, gestus, personality.

As such, each team should take a post and should make a series of posts that bring their character to life in words.  

You will need to respond to each other's posts.  Agree and change details.  Develop each other's points.

Prizes available for best responses.

Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through - Mary Shelley


Moving your puppet creations around will not be sufficient to be entertaining.  You must inhabit the characters.

The puppets should have lives, stories, habits, gestus, personality.

As such, each team should take a post and should make a series of posts that bring their character to life in words.  

You will need to respond to each other's posts.  Agree and change details.  Develop each other's points.

Prizes available for best responses.

Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through - Mary Shelley

Moving your puppet creations around will not be sufficient to be entertaining.  You must inhabit the characters.

The puppets should have lives, stories, habits, gestus, personality.

As such, each team should take a post and should make a series of posts that bring their character to life in words.  

You will need to respond to each other's posts.  Agree and change details.  Develop each other's points.

Prizes available for best responses.

Monday 14 May 2012

Of interest...


http://www.myspace.com/550589390/photos/albums/the-pink-flamingo-puppet-cabaret/349748

Check out this MySpace (remember MySpace?) profile to see a few locally made puppets in action.



Bunraku you too!

http://www2.ntj.jac.go.jp/unesco/bunraku/en/index.html

Go here...

There's loads of interesting stuff on this site.

Go to 'video clips of Bunraku'.

Watch some of the videos.  Preferably all the videos.

Post a response that includes...

What elements of the performances did you expect to see because of your learning today?

Why do you think the performances work well with the puppeteers in sight?

A further website of interest.  A reason for your choice.





Can we call you Steve?

In order to be sure we can all remember what we were wearing today...

...post a description of what you were wearing today.

Monday 30 April 2012

A human being is only breath and shadow - Sophocles

In separate posts...
Over the next few weeks...
Each of you...

Post a description of the characters and scenery that you are creating for your Chinese shadow puppetry project.

Post a link to a good, interesting, entertaining, helpful site that you have found on the subject.

Post a comment on why (whether?) you think moral tales, fables, cautionary stories, stories with messages (propoganda?) are well communicated through puppetry. Why might an audience be inclined to be influenced more by a puppet than a person, after all, there is a person behind the puppet...isn't there? Why might someone learn more from a shadow than a human? Might we learn more from a piece with no words than a traditional spoken play? Might we learn different things?

Post responses to each other's responses.

Team with most/best quality post wins a prize.

A human being is only breath and shadow - Sophocles

In separate posts...
Over the next few weeks...
Each of you...

Post a description of the characters and scenery that you are creating for your Chinese shadow puppetry project.

Post a link to a good, interesting, entertaining, helpful site that you have found on the subject.

Post a comment on why (whether?) you think moral tales, fables, cautionary stories, stories with messages (propoganda?) are well communicated through puppetry.  Why might an audience be inclined to be influenced more by a puppet than a person, after all, there is a person behind the puppet...isn't there?  Why might someone learn more from a shadow than a human?  Might we learn more from a piece with no words than a traditional spoken play?  Might we learn different things?

Post responses to each other's responses.

Team with most/best quality post wins a prize.

Monday 16 April 2012

The Deadly Theatre

Read the essay The Deadly Theatre

Supporting your argument with quotation from the text, explain what you understand Brook to mean by the term Deadly Theatre


Monday 26 March 2012

“The theatre is the arena where a living confrontation can take place.”

 

This is Peter Brook

Saner than Artaud
More humble than Brecht
More readable than Stan
...and more alive than all three put together

Here are some places to go...

The first is an excellent record of Brook's groundbreaking production of A Midsummer Night's Dream

http://www.touchstone.bham.ac.uk/exhibition/MND/home.html

The second and third are good extracts of his work.  Read some and see how much sense he makes.

http://www.so-rimlee.com/literature-supernova/2011/4/29/peter-brook-on-deadly-theatre-in-the-empty-space.html

http://owendaly.com/jeff/grotowsm.htm

The last is his seminal book The Empty Space in its entirety in PDFtastic form.

http://preterhuman.net/texts/religion.occult.new_age/occult.conspiracy.and.related/Brook,%20Peter%20-%20The%20Empty%20Space.pdf


 


Post responses

not compulsory; but excellent

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01dppfp/Henning_Knows_Best_Politics/

Quality stand up from the German comedy ambassador to the UK.

Henning Wehn

...and you can tell him you like him here...
http://henningwehn.de/contact.htm

Tuesday 20 March 2012

you ain't seen nothin' yet




Watch one.
How does it fit with what you have learned of Artaud?
What do you think the desired effect for a spectator is?
What do you think the message is?

Finally

Is it entertainment?

Find out a little about one of the following:

Keith Waterhouse
Jeffrey Bernard
Peter OToole

The Play "Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell"

Don't just list writings, awards, achievements.
Try to show you have some understanding and opinion.

the first manifesto

THE PROGRAM: We shall stage, without regard for text:


1. An adaptation of a work from the time of Shakespeare, a work entirely consistent with our present troubled state of mind, whether one of the apocryphal plays of Shakespeare, such as Arden of Feversham, or an entirely different play from the same period.


2. A play of extreme poetic freedom by Leon-Paul Fargue.


3. An extract from the Zohar: The Story of Rabbi Simeon, which has the ever present violence and force of a confla-gration. [Editor's note: The Zohar is a pseudo-epigraphic work, supposedly a mystiecal text written by Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai, but scholars have identified the author as thirteenth century Kabbalist, Moses de Leon.


4. The story of Bluebeard reconstructed according to the historical records and with a new idea of eroticism and cruelty.


5. The Fall of Jerusalem, according to the Bible and history; with the blood-red color that trickles from it and the people's feeling of abandon and panic visible even in the light; and on the other hand the metaphysical disputes of the prophets, the frightful intellectual agitation they create and the repercussions of which physically affect the King, the Temple, the People, and Events themselves.


6. A Tale by the Marquis de Sade, in which the eroticism will be transposed, allegorically mounted and figured, to create a violent exteriorization of cruelty, and a dissimulation of the remainder.


7. One or more romantic melodramas in which the im-probability will become an active and concrete element of poetry.


8. Büchner's Wozzek, in a spirit of reaction against our principles and as an example of what can be drawn from a formal text in terms of the stage.


9. Works from the Elizabethan theater stripped of their text and retaining only the accouterments of period, situa-tions, characters, and action.

Sunday 5 February 2012

Edward Gordon Craig

How do the theories of Edward Gordon Craig differ from those of Stanislavski and Brecht?

How does Craig view the theatre experience differently from other practitioners?

How does Craig see the relationship between the actor and the director?

How does Craig view the design elements of the theatre: set, space, light. sound?

Explore...

Sunday 15 January 2012

Wish You Were There

Go to…


Read through the blog and try to imagine what it must have been like to attend these workshops.  From the writer’s tone he clearly felt it was a very important and moving experience; a privilege.

Pick a part you find interesting, copy and paste a short extract into a post and write a few lines about your reasons for selecting it.

Free Choice

Go to…


Search through the list of improv games and post a game you would like to try out.
Don’t just copy and paste the description, write your own description of how you want the game to be played.  You can adapt the game, include ideas for scenes or characters or include new rules.

Shared Writing Project

Visit Libboo at…


Set up an account and post your username on the blog so that I can invite you to the shared writing project.