Session 1

In the first class session we looked at the role of stories in our lives. In pairs we were asked to tell a story to one another. I told a story from my childhood, and my partner told me a story that had happened to her that very week. After hearing these stories we focused on portraying them using actions and physical movement. We made a short group performance using one or two movements from each story we had heard, and tried to capture the essence of each story using only our bodies. In Helena Enrights "Letting it breathe" she talks about how narrative is transformed in to physical movement. When describing her portrayal of a a particular character in a play she had studied called "Walking away" she talks about how she created physicality based on the narrative she had heard by saying "You could tell she was in recovery and a little bit down... your physicality changed automatically becoming quite defensive". She supports this point with a quote from theatre-maker Anna Deavere Smith who describes narrative text as "..a physical, audible, performance vehicle". Enright also emphasises the importance of letting narrative speak for itself and talks about how it should be treated with respect and care. She goes on to discuss the danger of "over-emotionalising" narrative and states that as actors we should try to portray the narrative in a less complicated way, letting it "breathe". This is something I noticed in my own class workshop. After hearing my partner tell her story and studying the physicality of her doing so, I then attempted to isolate the words from the movement and simply perform the story rather than tell it. I found myself using hand gestures as if I was speaking, and in fact the physicality became so powerful when done alone without words that the performance as a whole was much more meaningful. John Palmer, an actor who worked with Enright in a play called "Under pressure" talks about how he avoided purposely trying to make his acting compelling or entertaining for the audience, and simply physically represented his character from the words he had been given. To build upon John's point I found that when I was doing the story-telling exercise, verbally telling the story took much more energy than physically performing it. When I turned my narrative in to physicality I did not feel the need to amuse, entertain or intrigue. I didn't need to worry about telling the story in a "funny" way or describing it dramatically enough to make an impact. I simply accepted the fact that all stories are important and let the narrative stand alone as a piece of physical performance. We also looked at the idea of stories being co-created and a collaborative process. By working in groups we were able to take individual narrative and use our own identities to understand it in different ways. This enabled us to see the narrative from many different perspectives and collaboratively create a new story as a performance. In his article on contrasting narrative perspectives on selves and identites, social scientist Andrew Sparkes explores this idea of stories being collaboratively created from different individual perspectives by saying they are constructed "around the things that appear most important in life, from either the first- or the third persons perspective, about a person's life over time". He also talks about how we can turn storied narrative in to performance by saying we look for "key experiences that may stand out as critical scenes in the story, important interpersonal relationships, the values and norms of society, and just about anything else that presents itself as..something that could work it's way in to a narrative to portray who I am". Certainly this point was quite resonant in my class exercises as I found that when telling my own story, I wasn't just telling a tale, I was portraying a piece of my identity and giving an insight in to my self as an individual. I also felt this from others when hearing their stories and seeing them be performed.

Introduction

In this blog I will be discussing the importance of narrative and stories in performance and how we can use it to create physicality.