Session 4

In today's session we looked at psycho-social approaches to creating performance work by experimenting with world theatre. We looked at using wrestling to create narrative story. In pairs we experimented with wrestling moves and looked at how we could use these physical moves to work with, over and around our partners. I found that when doing this I was focusing less on the wrestling techniques as physical actions and more on using these world theatre approaches to react to my partners body and work in harmony together to create a performance. When working with the idea of moving "with" my partner I felt we were very much in tune and were responding to each physical movement. It felt as if the movements were flowing and easy. When I experimented with moving "over" and "around" my partner, at first it was quite difficult because of the physicality of the moves. I was having to physically lift my partner around my body and vice versa which initially made me nervous. However when my partner and I began to play and experiment with this idea I came to realise that we were not striving to produce a piece of highly impressive acrobatic choreography, we were simply working with one-anothers bodys to create a performance. I did feel as though some Butoh inspired principles I had studied in previous sessions were coming in to play here in that the movements were sometimes quite un-human and strange, and I felt that this was OK and I could work with these images. I also remembered the Butoh ethos that there is no right or wrong way to move which helped me to perform to the best of my ability because I did not feel restricted in my movements. The performances we created based on wrestling by the end of the session were quite different to how we initially responded to these physical movements, and I noticed that at first the movements were quite rigid and forceful as wrestling moves generally are. However they became more dance-like and almost graceful. My partner and I were able to work with each others bodies to create an interesting piece of theatre, and on reflection it seems that if someone were to watch our end performance for the first time they would not neccesarily know we were using wrestling moves, as it simply looked like we were just moving. The movements felt powerful and emotional and led me to think about how we could turn them in to a piece of narrative for future performances. This lesson was a good example of my theme that narrative can create physicality, and this exercise also proved that physicality can too be used to create narrative.