Monday 12 December 2011

Have Fun!

"I always retain the capacity to laugh at my own serious intentions, even while those intentions remain serious."

This was something we were regularly reminded of while working with Matthias.  I really like this idea, as it reminds me to enjoy what I'm doing and have fun, instead of concentrating on getting it perfect.

Influx - Voice Tasks

Here are the some of the 'tasks' in our piece that involved using our voices...

1. "Round the Chimneys!" - We had to shout this while dashing around each other to get into our places.
2. Groans - We had to groan while crawling under a shelf.
3. "Spritely!
     Tightly!
     Slightly!
     Nightly!
     Sightly!
     Brightly!
     Rightly!
     Politely!" - We had to complete this sequence of words 4 times by saying a word each, getting faster.
4. Describe an object for the audience to guess while performing 'turntable'.
5. "Over the Rooftops!" - We had to shout this while dashing around each other to get into our places.
6. Tongue Twisters - We were each given a tongue twister from the list below and had to challenge each other with them.
                                 "Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry"
                                 "Eleven Benevolent Elephants"
                                 "Six Sleek Swans Swam Swiftly Southwards"
                                 "She sifted thistles through her thistle sifter"
                                 "Which wristwatches are swiss wristwaches"
                                 "Plain bun.  Plum bun.  Bun without Plum"
7. "Here" and "There" - A sequence of movement, adding different sequences of the words layered on top

Performance Week - Done!

Our Performance Projects module is rapidly coming to an end now with just our Vivas to go.  It has been such an intense, full on term but it has been so much fun.  It really allows us, as students, to get in insight to working in a professional company.

I've loved being part of Influx!  We were a very varied company but all very enthusiastic about our work.  I have to credit our company manager because she really has been amazing! 

As I've previously mentioned, our piece was called 'Walking Piece' and involved the performers moving in a loop around the edges of the Lanchester Gallery negotiating tasks along the way.  Some of the tasks required us to use our voice.  This is something I haven't really experienced before.  The thought of it was quite daunting at first especially because at times, the performance space would be silent apart from your voice.  The good thing about this piece was that the some of the tasks were so complicated,  I began focusing on doing it correctly and completely forgot about the speaking.  I would definitely like to do more work like this in the future.  I will post some of the voice tasks later, it will be good to look back at this blog in months to come and see if I can still remember them.

The performance week was a tough week for us all.  It was the week we had all been working so hard towards.  Unfortunately, I was only able to participate in 2 of the 5 performances due to being very unwell.  I was so disappointed but at the same time I was grateful that I had managed to perform twice and that I had a great company to be there to support me and make sure Influx still gave a brilliant performance.  It would be great to hear what others thought of our piece as it was so different?

I'm not sure whether I'm sad or glad that I'll never have to repeated the words 'here' and 'there' again!  But I do know that I have loved every minute of this module and I'm really going to miss being a part of Influx.  I'd like to say a BIG thank you to everyone involved especially the other company members, Matthias Sperling and Katye Coe.