Tents.

After the tent workshop, and spending a good amount of the day trailing different techniques using shadows and torches with the story of Beowulf, I had a clearer insight into how our piece will be shaped and what direction we could take.

Audience on the inside.
We started by having myself and 4 others get in the smaller tent, and having the rest of the group explore how light from the torches could be used at different distances and to what effect that had on the audience inside, for example having someone standing far from the tent with a single torch gave a very unsettling atmosphere, which i felt was good. We also tested how the material of the tent could be used to distort the shape of the face and hands, both worked to great success and i feel should be used in our final piece.

Audience on the outside.
Later in the day we set the lager tent up and had some time as a company to trail what we could do from inside the tent, having the audience looking in. We started by hanging a few torches in the middle of the tent and had a few of us stand underneath the light, creating characters that were faceless and expressionless, but still giving the full effect of a character. we also used different people to create one scenario, for example we had Dan stand with Anna lighting his face, then Cody made a heart with her hands, finally having Victor play the bongos to mimic a heart beat.

All of these different approaches i feel were very Artaudian in that they play on your senses and create a very different style of theatre.
The distortion of the faces made me think of Artaud and how we could take aspects of his approach to theatre and incorporate them into our final product
"This physical language, also referred to as 'poetry for the senses'"
(ibid)



Meyer Dinkle-Grafe, D (2001) Approaches to acting. 1st ed. London