Workshop with Tim Crouch

Really interesting workshop today with Tim Crouch. What an interesting man? I really enjoyed this workshop and thought there were some really thought provoking perspectives on the art of acting and storytelling.

The excersize was particulay helpful when it came to thinking about Beowulf and our work on devising. When we came to our afternoon workshop, Lissie, Victor and I took this idea and composed the story of Beowulf using words that only began with B.

Here is what we came up with: -

Brave beowulf, bound with beer in the beverage ballroom, bravely brought brothers before Baron Bhrodar to battle. The Barbarian Bredrin battled beyond the beverage ballroom, bold with bloody battleaxes and beaters. Belligerent bindle bear battles beowulf bravely but the barbiarian bear blunders badly, banished beyond boundaries. Brilliantly bloused boobs, bobbly bout beverage ballroom at beowulf blowout, beer and bongos beated brightly and boldly but brindles birthgiver black with bitterness brutally bites bodies...bleeding. Beowulf boldly beats bearer, with brilliant blade and burdens the beast brutally.

We were then asked to rewrite the above with a more simplistic storyline. We then took the main five points of our story and tried to come up with a sentance for each only using B words.
This was a lot harder and we didnt quite get to the end of the story this time round as we ran out of time.

The simpler version is as follows:-

brave beowulf bound in beverage ballroom bravely brings brothers to battle. bloody battleaxes brings brazen brute bottomward. Birthgiver of beastily brute, brings battle of blood to beverage ballroom, beowulf bravely beats bearer of beasts by beheading her boldly Bellnier and belliner blew by blissfully, but blackness bellowed and battle begins in billion blazes. Beowulf bravely bites the dust.

This was a really great excersize to do, because it has shown me how we can create some really interesting alliteration and this is authentic to the style of the original poem itself.
I am going to try and adapt the story I wrote last week and add in some of this alliteraton and see how it changes and adds to the story.

Another aspect of this mornings workshop I liked and thought we could work with was the idea that a character does not need to be a person, it can be a shoe or a signpost, like we used in the improvisation this afternoon.
I thought this worked really well when we tried it and it didnt take away from the story like I thought it might do when I first thought about it.