Dance - Body over mind

The first step of this exercise was to find a space in the studio and stand with your eyes closed.  Then music was played, in this case it was very loud, and in your face, the objective of this exercise was to simply let your body free, and just move either to the music or to what it wanted to do in general. 

A few people, including myself at the start, found this exercise fairly tough.  I found that you think too much about your movements, and what they might look like from the outside, but because everyone’s eyes were closed, this exercise really taught me that you can just do what comes naturally to you and take a lot from it as stimulus for a performance.

I really liked this exercise. After the first few minutes I really began to understand the point of the exercise and become fully immersed in my bodies movements.  After a little while I found that I was sat down and swaying, as this is what my body was doing, not what i was thinking about, I made a mental note of this but didn’t think about it too much so as not to disrupt my performance.  When the music ended, we spoke about how long the exercise went on for.  As we were fully immersed in the exercise many people, got the time wrong, saying it was much too short or too long, it was actually 25 minutes, this was very odd as to me it seemed much shorter.

The exercise gave many people new ideas, about timing, and natural human movements, but to me it simply refined my acting ability further by putting restraint around what I was allowed to do.  I was not allowed to open my eyes, at the beginning this was very odd, but as the exercise progressed it almost built up a trust bond between cast members, as everyone had the same restraints, but soe people reacted differently than others.    

Masking

The First part of our workshop was our director explaining the basics of mask work to all the actors.  This taught me that working with a mask involves much more physicality than traditional, naturalistic acting, this is because the audience and other actors on stage cant respond to your facial expressions, as the mask is covering your face.  One of the main basic elements of mask work is to NEVER touch the mask as it breaks the experience.  We also discovered that when you use masks you cant turn side on to the audience, as they can then see where the mask ends on your face and this also breaks the experience.

Then the director did some mask work to show us how it was done. I learnt a few things through this.  I firstly saw that the director was using her long hair to cover up the edges of the mask, as I do not have long hair it gave me an idea that I could use a hood on a jacket to the same effect.  Then we learnt that the most important part of mask work was ‘clocking the audience’ this meant, showing the audience that you realised they were there.

The other exercises that we performed in this lesson refined our ability to use masks in our performances, and testing masks ourselves let us find our own way of making mask work have the greatest effect on the audience, I discovered that the closer you can get to the audience and the stranger the physicality you can perform is the more effective mask work can be.

Towards the end of the class I began to wonder why mask work had actually been necessary.  Out of the lesson I researched why mask work was relevant to Artaud.

"The primary tool we will use to help us enter fully and truthfully into imaginary circumstances is via extensive “neutral mask” work. The Neutral, or Universal, mask was originally developed by mask and clown teacher, Jacques LeCoq, as a learning tool for actors - to help them develop emotional honesty and economy of movement, and to give them an inner core that is balanced, centered, and fully present. The mask itself is a simple, lightweight, unremarkable looking white or clay colored mask held comfortably to the face with a string or elastic."
---http://actingstudionotes.blogspot.co.uk/p/neutral-mask.html

Artaud wanted full emotional honesty from his actors and so mask work would help him achieve this, also the lack of emotion on the face of his actors would have added fear to his audience, which is something that he strove for.  To me, this quote explains that for an actor to be able to perform as any character, it is important that they let the emotions come out physically rather than thinking too much, I feel that masking refined my ability to do this, as it makes your body react instinctually to circumstances.  I believe it is interesting that one small piece of equipment can be so useful to an actors arsenal.