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Morning:

Ella announces about the production meeting. 3/7 whole day rehearsing in the showing studio. The evening before the final showing(3/14) is the get in. Christof will do the risk assessment.

Christof: reviewing about the feedbacks from yesterday’s sharing.

Flora: the reason we’re destroying all the documentation, is that is it really even happened?

Allie: go out interviewing random people on the street

Christof: our catwalk of our first rehearsal is really cool. maybe we send an email of our documentation to them. Send a link to them, and have them do it before the showing

Also the Rimini protokol video walk, we can send the video to them.

Simon put the triangle pieces together and turn them into a whole paper.

Allie did the video walk during the 15 mins break.

————————————Break————————————

Someone:

Christof: maybe we can have Jossette involved

Simon: maybe we pre-record it, and play it as a live stream

Interview

Rave

End of the performance

Discuss about what we do for Wednesday.

Shadow, paper

Lighting

Discuss about what we do on Friday:

Flora maybe have a scenografic improvisation 1 hour

Debrief for an hour

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In our first rehearsal, we began by discussing our different approaches to warm-ups, with Simon leading us on our first exercise around trust falls. We found and decided that high energy, playful warm-ups, led by different members of the group each week, would support our practice, though this could change depending on the nature of our sessions.

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We then discussed our individual goals for this unit, specifically what role(s)/skills we want to develop, and concluded that a non-hierarchical working environment would suit us best, despite focussing on different areas.
This was as follows:
Christof: not directing, performing, involving the audience and questioning performance as a format
Flora: performing, sound
Ella: directing, performing, composing
Yuhao: performing, movement direction
Allie: performing
Belle: performing
Simon: performing, scenography/light/sound

We then spoke about our different interests regarding the theatre we want to make, what excites us in terms of form and content, and practitioners that inspire us. This helped us to narrow down our field of practice and exploration, broadly deciding on the Absurd/post-dramatic theatre as a starting point.

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The week kicked off with Ella leading a fun physical and vocal warm up based around the theme of contrasts. We then individually shared some different sources of inspiration pertaining to some of the mutual themes that were of interest (eg absurdism, contrast, transformation).
These were the beginning of our padlet "mood board".
We also took the opportunity to share notes on this weeks workshops we participated in. This also sparked wider conversation about non-linear ways of thinking about Theatre; framing and the relationship with the audience.

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Todays rehearsal took place in the form of a zoom meeting with Christof at the helm. We revisited the assessment criteria to look at areas such as : The reading list, our manifesto; documentation and critically evaluating practitioners in our field of interest. We decided upon our individual areas of interest for reading, that we would document by Padlet in turns (1 person in charge each week) as well as Christof taking control of physical documentation each session.
We collated a google doc with Practitioners of interest; and began to think of questions; ambitions and limitations that we may want to introduce to our working ethos.

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Todays session began with a quick warm up;and then we used improvisational exercises as a starting point for exploring the juxtaposition between the absurd and the mundane.
We each wrote down a famous character or animal; an attitude; and an everyday activity on separate bits of paper. Then we individually took it in turns acting out our selection. This led to, for example, Marilyn Monroe angrily folding laundry and a giraffe meditating whist lying down.
We then worked on delivering our actions on a loop; all at the same time. When the director clapped; we broke from our character loop back into the ordinary version of the every activity.
We then changed facilitators, and Simon led the group playing with mirror work; with the idea of the characters seeing themselves and discovering their objects for the first time.
We then started playing with framing and audience expectation, in relation to these characters. What would happen if we played rave music from outside and jumped around so we were authentically sweaty; but upon entering the room the audience discover us politely sitting and drinking tea.
Subversion of expectations and relationship with the audience continue to be areas of group interest.

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Monday morning was our session with ANTS theatre company who's practice mainly involve playing with 'prompts' which tended to be outlandish and seemingly impossible tasks. We began with 'how not to let the ice cream melt'. After messing around with how to present this, we dissected what we liked about what had just taken place and what we didn't. Then we did the task again with a prompt randomly selected by the group. We needed to 'build a choir with one person'. In the later dissection, we realised that we had started to bring together too many different ideas which ended up in confusion between the group. We realised we needed to take a step back and sometimes the best idea to try out was the first one that came up.
In the afternoon session we focussed on subverting an audience's expectation and what the audience's role was. We split into pairs to find lots of different ways of achieving this. Afterwards, we looked at how we have many ideas on form but little on content. We decided we wanted to continue working alongside the broad theme of dreams/dream logic. It can be said that the knowledge of the showing coming up on wednesday is taking its toll as we would like to show our process of what we have so far.

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After a warm up from Flora, Yuhao led a movement workshop based off the story of 'The Egg'. We brought in an inspiration from that story (i.e. painting, music, object) and created 2 movements. From there we played with pace, tempo and rhythm to see how it changes the movement to then bring our movements together into one image.
We then moved onto structuring the fragments we had so far for the showing the next day (Wednesday). We walked through a basic run and agreed that, for wednesday, we needed to iron out minor details and figure out our questions for the audience.

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We spent the morning running through and tightening what we have so far.
- C and E split the audience based on their 'aura' and take each group out each exit of the Dench studio
- E tells the audience they're going into a day rave and C performs the 2 movements from the rehearsal yesterday.
- B then gets C and performs their movements together
- While this is happening, the rest of the group plays rave music and trashes the studio with our documentation
- When B reenters the room, the music changes to classical and the audience is led back in
- The performers are now doing their naturalistic movements and characters, when we hear the cue in the music, we switch to the abstract movements
- This then disintegrates into a naturalistic scene with moments of the abstract characters creeping in.
- C leads the gradual cleaning up which the whole group joins in on then everyone eventually exits
- S stays in and questions the audience through a live feed to the TV
- The rest of the performers come in after 1 min and sit to watch the TV and the answers of the audience

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AM-
· On Wednesday morning, our rehearsal was at Wac Arts which meant we could begin to use our physical scores from Monday to choreograph a dance which would essentially be ‘the bulk’/content for our next showing on the 20th. We decided to continue using the song HAHA by Charlotte Adigery and Bolis Pupal as we felt the obscurity of the song helped to play into the ‘absurd world’ that we have been developing. With Ella leading the session, we began by choreographing a dance made up of simple dance moves, integrated with our scores from yesterday. In order to keep the theme of subverting audience expectations, we created a triangle formation with the hope that the audience will expect a ‘show mode’ full out dance routine but are actually met with a fusion of absurd physicality and dead-pan facial expressions. We decided to mouth the only line in the song, which says ‘guess you had to be there’ to echo this idea of the audience witnessing our process, without seeing a ‘final product’ as such. Lastly, we decided to shift straight from the dance into a rehearsal space, in which we would break away from the dance and literally ‘take a break’ by going on our phones or having a drink of water, to resemble that this ‘performance’ is a rehearsal and not the final product.

PM-
· On Wednesday evening, we used the Dench studio to experiment with sound and light surrounding the reoccurring theme of dreams, nightmares and dream logic. We used sand, paper, a hair dryer, a few different lamps (thinking about how we can use non-theatrical lighting), microphones and instruments such as the piano, a guitar and a electronic keyboard. Under Simon’s directions, we each took a role of a sound designer, mover, lighting designer and scenographer whilst Simon conducted an improvisation. The part which stood out most was a ‘shadow dance’. With the house lights off, Ella and Allie began to dance in the space, Yuhao shone a torch light above their heads and Belle and Simon held up a large sheet of paper which created a shadow. The combination of the shadow sequence, the unnatural methods of lighting the space with the HAHA song began to create an unnerving nightmarish tension in the space which is something we may come back to in terms of the final ‘performance’.

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· On Friday morning, we dedicated the day to creating our plan/running order for the second showing on the following Monday. We decided that we would continue with a similar way of removing the audience from the space (Ella and Christof to split them randomly and send them outside) but create a ‘tannoy’ audio recording which would play outside the room saying “The performance will begin once you have taken your seats”. Following the idea of subverting the audiences’ expectations, we would set the room up with a traditional seating structure to elude to a somewhat ‘professional’ performance taking place. Our plan was: audience sent outside, we would set up the chairs and our documentation along the side of the room, audience invited in by audio recording, we would perform the dance, sharply shift into our naturalistic rehearsal break, clean the room, get the audience off the chairs to stack them up, collect our belongings and finally leave the room. In the morning, Ella finished choreographing the dance by adding an additional 4 counts of eight and we spent the morning polishing and refining the choreography. On Friday afternoon, we took time to organise our physical documentation (collected by Christof) into chronological order and created labels/cards with the corresponding dates so that we could have it present in the showing, a physical representation of the entirety of our process to date.

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In the evening, Simon, Ella and Allie went to the Dench studio to do some experiments. Simon brought up some sound amplifiers and microphones, along with papers and lights.
We tried different possibilities to make shadows and seeing the interaction between living being, object and photon.
By exploring the “dream” concept, Simon is trying to see human’s semiconscious state between sleep and wakefulness.

Breaking assumption of natural law using visual senses and aurality.

Visualize the light. Light is really something hitting on our skin（photon
Simon is satisfied of what came out, and he wants to put some of the elements into his personal shows. But not sure about putting in the final sharing.

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On Tuesday, Ella led the morning in Saint Peters Church focused on finishing all the elements that we envisioned for our final performance. This included a catwalk performance, a moment of rehearsal discussion breakdown, four tableau pictures as well as the final HAHA performance. Additionally, we briefly discussed the beginning and the end of the entire performance. At the end of this rehearsal we then had all the elements in place in order to combine them for the final performance and look at the various transitions.

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Simon is siiiiiiiiick
So by amplifying the concept of collective unconscious from Carl Jung, we all developed a skill of having a remote meeting with him by telekinesis.
We talked about the thing we might be able to share to Nohar and Jane’s visit on Monday, also discussed about the costume. And Simon, on the other side of London, going to do some magic design at home, which will ideally make the documentations be destroyed at the end of the sharing in a symbolic way. Hocus Pocus

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On Friday afternoon, Ella instructed us about the production meeting that had taken place on Wednesday. We went over all requirements like the blurb for the website, the risk assessment as well as the planning for the coming week. As we would be in the performance studio 2 in the following week, we went through all the light and sound cues and followed up on all eventualities like the beginning and ending of the performance, costumes as well as the email and videos we wanted to include as part of our final show.

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· On Monday afternoon, we experimented primarily with games and activities in the park behind the Hampstead (due to a double booking issue with the rehearsal rooms). Yuhao led the session, beginning with a warm up game of ‘tag’ then onto a new game which we know as ‘warrior’. The aim of the game is to use your forearm to ‘strike’ another player which essentially ‘kills’ them. However, the rules are that everybody is to move as slowly as possible when dodging and attacking. If you have been struck, you must then fall to the floor in a dramatic death but even if you have been struck you can still use the time in which you fall to the floor to strike another player. By the end of the game, we were all in a heap on the floor and decided to deconstruct this still image by extracting our singular positions on the floor, putting them up into the space which created our ‘dead person tableaux’. With each of us having four gestures/movements derived from the tableaux, Yuhao then asked us to experiment with the pace, precision and quality of these movements, culminating in a set of physical scores. Lastly, using our individual scores we then played with these movements with/against music, specifically the HAHA track, which ultimately left us with a set of absurd/obscure movements which somewhat resembled those of Ella’s workshop back in Week 2.

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We started our rehearsal on Monday afternoon in the Dench Studio with working on fragments taken from the HAHA choreography. Splitting up the group, Ella directed broken down versions of the choreography and Simon illuminated them with a torch in the dark. The idea was to give the audience a glimpse of the fragments of our original choreography.
We were then visited by Nohar and Jane who observed our rehearsal and gave us some feedback on our sharings and process so far. They invited us to consider the following:

How does our performance work for audiences who haven't seen the sharings before the final performance?

How do we pay attention to details and continuity in our characters and movements?

How do we signal to the audience that our piece is for experiencing and not necessarily a mystery to unravel?

They also made us aware that so far:

We have developed a company identity showing some complicity and hiding the identity of the individual performer behind the company.

Our work about the boundaries and conventions of performance alludes to the work of Jérôme Bel.

We ended the day by finishing the fragmented HAHA choreography in the dark and for the last hour developed a choral work from some sentences that have accompanied our group since the beginning of our group formation process. We therefore found it fitting to include them in the final performance.