Warm-ups

To help us in our devising process, we have done a series of warm-ups. Some of the ones we did are:

1. Travelling down the room: the class was divided into two lines lined up lengthwise on the side of the room. There would be one person at the top of each line and they would come in and travel down the room in a certain way. To start with, we just walked down the room and found a natural rhythm between us without saying anything. After we got the hang of it, Simon put on Hung Up by Madonna and we had to travel down the room to that song. We naturally walked down in sync to the song and it started to look like a catwalk which wasn't meant to happen, but it did. We then had to changed walking down the room to doing a crab-like walk still in time to each other. We were starting to get quite sweaty, but it was physically demanding and that helped. Then when we got halfway across the room, we had to turn over and crawl but backwards. That was quite tricky for some because you had to think quick but it was fun, it got your energy up and gave you a workout. I don't think that this is something Rachel and I would use for our performance piece but it's a warm up I would definitely do in the future.
2. Response to music: Simon told us to sit in the space on our own and respond to three different pieces of music but in a certain fashion. We did this to three different pieces of music and they were movements such as "broken" or "shattered" or "melting". With these movements I could see them in my head for example a shattered mirror or melting wax, but to physicalise it was something else. Melting wasn't that hard because you could just lose control of your body and be supple with your movements but broken and shattered were quite hard because the movements were quite jerky, it looked funny too so people laughed a bit but I think it was mainly because we were unsure of what we were doing. Eventually I learnt that I could just have one part of me that was broken and I could try to move with that broken part of me. This was a beneficial exercise because when you pick out the themes for your piece, the movements have to grow from them so if we're given a word and some music, we can improvise things from it.
3. Creating a character from music: This is similar to the other exercise apart from  we started off by laying on the floor and listened to a song. Based on the feelings and themes we picked up from the songs, we created a character. For the first song, most of the class came up with characters doing mundane tasks but with something in their mind. I was a librarian thinking about what she could have been and how differently her life could have been. The second one was just dreary and I came up with a character who was just sat there staring into space and drinking tea. She was going through a low point in life. Perhaps because things weren't working out as she had predicted or money problems. She also had a cat who she occasionally shoved aside. The last song was so so depressing. I didn't have the will to move. Nobody had the will to move we were all just so down. some people got up and tried to bring some movement to the room by walking over to a window and staring out or hugging their knees, but eventually they just sat back down again. This would have helped people who's pieces are heavily based around music and need to come up with things from it. The characters and the movements come from what the music makes you feel. Though for Rachel and I, this won't be something we will use because we are using spoken word for our piece. Though we could have someone read out the words and we improvise movements from that.