Individual/Group Experimental Devised Performance Piece

"Going,Going,Going" Experimental Devised Performance

Within our experimental performance piece, "Going,Going,Going" we wanted as an ensemble to explore what it is like to be English/British embracing the cultural heritage of Britain and its historic time periods. Within our group consisting of Esme Seber, Shaniqua Okwok, Ella Lucia Clark Cowen, Kate Oveden and myself we devised a short experimental piece around an "Old People's Home" that would coincide with our individual performance pieces and the ritual chant that provided the overall structure of our performance.

As a group, we explored what we interpreted to be the inner subconscious thought processes of elderly individuals, slowly loosing their faculties due to old age and Alzheimer's. In order to interpret this to an audience in an experimental manner, we would individually voice the subconscious thoughts and feelings that our elderly characters were experiencing, coming to the end of their lives. We decided that we would incorporate the audience in the action of the piece, asking them question that would make them feel fully immersed and affected by our characters and the general idea of our piece. In order to affect the audience to the fullest extent, we decided to incorporate music, physicality and variations of sound in order to catch the audience off guard, making them feel uncomfortable and uneasy, much like Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty.

In terms of message and purpose, the overall basis of experimental theatre is hard to define. However, as a group we wanted to explore the mistreatment of elderly people in modern day British Society, exploring how as members of the older community, they are treated as Second Class citizens compared to other "able individuals". Therefore, we would have to tie in elements of naturalism with experimentation in terms of unique contortion and range in voice in order to allow our performance to both make sense and relate to experimental theatre all the same.     

These images were used as Stimuli for our experimental performance in the workshop lessons, in order to craft ideas for our individual group pieces. The images evoked feelings of a"Broken Britain", one in which had been tainted by an uncomfortable and unforgiving past. The foreboding nature of the images and the sinister feelings that they created, allowed us as theatre makers to use the ambiguous nature of the pieces in order to create an uncomfortable theatrical experience. One where we could make the audience feel genuinely affected by the abstract and experimental nature of our physicality and vocal range, whilst utilising aspects of the ideas and practises of the theatre practitioners we had studied in earlier workshop lessons.

For our individual performances that were to be viewed one by one by an audience, we had to devise our own pieces that interlinked with both the group performances and also the ritual chant. In this part of the performance, I was a senile, elderly man in a wheel-chair speaking to himself. The experimental nature of my performance made the piece incredibly powerful and also disturbing for an audience to watch due to the rigid and almost beast-like nature of my character. The lines were as follows: "The birds fly high in the moonlight. They move, they fly, they fly high in the sky. They swoop, they stare. The dead birds lie down in the moonlight".