The whole auditorium was very comfortable because the audience was seated in the middle seats of the first six rows, this made the auditorium seem a lot smaller and then it didn’t matter that the audience was kind of small. You also felt very comfortable because of the seats, it felt as if you were sitting at home on yourcouch.
'Harry's Girls' was about a man who loses his wife in the very first scene, we do not know what happens to the kid but she is gone for the rest of the play, and his struggle to get his life back on track.
The play opens with a scene in the car where the daughter is happily telling her father she is winning a computer game. This happy scene is interrupted by a scream from the mother as the car crashes. The crash is shown through slow motion as the actors are moving their upper bodies in circles to demonstrate the car turning. Then there is a freeze broken by the subtle cry of the little girl which wakes up the father who finds his wife dead.
We used our bodies and short sentences to recreate the scorch moments of the play. These included the dinner table where he realized he had taken his wife for granted, his rejection by all the girls and his realization that he needed to change. (this video will be uploaded soon).
For Bunraku we all had to research different areas, I had to research the historical background as well as the shamisen and the chanter. For the historical background I produced a powerpoint, this is the information it contained:
The History
1590s:
·Three arts joined together: puppet manipulation, narrative storytelling and shamisen players.
·They formed commercial puppet theatre troupes.
·One name for this theatre form was joruri, named after a musical style used to chant the epic, Twelve Tales of Princess Joruri.
17th Century:
·It was built around a narrative, sung, chanted and spoken by a single narrator (called the tayu), accompanied by one shamisen player and illustrated by puppets.
·This remains the basic style of performance today
·At first the narrator, shamisen and the puppeteer were hidden during performances.
·But by the early 18th century when Monzaemon Chikamatsu wrote his first psychologically persuasive ‘modern’ puppet plays, all the performers were visible during the performance.
Monzaemon Chikamatsu:
·Monzaemon Chikamatsu was a well known Kabuki writer.
·He began writing Bunraku plays using the Confucia ideas of loyalty over personal feelings which are widespread in kabuki
·òHe also wrote plays about the merchant class, especially about current events or occurences that affected them.
·His plays were a huge success and are still performed today, because the majority of the audience were from the merchant class
Gidayu Takemoto:
·Gidayu Takemoto also affected the development of Bunraku
·He was the creator of the style of chanted narration, which is why it is known as Gidayu
·He added his own emotive style to the performances
18th Century:
·There was a lot of exchange between Kabuki and Bunraku both from a movement and playwright point of view.
·And number of plays were adapted from one to the other.
·Bunraku flourished and borrowed elements of Kabuki’s stylized movements to make the puppets appear more real.
·At the end of the decade there was a decline in the popularity of Bunraku due to a lack of good writers.
How did it get its name?
·In the early 18th century Bunrakukken Uemura built a small theater in the area of Osaka where ‘The National Bunraku Theater’ now stands.
·In 1872 the theatre was relocated and given official government recognition.
The Cambridge guide to Asian Theatre by James R Brandon
For the Chanter and the Shamisen I produced a movie using Imovie (which could not be uploaded).
Ms Hurst made two words games for us to learn the area she had to research. For the mechanics she had cut up the sentences and laminated them. The sentences had different colors, but there could be a red sentences followed by a blue sentence and then a red again. This blog: http://alisontheatre.blogspot.com/2011/05/bunraku-research.html shows the process of assembling the sentences. We learned that:
The Mechanism of the Puppets
The heads of the dolls are carved of wood and are hollow, and they are placed atop a special head-grip stick (dogushi), which is placed through a hole in the shoulder board; it is with this stick that the main puppeteer manipulates the doll.There are lengths of fabric draped both in front of and in the back of the shoulder board, and they are attached to bamboo hoops ― it is a very simple mechanism. Loofahs are attached at either end of the shoulder board to create the roundness of the shoulders. The arms and legs are each attached separately to the shoulder board by strings, but, as a rule, female puppets do not have any legs at all ―the foot puppeteer places his fists in the hem of the doll's robe and makes it appear as though she has feet and is walking. A long wooden armature (sashigane) is attached to the puppet's left hand, through the use of which the left-hand puppeteer operates the doll's left arm and hand.
And the website used to collect this information was:
·They are an international theatre company based in the UK.
·It was founded in 2001
·Amit Lahav is the Artistic Director and the co-founder of Gecko “After finishing my formal training, I was extremely lucky to work with inspirational theatre makers like Lindsay Kemp, David Glass, Steven Berkoff and Ken Campbell. It was this 10 year period that fuelled my passion for visual and expressive theatre and also confirmed to me that a new journey must now begin which would enable me to explore a theatre language. I met Al Nedjari in 2001 and Gecko was born. For 8 years we developed our skills and cultivated a very definite and exciting style through the process of making shows and facilitating and leading workshops relating to our style of devising and performance"
Steven Berkoff studied drama and mime in London and in Paris, after opening his own theatre company in 1968 his plays and adaptations were performed all around the world and in different languages. Among the adaptations was Kafka's Metamorphosis and the Trial. He has also directed and toured many of Shakespeare's plays such as Richard II, Hamlet and Macbeth.
You can see the elements of mime both through the make-up and the movement. The make-up is the original mime make-up with the exaggerated mouth and white face, the movement is very descriptive like it is in mime.
·
They have toured in 20 countries with their 4 award winning productions and now has the foundation to become a leading international physical theatre group.
Amit Lahav - Artistic Director
Kate Sparshatt - Producer
Helen Baggett - Associate Director
Eleanor Hartwell - General Manager
New Wolsey Theatre - Associate Theatre
Dave Price - Music Collaborator
Jackie Shemesh - Lighting Collaborator
Richard Haughton – Photographer
Their Style
(taken from 1st website)
Physical theatre:
·goes beyond verbal narrative, incorporating physical and visual elements on a level at least equal to verbal elements
·is more than simply abstract movement – it includes some element of character, narrative, relationships, and interaction between the performers, not necessarily linear or obvious
includes a wide variety of styles, approaches, aesthetics – can include dance-theatre, movement theatre, clown, puppetry, mime, mask, vaudeville, and circus
Some helpful quotes:
·"Audiences today want a real experience in their live performance, because they can get great script based entertainment at home, through various new media sources. Traditional theatre, which appeals on a mental, and hopefully also emotional level, has not been enough to compete with other media, and audiences have been declining. Physical theatre, by contrast, appeals to the audience on a physical and emotional level, providing a much more immediate experience than traditional theatre, and audiences here have been growing. Today physical theatre is a broad term which covers the range of circus theatre forms, clown, mime, mask, commedia, visual theatre, and dance theatre." - from www.artmedia.com.au - a physical theatre website from Australia
·"It is NOT that the body says what the voice is saying. I start with what it is not because I find that most people (even folks in the biz) think it IS that you can say with your body what the voice is saying and I think that is redundant. Physical theatre allows the voice to explain the details and the body to control the atmosphere and changes in the metaphysical temperature of the space. In so doing the body (and body is not simply the actor's body but all the physical bodies that the theatre creator controls the shape of: ie her/his own, the stage space, the sound scap, etc.) creates the perpendicular. This perpendicular creates the intersection of the anecdote and the event. The anecdote coming usually from the text and the event coming from all that surrounds the anecdote (all those bodies)." - from Daniel Stein of Dell'Arte, via network member Kali Quinn
·"Theatre is a physical and visual medium, but the play's not always the thing. There is a strand of theatre - the physical and the visual - that speaks a completely different language from the traditional well made play and spans theatre, puppetry, dance and visual arts. This work uses the language of gesture, an area of theatre that in the past was dubbed mime and thought of as entirely silent. Nowadays such pieces frequently include spoken text, but the body speaks as eloquently as the voice, and one of the great strengths of this form is that it can often mine the emotions that fall into the silences between words. Much of this work is devised not scripted, and although many of the UK companies working in this area have been influenced by European traditions, increasing numbers of young companies are developing their own distinct and excitingly high voltage styles." - Lyn Gardner, the Guardian (UK)
Inspiration
·Amit Lahav is the Artistic Director of Gecko “After finishing my formal training, I was extremely lucky to work with inspirational theatre makers like Lindsay Kemp, David Glass, Steven Berkoff and Ken Campbell. It was this 10 year period that fuelled my passion for visual and expressive theatre and also confirmed to me that a new journey must now begin which would enable me to explore a theatre language. I met Al Nedjari in 2001 and Gecko was born. For 8 years we developed our skills and cultivated a very definite and exciting style through the process of making shows and facilitating and leading workshops relating to our style of devising and performance.”
How they create theatre
·“Workshops and residencies play an important part in Gecko's ongoing development as a company - they affirm our style and our process of making work. Education projects focus the company on it's central ideas of performance and play, particularly the emotional physicality of performance. We are able to refine our working methodologies. Occasionally we test out images and ideas in workshops which we hope will surface in future work.” Amit Lahav
The Gecko theatre company explore theatre through workshops and through physical improvisation, this is how they create new theatre, they get ideas from the workshops and further develop these ideas into performances.
