New Landscapes Week 2 – Acrobatics and Archetypes

Afternoon all! It’s been a fun second week with Coventry University 2nd year theatre students. We’ve been getting stuck into the physical side of outdoor performance, visiting basic and intermediate acrobatics and acro-balance, then looking at developing archetypes and stereotypes. The acro sessions, as always, were good fun with many people wanting to experiment and push boundaries. Already plenty of good rolls, cartwheels and handstands to show for it and I’m looking forward to see what comes together for the big acro piece at the start of the show! In the following session with each group they presented their scratch pieces that was assigned to them last week. The outcome was very exciting: 8 great short pieces of theatre with so much potential for an outdoor spectacle. Now that their parameters have been extended and they know these will be their pieces to present in the show I’m curious to see how they utilise the playing space and the audience. Then after a singing refresher we moved on to a technique that has had many names and the practitioner who taught it to me called it ‘The Ministry of Silly Walks’, reminiscent of the Monty Python sketches. I used this technique to develop […]