New Landscapes Week 3 – Characters and Clocking

Ladies and Gents, Boys and Girls, People, Players and Peasants alike, we present: So we’ve just had week 3 and everyone has spent the past week researching into circus acts and specialities that you would’ve found at the stereotypical circus/carnival scene, such as stilt-walkers, jugglers, contortionists, escapologists, etc (this list goes on and on!). This is what our wall for ideas looks like so far: In my next post I shall pop up a picture of how it looks when the students have started pasting their ideas and research all over it! And so far some great ideas have already come to light, such as Chloe’s Barberibbit, a circus Barber that also happens to be a human sized frog (this had me laugh out loud in the rehearsal space, brilliant thinking!) So, to back up a little bit, this week began with discussing the characters you would find at a circus/carnival setting, and then everyone researching the characters they would like to embody for the entirety of the performance. This means performing walkabout in their character and then remaining as that character throughout the whole of the performance, and then in the show performing as that character playing another character…do you follow? This comes from […]

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 […]