In this week's lecture we learnt about chair duets, a technique
which was created by Frantic Assembly, a UK based theatre company that has a unique physical style which combines movement, design, music
and text. A chair duet is a choreographed movement piece, the idea
of which is to build a story through movement and ultimately create a
working scene from it. ‘According to Frantic Assembly, a story will naturally
develop after adding meaning to the movement.’[1]
To begin with first Dan showed us this example of what a chair duet is:
An example of Chair Duets.
We were then told to get into pairs,
and create five simple movements to put into a ‘call and response’ style. within my pair, the movements were a
little restricted as we were sat down. This meant the moves we used
were simple leg, head or arm movements. I think that even though the movements were so
simple, they were effective, and there was definitely a story starting to
develop.
To make our duets
more complex we were told to swap partners with the duo next to us, and to create
five new movements for this pairing. This made the story progress: characters
and relationships started to form. After doing this in our new pairs, we were then
instructed to do the first set of our individual movements, but in a simultaneous
sequence and not sitting with a partner. This was strange because we didn't have anybody to respond to the moves we were doing. Afterwards we spoke as a
group and we decided that this would be a good tool to show important relationships in a piece, because you can see what they feel towards each other by
the way they move together.
The next task was
for us to get into our performance groups and recreate a well-known story as a movement piece without letting people know exactly what story we were doing from
the start. We decided to do Jack and Jill, and although we thought that this would
be an easy story to recreate, we found it was actually hard to pick key points
without instantly revealing to the audience our chosen story. We found the full nursery rhyme online to help us, and the context of it. Firstly we had to break down the key
points, then create movement that showed the relationships and emotions of
characters. We changed the story slightly to make it more than just a nursery
rhyme. We chose to have Jill be a victim of domestic violence; to put a dark
twist on the children’s story. This also gave us more to experiment
with in terms of character relationships.
During the piece Dan instructed us to
use mimetic actions to correspond to the dialog that we were using for the
piece. An example of this was when Nurisa cowered away from Rhys as
he raised his arm to point somewhere - this was to show her fearful state of
mind. Similarly to this, when Nurisa and I were talking my character said
“You can’t go, not after the last time.” I pulled her closed to me and put
my arms around her, as though protecting her.
The idea of having movement related to
the speech is a useful method to really emphasise something important in a
performance. We chose not to say the names if the characters because that would
have given it away instantly, although we did mention the ‘hill’ to give the
audience a clue of the story we were portraying. When we performed our piece, the class didn’t know what story we had chosen, so we had succeeded in the task
we were given.
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