Week 9 - Lewys Holt

In today’s session, rather than have a regular physical theatre session, we were visited by touring practitioner Lewys Holt, who delivered the session. During the session, we explored things such as contemporary dance and freeze frames before watching Lewys’ performance ‘Of, Or at A Fairly Low Temperature’, a piece that ‘examines being ‘cool’. It mixes contemporary dance with storytelling and comedy to question what is ‘cool’?’ (Theatre Royal Concert Hall, 2014). The session was very useful in relation to our groups devising process as it gave us ideas of what we could add into our piece and allowed us to explore some of the different forms of theatre (such as storytelling and semi-autobiographical narrative).

We began the session by completing a full body warm up, before moving into a dance sequence which included a variation of different movements and levels. It involved us doing things such as pivoting on the spot and crawling along the floor and gradually rising until we were back on our feet again. This was to allow every part of our bodies to be warmed up and practice our flexibility. After this, Lewys made us get into a circle and perform a group exercise that involved us at first passing a clap around the circle. Once we got the hang of that, Lewys then proceeded to add an action rather than a clap to the game, which reflected a struggle, like carrying a heavy object. We all began to copy Lewys and complete a relatively similar action to the one he had done. We then broke out of the circle and started to move around the space while still performing these actions, until we all began to gradually fall to the floor until the last person with the power was standing. I believe the purpose of this task was to allow us to explore group dynamics and how we effectively use the stage space.

The next task we had to complete involved us creating a series of 3-5 movements that reflected specific words, such as ‘badass’ and ‘cool’. Once we had completed this, we were made to get into pairs and perform our movement sequences to each other. After this, Lewys made us add a word to each movement in our sequence that related to the topic ‘nature’. The reasoning behind this was because Lewys wanted to us consider the effect of adding random words to a sequence of movements and see how the audience reacted to it. A majority of the performances that were showed came across in an amusing way because having added words such as ‘wildlife’ and ‘leaves’ to my sequence, I found this added a comical effect to the piece.

For the final exercise, we again repeated the process of adding words to a sequence of movements but rather than using a random topic, we based it off of set topics Lewys had given to us. For my piece, myself and my partner based our movements off the topic ‘Coronation Street’, and created a set of moves related to the programme. This included using different levels and gestures to recreate notorious parts of the show. I found this task interesting because it made me consider how to use my body to create different things and how I could do this effectively (I recreated one of the characters and one of the businesses that are reoccurring in Coronation Street).

 Reference List

Theatre Royal Concert Hall (2014) Lewys Holt (UK) presents: Of, or at A fairly low temperature. Available at: http://tickets.trch.co.uk/single/PSDetail.aspx?psn=125980 (Accessed: 17 April 2016).