Alphabet Box

Alphabet Box

Today's lesson we started off with a simple task, to piece together our own names using the alphabet box we had created by pointing to the places where our names were. At first it seemed a pretty pointless task. However we were then asked to make it more interesting by using different body parts to reach these points. I found it very interesting trying to find a new body part to use instead of repeating any movement. Then we had to imagine we had to move our bodies in a different way and imagine our box was filled with different substances. E.g when I imagined myself in water my movement became much more floaty and relaxed, when my box was filled with a thick substance like treacle my movements became more pronounced, slow and strained.

We then had to show our movement we had created to each other and it was really interesting seeing all these different combinations of letters had created such different movement. They were all individual.  When music was added to the performances they suddenly had different meanings completely behind the movement. some people you could see were obviously now doing their movements in time to the music whereas before they were just neutral. It also depended on the different type of music, if it was a slow sad song then people tended to put more emotion into their movement to match the intention in the music.

I really appreciated the idea of taking something so simple like spelling out a name then making it into a complex piece of movement so easily,  I understood how easy devising can be if you can build on your piece so it develops in such a way as our movement piece in class did. However in response the question "Did we create a meaningful piece of theatre?" is no because I still saw people just spelling their name in the final developed movement. I wasn't particularly moved by it but it did teach me that devising movement doesn't have off really complicated, it can be simple.