"Fear" workshop, day five.

Monday, thus beginning the second week of our performance project workshops. We are set to start devising the project on Wednesday, at the moment we are gathering resource material to work from and I am certainly pleased at the ground we have covered. I'd also like to take this opportunity to mention how pleased I am that the group has come together. We are all pretty much fully committed to the project now, which makes the idea of an ensemble actually seem not only plausible, but desirable, and achievable.

Today we started with a quick warm-up, then went straight into some character development work. We used visualisation again, this time we were told to close our eyes, and to imagine that it was the performance night; We are about to go on stage. What are we wearing? What is our hair like? Where about are we on the stage (or are we indeed off stage?) What kind of sounds could we hear? We then fed back to the group. I pictured myself concealed behind some sort of panel, centre stage. I was dressed in a pale blue hospital gown, my face was white and my features were contrasting against my pale skin. My hair was long and straight, possibly distressed looking and darker looking than usual, I could hear only silence.

We then got into groups by way of whoever we felt our characters were closer related to, so I ended up in a group with someone who pictured themselves clothed all in white, and someone in a gown which was covered in blood. We were to continue to develop our characters within these groups and possibly but then to a narrative or context. I found this exercise very difficult considering we had all pretty much gone for the mental patient, mine being one whom is totally devoid of sense, reason and reality, the other girl having been driven out of her mind by a demon, and the latter having killed her younger sister in a fit of jealousy (and therefore sanctioned.)

It was difficult because there is very little narrative you could do with people who were supposedly insane. They would have little motive and therefore little reason for conflict (which is where a story forms.) Really it was a good example of the restrictions and pitfalls to avoid when creative an interesting narrative, not to have characters that are too similar.

After before lunch, we looked into how magicians and mediums used techniques which were as much slight of hand and theatrics than any form of occult practice to instil fear into people. Largely rife in Victorian times when people were much sell sceptical and supposedly a lot more gullible, mediums would enter a persons house and use a number of tricks and illusions to convince the people in attendance that the séance was real. There are famous such people who did this quite convincingly, having 'ectoplasm' seep from orifices both reputable and perverse (certainly for the period) and people actually believed this was going on.

Then we had lunch, I had chips and gravy and even sprang for a Dr Pepper, it was good.

When we reconvened after lunch, we looked at a method of using technology to instil fear; Projection...

That piece is a little ambiguous, but really what it represents are the many possibilities! Imagine projecting someone elses face onto a neutral mask, or having a room full of living, speaking dolls. Or having one person dialog with themselves on stage through the use of multiple projections. This are certainly rolling in the ideas department, and today after looking into it, we used the characters we had developed earlier to experiment with cameras, and what we could do with the use of projection and live performance interaction. Ours was based around the story of the criminally insane girl who murdered her younger sister, with another actress and myself playing the part of her conscience, or rather playing out the inner monologue which happens during the scene. We were projected on the screen behind her, tormenting her with the thoughts she was having in her own head, we argued, yelled, laughed, all while the actress on stage reacted to our projections.

I am looking forward to using this in our final piece!