Unit 33 - Original Performance - Deacon Cutt

  What did you contribute? Me, Sam and Chloe - chord progression  Me - Wrote the spoken word  Me and Sam - Movements in scene 3  Rejected Original riff for the music  Context Social - our piece explores individual identity  Historical - highlights how much more accepting we are in today's period  How - our piece highlights how individuals who are completely different with their own opinions and views can co-exist and come together to create something in a comedic and melodramatic style.  What - the themes of our piece revolved around individuality and how people with their own beliefs and opinions can co-exist together  Who - Due to our targets audience being young adults between the ages of 15-19 we wanted to create a comedic piece that would be engaging for them while still getting the themes of individuality across.  Structure   Our piece follows an episodic structure that consists of four scenes.  Over the course of these...

  What makes the performances interesting?  Heavy use of rhythms to progress the piece  Use of choral speaking helps to engage the audience with important information and key words Abstract rhythms in sync  Use of different forms of communication including sign language  How are they original? Original Music (I think) Original subject matter  Use of sign language as well as vocal communication Original comedic music and story  What styles and techniques did they use?  Freeze Frames  Use of rhythms  Abstract use of rhythm and physicality to show the passing of time  Gestures and physicality help to tell the story  Choral speaking  Performers play their own instruments  Removal of clothing portrays different characters  Dance/physical theatre movement used to portray the character’s inner monologue  Dynamic changes in vocals  Use of sign language  Use of breath as part of the rhythm  Well timed ...

The stimulus we used today was a painting. This painting involved lots of interesting details that gave us a multitude of ideas. Some of the particular details we used included the use of a hospital curtain to set a portion of the piece in a medical setting. Also due to the lack of detail in the faces and other portions of the painting it gave me the impression that the piece revolved in some way around the mental illness of dementia and the regression that comes along with it. We showed this regression through our physicality and the amount of aid that Adama was given to Saskia to help her complete the movements. I feel that we also appropriately used speech as it was only used by Adama when showing the passage of time between each moment and with it highlighting Saskia’s regression further. 

To begin with, we collectively agreed that we wanted to do a piece surrounding an ethical stimulus as we felt that we could generate some of the best ideas using this category. Although initially we had multiple different ideas we originally settled on the idea of whether or not it is okay for individuals to have differing opinions surrounding the topic of identity, particularly around gender. However, we found that not only did this shoehorn us into creating a very serious piece, but also the issue becomes very political which would make the piece difficult to create, so we then decided to slightly alter our message to how we can all use our individual beliefs and identities to work together and create great things. We have settled on this theme as we felt that it gave us quite a bit of scope to create a piece while still having a clear message that we will be able to portray throughout.  Due to much of our theme being about personal opinions on the topic, much of our research was...

Today we created a performance in response to the stimulus of "Dreamscapes". To do this, we used the piece of music "Where To Begin" by Philip Glass. To begin with, we brainstormed the emotions that dreams evoke within us, we then split into two different groups: those of us who wanted to perform the piece through movement and those who wanted to perform orally. As part of the group who wanted to perform orally, we began by finding a way to incoorperate the words that were evoked from our initial response to the stimulus. We finally landed on the idea of using these words in a range of dynamic ways, including whispering to ending with a more operatic crescendo to match the most dramatic part of the piece of music. We then performed this piece with my peers who had decided to create movement to the music instead, this ending up being very successful as our dramatic vocals matched the creepy dreamlike physicality that they all possessed.  One of the most exciting thin...

  Acting  Sarah Kane - 4.48 Psychosis  Constantin Stanislavski - An Actor Prepare  Frantic Assembly - Curious Incident…  Gecko Theatre  Singing  Chris Cornell  Layne Staley  Eddie Vedder  Scott Weiland  Kurt Cobain  Andrew Wood  Dax Riggs  Will Ramos  Chet Baker  Dean Martin  Billy Corgan  Jonathon Davies  Dancing  Martha Graham  Akrahm Khan  Kathak Dance Style  Musical Theatre  Bob Fosse - style Rodgers and Hammerstein - Golden Age writing of musicals  Jerome Robbins - golden age of musicals  Singing In The Rain - Gene Kelly