The Climbers

Workshop on 26th April

Firstly some comments from the actors for the blog

Cheryl: I love drama on Wednesday. I think the blog is a good idea.

Katrina: I love drama so much. The end of the year performance is going to shape up to be a good one because everyone has got such good ideas and its going to be active.

Andrew: I like the way ideas are put together and I’m learning more words from the walking dictionary!

Deb: I like drama. I liked playing the drum tonight.

Jean- Maree: I love drama! We come up with new ideas all the time and we’re going to get better and better.

The Workshop

After a stretch and focus we had a warm-up prepared by Amara. This involved walking as if being lead by different parts of the body - Amara ran us through lots - head, chest, stomach, shoulder, nose, knees, bottom - you name it. This lead into the next exercise which I had prepared as an antidote to the previous weeks’ work on The Seven Deadly Sins - none other than The Seven Heavenly Virtues! These are basically the opposites of the 7DS - kindness, chastity, patience, liberality, diligence, humility, abstinence (we renamed them to bring the into the 21st C). The exercise involved striking a pose, bringing it to life, interacting in the mode in pairs and then doing ’spotlight on’ various pairs to watch their improvisations. We then tried paired impros putting the sins with the virtues which was strange!

Pandora’s Box

Next I told the ancient Greek story of Pandora’s Box. A few had heard the expression ‘Like opening Pandora’s Box’ and knew what it meant though few knew the story of Pandora who was entrusted with a box to mind with the strict instrustion not to open it. Do you know the story? This was at a time when the world was all peace and happiness. Pandora’s curiosity grew and grew until she could no-longer resist so she attempted to peek into the box only to have it burst open and from it came all the evils of the world (back to the bad things again!). Try as she might she could not put them back into the box but she noticed one last thing come out of the box - it was hope. So though we have evils and hardship, we have hope! I told a longer version with an emphasis on creating the dramatic tension with sound (audience participation) and percussion! We moved into two groups for the performance making task - enacting the story. We watched the two different versions - both were very different and good but we indentified the best bits of each and thought we could make one really good version out of them - another time.

In the break I read out the actors’ profiles we put together last week and that were posted on the blog- everyone enjoyed hearing about themselves and each other and seeing their photos.

Mmmmm…. last night was interesting night for me. Why? Well as we did the 7 deadly sins, now is 7 heavanly divane. And that was interesting to make them as the postive side of the life. Also i have felt a little strange about that and it felt good in the way that it calms me down in the certains ways.

Then we did an experantial scene with a story called “Pandoria’s box”. i haven’t heard that story for years and I have forgotten the story, Jo will explain the story bit more about that when she will be on again soon. I liked story and we did 2 different visions of the scene, one was a morden and the other is an anceint with morden words in the twist. I liked the anceint story but in some reason, some them liked the morden vision and they thought it was funny. And i thought the same too. This scene might be the part of the play.

Before I go, in the some reason something happen to Andrew from last week that i have made a comment about him. Andrew was jokely got upset from me that I commented about him. I have had no idea what he is talking about and he was saying that “You have made a smart-alec remark about me.”. …. i haven’t a clue what is taliking about :S

In the break, Andrew continued to hassle me and he said to me jokely, “I will get you next time.”. And i said to him, “ooooo, revange!!!!!! bring on!!!!!”. Then he replied, “THE WAR HAS STARTED!!!!”. i will wait for your revange Andrew.

I think this is it for the moment, and as Andrew always says, “same bat show, same bat time and same bat station.”

The Dramability actors now have their profiles on this site. See the Actors Profiles tab on the right hand side.

Margot was away last week so hers will be added soon.

Cheers

Jo

Jo Blogs

Some days have passed since the last creative development workshop on 19th April - its all become a bit foggy so here is an impressionistic outline of what we’ve done. Tip for the day: Its always better to blog sooner rather than later!

After a physical warm-up lead by different members of the group ( all members are to take some responsibility for this now) we worked on a vocal warm-up. This included the crazy choir / emotional orchestra vocal activity - some people remembered this from when I worked briefly with the group last year.

Whats this play gonna be anyway?

Mandy asked ‘What’s the play going to be called?’. I explained for good reasons we haven’t got a name or even a fixed idea of what it will be like yet. At this stage it seems our performance will be near the end of the year so there is lots of time and I really don’t want to have to make hard decisions until we’ve had this creative development phase. There are plenty of ideas to try out and lots of performance styles to experiment with. Our three Deakin Drama Education students - Amara, Linley and Brendan were all involved this workshop. They are also joining in the experimental work and having some creative input - we love having them involved.

Deception after Dark

Improvisational work was continued along the lines of the Seven Deadly Sins. We then worked on the Museum after dark idea trying different people in the roles. First we took the idea of deception and shared ideas of what this meant to people - lies, sneaking, dishonesty, trickery and Debbie came up with the brilliant connection with masks remembering the last performance by the group in 2005. We created a sculpture with about six actors based on the deception theme - A sign that said ‘Deception’ was placed by the sculpture. We then tried a couple of different actors in the role of the cleaner who enters the museum to clean the sculpture - needless to say the sculpture was somewhat deceptive and each time the cleaner turned his/her back the sculpture moved and did something sending the cleaner into spiralling confusion and panic. All members of the ensemble contributed ideas to make the scene more effective. Additional characters were added as necessary. There were a couple of really interesting versions and we had lots of laughs. We did a similar thing with ’sloth’.

Who we actually are

In break time I read the blog and noted that Alex had already put up his profile. Everyone wanted to have all actors profiles on the blog. Katrina came with hers completed and she and her mum, June who is also a great assistant to the group, had prepared a profile sheet. We interviewed each other to create actors’ profiles and then had fun taking some photos for the blog. Everyone was able to have a look at their photo and see that they were satisfied with it. Take a look on the sidebar at Actors Profiles - they’ll be up soon! Then you’ll know who we are.

ciao for now - Jo

Hey - great to see Alex blogging on Climbers too. Good on you Alex! Nice blog! Now its my turn to blog about the last workshop.

Seven Deadly Sins

Greed, Sloth, Gluttony, Envy, Pride, Lust, Wrath!

Last week we looked at some of the ideas from our earlier brainstorm that lead to a list of things we’d like to change in the world. I got to thinking about some of these universal problems in the world and how they have been presented over time and I thought about the medieval Seven Deadly Sins. In our latest workshop I introduced the idea of the Seven Deadly Sins by taking in a little research I’d done by googling ’seven deadly sins’ - there were some interesting results!!!! including a ‘Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging’. I was interested in the medieval ones that were personified in the Morality Plays of medieval times. We talked about these morality plays and how the sins or vices and plays about them were presented to people as lessons for living. The sins have old fashioned names so we talked about what they mean in today’s terms.

We did some character work exploring each of the vices - working on posture, ways of moving, attitude, expression, vocals etc.

We then took some of the sins and created modern day scenes to show them in action. We began with Gluttony. Who, what, when, where and why questions were asked to establish the scene. The first scene had a waitress and four people at a formal dinner - one a glutton of course. We played the scene and then the audience gave further direction to make it more interesting. It was a very funny scene with the waitress running off to get more and more food while the three guests looked unbelievingly on the glutton who consumed almost everything - first sneakily then unashamedly.

In the next scene we had three people playing sloth - lolling about lazily watching TV - each was given an objective - one to get someone to change the station, one to get their back scratched, one to get someone to get them something to eat. The fourth member of the scene was given the objective to get the others to help them do a job. Playing for the objectives helped to move the scene along but we thought the sloths seemed a bit enthusiatic and energetic while trying to get their objectives. We decided to try playing it in slow motion except for the fourth member (non-sloth) who was to go in fast motion. Vicki as one of the sloths was particularly funny in slo mo. This made an entertaining scene.

We then did a scene of three lazy workers in a factory - Alex liked the idea of the being in a line with different levels (heights) and directed a scene using this for comic effect - the actors - Paul, Katrina nd Cheryl did some great improvisation in the scene. Members of the group could see some potential in these scenes.

After the break we went a bit more abstract and made group sculptures - building on the work from last week. The sculptures were based on each of the Seven Deadly Sins. Participants joined on the sculptures one by one paying attention to levels and overall shape. When the sculptures were made they were asked to make an appropriate sound for the sculpture on the count of three. We talked about the museum after dark improvisations from last week and decided to work on the group sculptures in this way next week. Most of the group really want to explore the possibilities of this as we work towards our performance. I imagine scenes for our eventual performance will emerge from this creative development phase of the project and the blogging will help us remember what we’ve done.

I read our last blog post during the tea break. Everyone has the vineblog address and will be checking it out for themselves at some stage soon. There was a strong feeling about posting individual biographies and comments from all group members. Alex has begun to blog - others may also blog soon and everyone’s ideas will be included. Stay tuned.

Happy Easter!

Jo

Hi there, and my name is Alex and I’m one of the actors and the founder of the group.

If you would like to know bit about me, you can go to my blog and you can pass me a post in any time. Also I don’t like to tell you about my life but i would like to share my thoughts about tonight and other rehearsals.

Thoughts for tonight:

Tonight was interesting and we some interesting ideas for the play; as Jo said.

Tonight, we continued to the idea of the musem theme play as we kept that idea for future play. tonight was even interesting; As Jo thought that we should continue the theme idea into a different form of stauchules. The theme was the “The 7 deadly sins”, i thought and said, “i liked the 7 deadly sins…. “. My faverite one is the sorth (sloth) (laziness (did i spelt it right Jo? :s ). Any way, of cause we did other ones exept the “lust”…. that would be embarrassing to group…. hehe. i had an idea for the laziness and i directed a scene that didn’t went well but they did improvise the scene on the way. I was thinking more simplier scene doing the same routine and the actor have different heights that would look even better with same routine.

Thoughts of the group:

You know, I have known the group for more then 9 years now. They came and gone including myself and a few they have had died from the group.

In the begining, they were shy, quiet, and uncertain. Now, they are full of life with enjoyment amogs with the group and with some quick smarty-paints remarks and full ideas they haven’t even thought of it. When I looked on them, I compashed something that I did something good for the people with disabilities. And eveytime i see them that i was appacted for 3 years and that is also over the years too, i have seen them so well now that they are better then me; and that is the honast truth.

I think this is it for the moment,

Bye for now and stay tune for Jo’s latest blog.

This is Jo blogging.

Tonight was our second creative development workshop on the VINE project performance making. If you read our blog last week you’d know that we began brainstorming ideas. (If not read earlier posts or at least have a look at ‘about’ on the side bar). We did some more work on this tonight.

Freezin’, Moody and Tense (no not me!)

The workshop began with some exercises to develop skills in focus, stillness (freeze) and dramatic tension. After stretching we played some games including Keeper of the Keys (good for freeze and tension), Emotional Statues (to music) and Freeze Tiggy. We then did a pairs exercise called Sculptor and Clay where the sculptor has to form their partner (the clay) into a statue. Various titles were given for the sculptures (eg: hero). When the statues were finished the sculptors then viewed them as if in a gallery - commenting on the various qualities of the sculptures (shapes, levels, mood, metaphors etc.). We then created small group statues with abstract themes such as ’spikey’ and ‘calm’. These were also viewed as if in a Museum of Modern Art.

In our break time we had a chance to talk more about the VINE. However, not before Paul had played his didgeridoo for us - really this was for the benefit of Brendan - one of the Deakin Uni students who is also a musician. Paul offered Brendan the chance to have a turn but Brendan admitted that he’d tried to play a didgeridoo before but it was too hard! Katrina brought in some more ideas she’d written on paper for the performance -these were read out. She has beendoing a lot of thinking! I read out the first blogs as people in the group hadn’t had a chance to see it yet. Around half of the members of the group don’t have access to the internet. People seemed to enjoy hearing the blog and there were suggestions of more things to add. Jean Marie asked if I would add in that she and Alex had recently performed in the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games - they were two of the Commonwealth Dames! The members of the group want their names and profiles put up so we’ll do this soon. Mandy suggested a list of past productions too.

After hours at the museum

In the second part of the workshop we went back to the posters we’d created last week and chose one of the suggested ideas - remember it was ‘Changing the World’ and we worked with the ideas of War and Peace. Amara suggested that it would be a good title for a novel and Jean Marie said there already is a novel by that name - ‘You must know that!’ she exclaimed. A group of volunteers created sculptures to represent war and then peace and the rest of the group directed them until we were satisfied. I then asked them to imagine the sculpture in a museum. It was closing time and everyone had left the museum except for one person - a cleaner. Using a costume and prop and an actor we created the ‘cleaner’ character - and with some atmospheric music set the scene of ‘after hours at the museum’ and you might be able to imagine some of the strange things that happened with the sculptures. Dramatic tension and the skills of movement and freeze were well used in the creation of some interesting scenes. Lots of people had ideas for ways of developing the narrative and we played these out. Plenty of suggestions were made for the ways this could be developed for performance too - who knows - we’ll file these away for the future. There were lots of creative developments!!

Alex, one of the group members will blog soon and we’ve got some photos to put up so visit again - and post a comment too if you like.

cheers

Jo