Avant Garde Workshop: Artaud

Today in Theatre HL class, me and Natasha were asked by Ms. Ericsson to perform or interpret Molly's monologue in Road in an Avant Garde manner. Before this, Ms. Ericsson had shown us an example of a video which we were supposed to kind of copy the style of movements. There was a lot of repetition and unnatural positions or movements of the body, as we had observed; so we attempted to do these things to 'attempt' to create the same effect or similar at least.

We were given around 10 minutes to 'dance' or 'act' to the monologue as Elizabeth was reading it. Although we felt really uncomfortable or more like, silly at first for doing really unnatural actions while practicing, we soon got used to it and took the movements of Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty much more seriously. We attempted to do emotive actions and movements and just improvised all the way through. We had used our arms, legs, hips and hands to communicate - almost like the Balinese dance which he admired. It was quite tiring but it proved to be very fun and imaginative.

Doing this workshop was one step closer For this type of workshop, one must let his/her imaginations run wild and let the concept of Artaud's theatre take control. Me, Natasha and Elizabeth were asked to present a workshop on this to the SL students next next Friday. We had thought of recording Elizabeth's voice reading Molly's monologue; but we also want her to add more emotions and unnaturality to her voice as she records it.. together with a peculiar background music! We want it to be really good because we had fun trying it out today, and hopefully they will have as much fun as we did! :)