Class: Week One

A good class this morning, I thought. I wanted to recap on what we did today so we have a record of the course as it develops. I'll also add some comments on the work.

After the collective introduction to the course in the Studio Theatre we worked through the course booklet. I emphasised the fluid structure of the course; the outline in the handbook, pp. 6-7, will undoubtedly change as the course develops creatively.

I introduced to you the thematic starting point for our project: Homesickness. We started thinking about all the experiences and ideas, the places and spaces that intersect or pass through the experience of homesickness: home, foreignness, migration, the links between people, and so on.

We began to animate these ideas by a simple map exercise.

• Everyone wrote down every address that they have called home. When a precise address was forgotten, you just described the place.
• These were arranged in the space to create a map of homes.
• I then counted you through the years of your life and we traced out the patterns of migration that led you, aged around 18, to Royal Holloway, Surrey.
• We repeated the exercise, now adding in holidays to give a fuller sense of your global movements.

This was a very promising exercise. It produced a kind of meticulous, deliberate choreography out of your collective migration patterns. I can imagine us building up this sequence to create something that is both abstract but clearly has an underlying pattern. (I don't think it's necessarily important that the audience knows the original meaning of this pattern.) It can be refined, made more elegant, tightened, segmented and looped.

We then did a similar exercise with home.

• You all chose one of these homes - the one which you felt was most homely.
• You imaginatively traced out the groundplan of this home.
• I then counted you through 24 hours of an ordinary Sunday at home.
• You then got into pairs and repeated the movement to each other.
• You used your pair to help you clarify the abstract shape described by the movement of your body through space.
• You then worked to create a c.15-second movement sequence that the audience should both recognise as a day at home but also see as an abstract shape.
• You all performed these.

In the last forty-five minutes of the class we watched the beginnings of two Suspect Culture shows: Mainstream (1999) and Lament (2002).

• Mainstream.
• The group recognised that the form of the performance was trying to explore identity: who are we? what do we show each other? what assumptions do we make of each other? what should we reveal about ourselves? what should we put on our CVs?
• It was also trying to explore individuality: similar experiences are being communicated by several actors. In one early scene the same exchange is spoken by two pairs, simultaneously. The exchange includes one person saying to another 'you're unique', which becomes layered with irony when we hear two people speaking the line. During an interview scene, the onstage action is mirrored (but not perfectly) in the visible upstage area.
• I hope you noticed the moments where a gestural vocabulary is being used. The visual language of the play involves four main locations (interview room, bar, hotel room, breakfast room) which are indicated through a piece of furniture, and the disposition of bodies in the space.

• Lament
• The opening of this performance is very daring. It seems very downbeat, almost trivial. It opens up one of the devising methods that Suspect Culture use: building on the performers' own attitudes to the material. But it doesn't tell us how we are supposed to watch this material; do we watch the actors on stage? Do we watch the video? How far should we make connections between live and recorded action? Is it fruitful to make that connection?
• Subtly the opening sets up all the themes, motifs and locations for the rest of the action. What is apparent from the (unheard) questions and the performers' responses is that all the performers have visions of a paradise lost, but they know very little about these places. Delightfully, Louise Ludgate's description of working on a Kenyan game reserve seem incomplete, rather unthought-out, naive. The show will affirm both the naivety - it says it is vital and permanent that we look for utopias - but it also reflects our current difficulty in imagining anything beyond the way the world is now. Scenes in the rest of the show appear to be deliberately incomplete, crudely drawn, but always searching.
• I think it would be important for us to generate some material in this way. I suggested that next week we do some hotseating about our attitudes towards and experiences of Home.

You have some tasks to complete before next week:

1. You must post something to this blog.
2. You should note down the movement sequences you produced in the first half of the class (the global migration patterns and the 'at home' sequence). I want to be able to refer to these in subsequent weeks.
3. You should bring something to class from your room that helps make it seem 'homely'.
4. I would like you to read or watch Timeless (1997). I will be in touch to explain how I will make this show available to you.