Theatre of Cruelty- Starting point (September 2012)

Today, September 19th 2012, we started exploring a new stimulus for our next project of theatre of cruelty!!

Jealousy and Greed- Stimulus from a tv series called "Adventure time"
In this episode, the main character wants to look for a princess to be his wife, and because he can't decide on any, he decides to chop off body parts of many recruits, to make the perfect princess- cross reference to Frankenstein!!!!

Our teacher asked us to create short scenes, working from our new prompt, to see what we could come up with!
The topic/ themes discussed where as i mentioned before, Greed, and the scene in adventure time, although very humorous as it is actually a carton series, it played around with the dark humor that reflected the human greed for too many things, that he can't have at the same time, and the desire and ambition to devour everything, even if it has to be done though unethical means. It made me think that is was actually a very dark topic, and therefore we needed to play around with this atmosphere of darkness and gloom.

Other peoples work:

Below, is the video of Katy's group. The characters in the scene used limited spoken language to communicate with the audience, and instead use body language more effectively. An example i specially liked was the limited use of sound only for the scream made by Grace, when her arm is being pulled off, as  it expressed how damage was caused in a person, but she tried her best to make it quick and even seem bearable- reinforcing the idea of inhuman feelings.

Our responses as the audience:

This was part of our class feedback! And underneath, is more of the feedback i came up with along with some friend discussions about the performances

• I thought that the use of proxemics was excellent. Elaborating on my pint made, i thought that it was a nice structure and coordination with the walking from side to see of the stage, only stoping to get a piece of the body you desired, to show how humans are only conceded about their own business, and sometimes unaware of the damage they produce in others. It showed, as if a monotonous, cold environment, similar to a factory actually, or a very busy city in which people nearly ever communicate, or say sorry when they bump into each other in the street.
• the characterization of the characters was minimal actually, it lacked in depth and breath ad the audience wasn't given any notice of where they came from or who they were, they had no sense of identity. However, i believe this was mused to their advantage to reinforce the idea that they are anonymous. As if even they didn't way to be known or recognized, which again fitted perfectly with the aim of the piece.
• i thought that "marking the moment" was created by the repetitive dialogue between duty and Katy of "It is mine" and "i saw it first". Just the repetition of these two simplistic sentences helped that idea of humans being stupid, and obsesive about an object (or at least what they consider to be an object).
• i believe that the choice of posture of  Grace, ( in the middle, balancing out and being quiet) created an ironic "literal balance" at the center of the staged scene,  showing how people pass by without paying attention to her. The fact that she sometimes lost her balance could even be interpreted as how a whole society losses its balance, or looking at it in a more morco scale as supposed to the previous macro scale of measurement, it could refer as to how the brain losses its balance, about what is right and wrong.
• the overlapping of  Dury's and Katy's fight and Daniel minding how own business showed societies descent into ignoring one another.

This activity was very useful for us to develop the starting point of our project!!!!!