Theatre of Cruelty: "Hot Seating"

Hot seating!!!!
Thursday October 18^th 2012

Today in class, we tried one of my most favorite exercises! HOT SEATING!

I personally like this method of Character warm up as I believe it is a way to trigger sincerity in emotions, as the premises are real; it is a character speaking the truth about himself/herself.

This exercise was very helpful for the team, as we had vague ideas of our characters, but we didn’t really know how to put it together. Being put in a situation in which the spotlight is only on you (literally) and you are being interrogated without too much time to think made us speak about ourselves intuitively, and from here we got background stories.

As a group, we also helped the person being hot seated by the method of the blocking wall. By giving the characters truths such as “we know what you did, it was in the papers” or “how could you have done that to your sister” we already implied that they did such things, and therefore the character could only accept and move forwards. He/she is not allowed to say “No, that is not true” and therefore we can continue with our building!!

Katy being hot seated!!

The audience!!

I believe that this exercise was one of the most help full for all of us, and it is the one that got our story together!

Assigning roles: Make up and costume artist

For our individual roles, I was given the chance to do make up and costume for our final performance.

The reasons for why I am looking forwards to working in there areas is:

1.     The costumes and make up are so diverse and there are so many characters, that it gives me a chance to work with then as individual, however still look for unity.

It gives me the chance to work with a theme that I have never looked upon such as “Cults” and therefor working with the idea of reinforcing conformity through visual elements