Lab at CPT Tuesday 4th December 2007
In attendance: Bib, Boris, Lukas, Rachel, and Theron.
Julia wasn’t able to attend this lab so we carried on with our response and reaction work, looking at it through an exercise Lukas had had an idea for last week: bring something in that you have a connection with, present it and then work with our responses and reactions to it. We worked with these through levels of presence and address.
It was interesting to see what parts of the presentations the group connected with and worked through. Lukas’ presentation was primarily verbal, yet the work from the group in response/reaction to it was mostly movement based and gestural, as they worked through the idea of utterance, which was the theme of his story. On the other hand, Theron’s was almost completely non-verbal with moments presented in the dark, yet the response/reaction from the group was heavily verbal working with theatricality.
In my observations I felt that response rather than reaction seemed to help build energy. We concluded that maybe reaction was a disruptive verb and response was a supportive verb –if we could tune ourselves into our intentions more directly, I wondered whether we could play with these more rhythmically?
Theron suggested: there is a line between original action and response, where as reaction has more roots in the original action. A response is still addressing the original action, but is more of a proposition you are placing next to the original action. Rachel noted that you have to think more when responding, so it’s a different process of creation than reaction, which is more instant as they can become chain reactions. I wondered in this vain whether a response can really be a conversation, or is it something done separately, which, as Theron said can be seen only next to the original action? Also, does witnessing become what you are doing if you are neither responding nor reacting, or is this an active response/reaction in itself?
Working with the levels of presence really helped the work to build, where as the levels of address seemed to give it direction. We worked with a variety of combinations –sometimes using address levels and sometimes presence and sometimes interchanging both. The level of presence was announced before it was used and Lukas felt this gave a sense of paying respect to what the other person had brought into the room with their presentation.
In watching the responses/reactions the group became a kind of “memory machine” and the performers felt curious standing outside themselves: “a sense of there being another you in the room”. Theron suggested we should do a session on quotations of other people in the group. Something more distant than this work where we recast the original presentation and restage it. How would it sound? What would we discover about the work and ourselves?
With this thought hanging we ended the session.
Julia wasn’t able to attend this lab so we carried on with our response and reaction work, looking at it through an exercise Lukas had had an idea for last week: bring something in that you have a connection with, present it and then work with our responses and reactions to it. We worked with these through levels of presence and address.
It was interesting to see what parts of the presentations the group connected with and worked through. Lukas’ presentation was primarily verbal, yet the work from the group in response/reaction to it was mostly movement based and gestural, as they worked through the idea of utterance, which was the theme of his story. On the other hand, Theron’s was almost completely non-verbal with moments presented in the dark, yet the response/reaction from the group was heavily verbal working with theatricality.
In my observations I felt that response rather than reaction seemed to help build energy. We concluded that maybe reaction was a disruptive verb and response was a supportive verb –if we could tune ourselves into our intentions more directly, I wondered whether we could play with these more rhythmically?
Theron suggested: there is a line between original action and response, where as reaction has more roots in the original action. A response is still addressing the original action, but is more of a proposition you are placing next to the original action. Rachel noted that you have to think more when responding, so it’s a different process of creation than reaction, which is more instant as they can become chain reactions. I wondered in this vain whether a response can really be a conversation, or is it something done separately, which, as Theron said can be seen only next to the original action? Also, does witnessing become what you are doing if you are neither responding nor reacting, or is this an active response/reaction in itself?
Working with the levels of presence really helped the work to build, where as the levels of address seemed to give it direction. We worked with a variety of combinations –sometimes using address levels and sometimes presence and sometimes interchanging both. The level of presence was announced before it was used and Lukas felt this gave a sense of paying respect to what the other person had brought into the room with their presentation.
In watching the responses/reactions the group became a kind of “memory machine” and the performers felt curious standing outside themselves: “a sense of there being another you in the room”. Theron suggested we should do a session on quotations of other people in the group. Something more distant than this work where we recast the original presentation and restage it. How would it sound? What would we discover about the work and ourselves?
With this thought hanging we ended the session.
