Apocryphal Theatre Laboratory

Firstly, thank you to everyone who attended our Apocryphal Festival at Camden People’s Theatre last week.  It was quite an intense week for us, but we are all very excited by the work presented and the possibilities for developing our work further.  We’ve not had labs for quite sometime, as we’ve been dedicating the time to rehearsals for the festival, but you will be glad to know that we are now having labs again, up until the end of the year, and then early next year we will be in rehearsals for our next production of Besides, you lose your soul or The History of Western Civilisation which will be running at Camden People’s Theatre from 11th February -1st March 2009.

Anyway, we did meet this Tuesday and discussed our responses to the festival, and then did some lab work.

Attendants: Julia, Lukas, Bill, Bib.

In our performative response showing of Besides, you lose your soul, the text deals with quotations from various theatre, philosophical and historical texts, and we decided that we would like to work with favourite quotations and our responses to them for the next series of labs.

Julia gave us a quote “we struggle with dream figures and our blows fall on living faces” -by Maurice Merleau -Ponty, and we each spent 5-10 minutes on creating a response to this, showed them to each other, and then chose someone else’s response to then perform as we remembered it.

This work was a lot of fun, and is not something we have done on before.  It was interesting to see each person’s very individaul response, whether it was the way they inhabited their response through their specific physical training, or the personal anecdote used or shown which was felt to respond to or express this quote.  We didn’t have long to do this work, but after creating and showing our own responses and then attempting to inhabit someone else’s it really made, for me anyway, the quote far more personal and a part of me, as it strengthed my emotional connection with it.  Although this may not have been true for everyone, by exploring what was otherwise an unknown sentiment, it certainly brought us all closer to what it might mean.  As we were working in solos, it did however mean that the presentations seemed to be more about the “dream figures” than the “living faces” section of the quote.  The work was fruitful and had further depths to probe, and it would be interesting to work on incorporating more than one person’s response in our presentation of responses to eachother and working in duos or trios etc..

We will continue this work next week for a full session, and Bib and Lukas will be emailing quotes to the group for us to then think about over the week and then create responses to in our next session.