collaborative project 1

For the collaborative project, our group decided to explore the narrative of movement: basically to what extent can the movement tell the story without the help of text which accords with the idea of Tectonic Theatre. Also, we want to focus on creating the story based on concrete text or idea and then express it with abstract elements including gestures, lighting etc. We have not ensured our stimuli yet, but we are really interested in a project called Rhythm 0 which is a performance art conducted by Marina Abramović. This social experiment involved Marina Abramović standing still  in the public and the audience were giving freedom to do whatever they want to do with Marina Abramović. At first people are pretty gentle, but gradually, people start doing brutal things like stabbing her. This experiment reveals how complex and disgusting human nature actually is. With the collaborative project, we want to explore the complexity of human nature by using expressive movements. And we are also going to apply the theories from Tectonic Theatre to help us create our project. For example, Tectonic Theatre emphasizes the equal importance of every theatrical elements so the play should not be dictated by the texts which is why we want to avoid using texts in our show. Also, we want to adopt the method of creating moments first then creating the narratives, so we are probably going to do exercise exploring some moments of movements or lighting or sound and then connect them, thus creating a piece.

During the class, we did the exercise with creating moments and building them together, thus creating a short story. This process really helps me understand the chapter I was presenting for the Moment Work. The book talks about three main techniques of constructing short narratives. First is consecutive sequencing which is putting the moments created before in order. This is what we did in class, when one moment is happening, other moments freeze and the story happens in chronological sequence. Then is moment layering which is basically layer one moment onto the other, so moments can happen at the same time. This creates a more complex narrative because moments have more relationships between each other. The last one is context which means creating another moment happening at first or at last. The context will frame what the audience perceive and sometimes even redefines the narratives. There are also other small techniques in creating narratives, and the two that stand out to me is keeping information from the audience and the Joe X test. Keeping information from audience means that producers don't have to over-explain everything that is happening on stage, and thus create suspense and invite audience’s engagement. So when we are sequencing the order of the moments, we have to think about when should we reveal the important knowledge to the audience. The Joe X test is also important because it emphasizes that audience are new to the story so we have to make the audience understand what is happening. It is also okay that audience doesn’t understand something, but we have to make sure that it’s only because we don’t want the audience to understand or we will reveal that later on in the scene.