Mental health piece

In our experimentation of mental health as a topic to put on stage we explored it's different levels of intensity andstereotypical misconceptions. 

Having a mental health problem at this time is very common and doesn't just look like someone rocking back and forth in a white gown screaming with laughter. To deepen our perception we created loops of movement to show irrational behavior in a stereotypical way. We used Artaud's impossible actions to get us into an irrational state which is the core of the mental illness stereotypes. We tried things like jumping with the determination to fly off the ground or shouting down a shoe with the complete conviction that they'll be an answer if you address it sternly enough. This had a weakness of similarity between each other's actions but we adapted them through repetition. There are are a million words to describe people with mental health issues and all of their subtexts are what make up the massive misconceptions. Loony, deranged, mental, disturbed, bonkers, crazy... We were each given a word, sying these words in a very matter of fact way to describe what we were demonstrating. I think this one word made very the action strong  because the purpose leaked right through. 

To clash with these actions we each picked out some real facts about mental health as ourselves. I found some myths and facts on www.time-to-

change.org.uk which fits our contrast nicley.

It is also a fact that mental health issues affect men and women in completely different ways. Boys and girls cry and express emotion in exactly the same way and intensity before the age of 8 but society shapes their expression of emotion as their growing up, cementing it into their instinctive nature. The social definition of a man forms their ideals and self-expectation which can be seen a positive thing to a father; a son looking up to his dad and aspiring to be the "strong breadwinner". But in reality it results in boys disconnecting from their sadness early on resulting higher suicide rates in men as they fail to communicate their building emotional problems. The rate of men who are alcoholics is also much higher that women who tend to deal with their problem through more logic and emotion. 

Mental health: what is it really? Can someone that we socially view as having poor mental health have a clearer understanding of the world than we do? Was Artaud "crazy" or was he onto something real?

At the start of our piece we're separating the boys from the girls creating a visual image of how people hide their mental health behind social fronts and now men and women do it differently. The girls take layers of fancy clothes off ending up collapsing after a frantic repetition of their movements of "hiding". (That involves putting on makeup, nursing drinks, fake laughter etc...) After which we smear the full face of makeup we'd have, all over our face to show loss of face and control over yourself. 

The boys are doing the opposite at the start; putting layers of hoods and coats on. translating these Macho attitudes and sexualisations into motifs. They're all really simple but quite visual for the audience which gets reflections out. 

In the group movement we took off layers of clothing, as if peeling off protective layers to uncover emotion.
The repetitive movement has strength in build-up of tension and emotion bubbling in the character. Through a set of individual looped movement we were showing anxiety and dysfunction as it got manic and out of control with the buildup of music. My movement was very naturalistic at first, I was only miming getting a cab and disapproving my reflection in the mirror or reaching across a table and faking a smile. The subtlety of it was a disadvantage for the purpose of our piece. I practiced bringing across just the raw emotions through my body with exaggerated movement that didn't look like the character doing something but was an inside out version of the action.   

At the beginning the movement wasn't that stylized, some of the work was lack luster, for me personally I just didn't exactly know what I was doing so my movements were disconnected and random. When I understood the task my movements became more robotic and stylized and stereotypical. During the final rehearsal day Miss stated that I needed to make my movements larger and incorporate levels thus creating a greater effect on the audience. I believe I acted on this feedback immediately and consequently my movements became visually stimulating I felt myself working harder to portray how women get ready to go out and how this shows our insecurities that we discussed as a class. Overall I believe my movement sequence coupled with all the different movements we were all doing truly highlighted the insecurities of women getting ready and incorporated an idea we had during the early stages. 

At the beginning of devising the movements they felt a bit disconnected and and false. It became much more effective once we exaggerated and stylized each stroke and removal of each layer. This was much more visually stimulating and an inside out portrayal of how women hide behind clothes and makeup and the anxieties/insecurities we have. The strongest point in our piece was when we all fell in unison repeating the same movement as it created a ritualistic atmosphere. In the buildup we fell out of it one by one as the movement got manic, fast, intense and crazy ... 
The piece the boys did was efficient in the movements getting faster and manic followed by the girls each holding onto them whilst the boys carried on struggling. This was also stylized rather than naturalistic which is what made it effective. We followed the boys down to the floor while saying “its okay”. This section was very strong visually and emotionally. It was a great contrast to the soundscape and dysfunctional almost horror-film movement of typical madness to show real anxiety just by exploring how mental problems affect men and women in different ways. 

Artaud

Antonin Artaud September 4, 1896 - March 4, 1948

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.

A French dramatist, poet, essayist, actor, and theatre director, widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century theatre and the European avant-garde. 

Being the son of a wealthy ship-fitter with a mother from a Greek background Artaud was educated at the Coll'e du Sacré Coeur in Marseilles. At age five he suffered a near-fatal attack of meningitis, the results of which remained with him for the rest of his life. I think this must've shaped his views on God and the harsh realities of human value and illness at a very young age.  He was very determined from this and at 14 he founded a literary magazine which he kept going for almost four years.

Still in his teens, he began to have sharp head pains, which continued throughout his life. This signifies a lot as to what he had to deal with on a daily basis that could've pushed him in the direction of developing the right mindset for creating the Theatre of Cruelty. In 1914 he was the victim of an attack of neurasthenia and was treated in a rest home; the following year he was given opium to alleviate his pain, and he became addicted within a few months. 

He was inducted into the army in 1916, but was released in less than a year on grounds of both mental instability and drug addiction. In 1918 he committed himself to a clinic in Switzerland, where he remained until 1920. On his release, he went immediately to Paris and became a successful professional actor on screen and on stage all through the twenties. He also became very interested in surrealist movement headed by André Breton and in 1923. published a volume of symbolist verse; a collection of letters, poems in prose, and bits of dialogue; it contained one complete work, the five-minute playlet Le Jet de sang (The Jet of Blood), which was finally produced in 1964.

Artaud used exhaustion to break down barriers in actors, much like Grotowski was inspired to. The Theatre of Cruelty heightened emotions and feasted on the vulnerable senses of the audience. He believed that through this he could create revelations in the audience and speak to them on a deeper level. Cruelty means strictness, diligence, unrelenting decisiveness, irreversible and absolute determination. He was mentally ill and because of that he had a cynical pessimistic view of society. He believes we are all the same within and that's the part of the individual in the audience he wanted to break down. In truth he thought the individual was just an illusion. He believes that given a situation where the normal rules of society are overturned eg. A plague, war, etc. we all can do extraordinary things. In an anarchic situation we all would be the same and savages at that.
Therefore in Artaud's theatre man must be put in an extreme situation because only when in an extreme will the inner man be exposed.
He became deeply influenced by the horrible fascist world that he lived in which is where some of his phylosophy stems from. Influenced by the horrors of the first world war where people saw what horrors man could do. Artaud's theatre is about revealing what man can do. Theatre for Artaud was a tool for exposing and realising society's ills. He referred to these ills as a poison, and wanted to bring out the poison so that when actual extreme situations came to be (eg. War, plague) people would not become the savage beneath. Having the opportunity there would be inevitable, it's about whether or not you actually do a bad thing. He saw theatre of cruelty as a way of containing this savage by horrifying people with it.

He wrote lots of manifestos including the one on theatre of cruelty and wanting to move beyond language in theatre through movement, dance and sounds to move beyond naturalism.
Total theatre- the means by which the heightened stage can be achieved. Using everything at out disposal to create an impact. This was done because helieved the modern man has an innate capacity to reason themselves out of an experience instead of experiencing it. He wanted to bombard his audience with as much sensory media as possible to force the mind into submission. This then softens up the brain and the audience's inner self.
Artaud practices the art of shocking the audience. He believed deeply in his Theatre of cruelty. Strict diligence, unrelenting decisiveness, irreversible and absolute determination. His theory was that Man Is a savage.  Defining extremes. He was mentally ill so he had a pessimistic view on life which made him believe that below the surface we are all the same. Given a situation where the normal rules of society are overturned we'll all do extraordinary things. He believes that as mankind when law and order doesn't exist in an anarchic situation, we will murder and pillage because man is a savage. But only when pushed to the extreme, will the inner man be exposed. 

Theatre was a tool for Artaud to expose society's ills. We need to release and expose it through theatre of cruelty to be able to contain our darker side. 

Artaud was influenced by Balinese performances which is where his manifestos sprung from. 

Total theatre refers to how the heightened state can be achieved. Total theatre bombards the mind into submission through heightened sensory experience. We don't fully commit to moments placing logical barriers into our theatrical experience and Artaud was aware that this would hinge his theatre trying to achieve it's purpose.

Artaud in practice

During the devising of  our performance we tried to adapt this thinking process and break down barriers within us as actors. We did exercises like spreading emotions in a circle to immerse ourselves in them and let them go on to a different level... Spreading joy turned out to be easier as we we let it happen and then ended up in circle of mad laughter bouncing off each other. But the sadness that was passed around in the same circle started out being rejected and faked as people don't like embracing their pain as much as hiding being humor. We did other imagination exercise which i think helped strengthen our pieces later as we were fully committed to the emotions in our exaggerated looped movements and group insanity.
The exercises involved group imaginations of being in a spiderweb or drinking from a chocolate fountain. The point was not to mime a fountain and make it look like realistic but to just feel the emotions intensely and commit to them. One was where we had chairs in a line and we had to go underneath them behind each other but feel like we were being trapped 1000 metres beneath the earth's surface in a tunnel. Like Poor Theatre we had no conventions just working with ourselves as the actor and focusing on us creating the set by being in it mentally. We explored descending ceilings and sinking gobs which was very interesting and developed our senses as actors. In our piece we have soundscapes to create a story and emotion. We could only make that successful buy doing these exercises using not just our bodies and naturalistic voices but sounds.
As we're exploring mental health we made soundscapes from everyone's take on what if feels and looks like. We ended up creating one that set a sense of madness in the room with lots of different cries of help, hysterics, irrational actions etc... We could only show them this once we understood ourselves what it means and looks like to us. It might have stared as us forcing these emotions and sounded unrealistic but allowed us to explore the conventional aspects of mental illness and apply it to our final pieces where we showed the audience perceptions and realities of mental heath.
This was all part of Le Jeu ensemble work where we do collective activities with no leader in a group and anyone can change the drift. This is also something that enabled us to create work through playing like children without barriers. There are boundaries within us as actors which we were attempting to break down like Artaud did with his actors. Even though it can get out of hand or seem like it's not leading us anywhere at first, I think we managed to use the exercise to creates a good sense of ensemble. Also afterwards when we were devising the mental health bit in our piece, this extended the efficiency of what we were able to produce. 

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath October 27, 1932 -  February 11, 1963

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

Novelist and poet from Boston Massachusetts. Died in London. Her mother, Aurelia Schober, was a master’s student at Boston University when she met Plath’s father, Otto Plath, who was her professor. They were married in January of 1932. Otto taught both German and biology.

In 1940, when Plath was eight years old, her father died as a result of complications from diabetes. He had been a strict father, and both his authoritarian attitudes and his death drastically defined her relationships and her poems—most notably in her most infamous poem "Daddy."

Even in her youth, Plath was ambitiously driven to succeed. She kept a journal from the age of eleven and published her poems in regional magazines and newspapers. Her first national publication was in the Christian Science Monitor in 1950, just after graduating from high school.

In 1950, Plath matriculated at Smith College. She was an exceptional student, and despite a deep depression she went through in 1953 and a subsequent suicide attempt, she managed to graduate in 1955. After graduation, Plath moved to Cambridge, England, on a Fulbright Scholarship. In early 1956, she attended a party and met the English poet Ted Hughes. Shortly thereafter, Plath and Hughes were married, on June 16, 1956.
Sylvia Plath had her first collection of poetry, The Colossus, published in England in 1960. That same year, she gave birth to her first child; Freida. Two years later, Plath and Hughes welcomed their first boy; Nicholas. Unfortunately, the couple's marriage was failing apart. After Hughes left her for another woman in 1962, Sylvia Plath fell into a deep depression. Struggling with her mental illness, she wrote The Bell Jar in 1963, her only novel, which was based on her life and deals with the mental breakdown and return to sanity of Esther Greenwood. Plath published the novel under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. She also created the poems that would make up the collection Ariel (1965), which was released after her death. Sylvia Plath committed suicide on February 11, 1963.

We're trying to explore through our pieces how people hide behind fronts and material things from their insecurities and irrationality. 

Minute solo performance

Physical minute performance about mental health shoelace bipolar reactions rolling back and forth into different dimensions non naturalized reactions 

Soundscape counting 

Total theatre solo pieces on Sylvia Plath

Jilted

My thoughts are crabbed and sallow,
My tears like vinegar,
Or the bitter blinking yellow
Of an acetic star.

Tonight the caustic wind, love,
Gossips late and soon,
And I wear the wry-faced pucker of
The sour lemon moon.

While like an early summer plum,
Puny, green, and tart,
Droops upon its wizened stem
My lean, unripened heart.
 

Peter Brook

Peter Brook March 21, 1925, Chiswick

Reality' is a word with many meanings.

Born in London, Peter Brook was educated at Westminster, and Magdalen College Oxford. He has staged numerous productions for Birmingham Rep, Stratford Upon Avon and Broadway. In 1962 he was appointed Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, a position he held for 2 decades.

Brook's theatre is a cleansing fire



involving the spirit not just the mind and body. Esoteric communal activity. He's putting forth the idea that we only get that from theatre and no other art. 

It's our duty as a society to give people a hunger for art to the point where they see it necessary for life itself. Living theatre has the ability to transform life through starling images and a blend of the real and spiritual. 

He said that Deadly theatre is only commercial theatre that kills true art form or is deadly boring and doesn't make audience think.

Brook was always about the psychophisical and doing minimal on stage. 

Holy theatre 
Why do we still need theatre  (an ancient art form) in modern day?