After a year of weekends at Egham, trains from and to London, phone calls explaining  projects and worries to each other, time in the studio to develop our pieces and an intensive week in June, we are finally here!.

My process in the course has been challenging at times but also a massive learning curve, in many levels and, following Jasmin’s style, in many layers.

The first half of the year was focused in understanding and exploring methods and approaches of creating physical theatre work and it finished with the creation of a solo. We worked on many tasks and exercises to stimulate our creation process and also to challenge our skills which where quite different as we all had different backgrounds.

The solo I developed (titled Take Me Home) was a 3min 30sec piece which explored the journey of a character that tries to go home. She is late, and decides to hitch hike as she is about to miss her plane. After a frustrating waiting time, a car finally stops. A nice middle age man offers her a lift to the airport. Nice music and a good conversation. However, the road they travel is not as smooth as expected. Despite the bumps and scary driving, she tries with dignity to pretend that everything is ok. Once the road gets better, the driving calmer and the music softer, she falls asleep for some seconds and dreams about making it with her career as a dancer. She is enjoying her time on stage until her dream is suddenly interrupted by the driver. The destination has been reached. She apologises for having fallen asleep and leaves the car to take her train.

The character was initially developed from a prop, two joint chairs that pretended to create the two front seats of a car. I played with the idea of falling asleep, having a dream, waking up, feeling lost, trusting someone else, not trusting that person, going through different states / layers, feeling different tones and having elements of surprise that suddenly changed the story. Voices were added and then removed, and choreography was made shorter and then longer, it started to be the core of the piece but it then became just a dream that the main character had in her journey going home.

I found Jonathan Burrow’s book on how to choreograph really useful during this process¹, specially the parts where he talks about his difficulties, how to start from nothing, how to develop small ideas into something meaningful and to see that all choreographers go through the same kind of process, no matter how many times you have done it. It was really useful to see how you start somewhere and then how magic it is for it to turn into something different that you did not plan. I did not pretend for the piece to be humorous but it happened at some points somehow; having music to help telling the story added a layer of contradiction that made the whole thing turn into something else. I will quote Phillip Guston here, talking about an unexpected response to his paintings “When I show these, people laugh and I always wonder what laugher is. I suppose Baudelaire’s definition is still valid, it is the collision of two contrary feelings”. I think that is what happened there, something that was not funny but almost the opposite, a scary moment for the character that was going though a dangerous / uncomfortable situation, could make people laugh because of the music choice and was not intended to be funny. I explored the piece with different tracks and observed that it got to different points and gave different feelings, people had different reactions to it depending on the music choice, the links where also important as I wanted to have a sudden mood / state change in the middle of the piece and after trying to break it at different points and in different ways, I felt that having a radio tuning could help linking moments and could benefit to tell the story.

References to mime and monologue were used to develop the piece^2,7. Exercises on layering, changing character qualities and adding props were applied to create the solo. The style of the piece is based on the Spanish theatre company ‘El Tricicle’³, these were 3 men that did stand up comedy and humorous physical theatre in the 80s. I tried to mix physical theatre, dance and a bit of voice.

After getting assigned on the solo, the next part of the course focused on developing a 15 to 20min piece as a director and also on being directed by others as a performer in their pieces. I found ‘The Creative Habit’ book by Twyla Tharp⁵ really  useful in this part of the course, specially to loose the initial fear to try and explore ideas and to better understand how to learn and use a habit.

I chose to develop the solo I presented in the first part of the course into a more complete / longer piece by adding voices, playing with more layers, having clearer cuts and transitions. I thought it would be interesting to turn it into a piece where more characters and cars could be added to create sequences that could range from dramatic to sarcastic. I thought the idea was concrete but also broad enough to allow playing with different elements and also, personally, I wanted to explore the issue of someone going through a journey. I imagined it as a long journey where one person goes hitch hiking and takes different cars, or as character that is in a car and it is exposed to different situations.

Different ideas were explored, using chairs as props, representing cars. I decided to have everyone in the piece as having more cars and more characters could develop more stories. I explored two ideas.

The first one was around one person going through different stages in her mind and understanding herself in the journey she was taking from car to car. The idea was that she started in one place and after talking / interacting / playing with different people in the cars, each of them would have an impact on her, making her grow, etc, as if it was the different stages in life or the people who has impact on one self through life. The piece would start with a character (me) living in London having a moment of revelation and deciding to reconnect with her long-lasted dream by going back to the place that first inspired her: Paris. Unfortunately, that night London’s transport is on strike, which forces her to hitchhike, exploring several car drivers / passengers. At every stop, she meets someone who teaches her something about life. After trying this with everyone for two days on the weekend before the intensive, I saw that I would need more time to make the idea work so I decided to try the second one which seemed more appropriate to the amount of creation time I had at that point.

Road (the second idea) had both the hitch hiking element and also the cars but it just attempted to make the solo longer and stronger without taking the character into a deeper emotional journey. In this piece, a person needs a change in her life and decides to go somewhere else (Paris) so she desperately tries for each car to take her to her destination (without the cars affecting to her emotions as deeply as in idea number 1, just by making her more nervous because she gets more and more desperate to get to Paris and using the fact that everything gets faster and the character gets more nervous to add to the piece’s physicality). 

Each of the performers in the car had a specific trait so we could practice adding layers to the characters. It was 5 of us; I was in the piece too. Each of us created movement separately, they had to choose if the wanted to be a driver or a passenger and the only rule was to stick to that and create movement using the ‘car’. We chose the bits that worked best and developed them. We first tried the cars to be in a line but we then saw (hearing Mafalda’s advice) that it would work better with the cars staggered. Then I gave each of them a character and a story: Sam (car 1) was a drunk guy who was into disco music and would be involved in a car accident, Julia (car 2) was a nervous mum trying to get ready in the car, with her children playing in the back seat, who was taken by her calm husband to a wedding, and they were very late, Kate (car 3) was a girl who was into bossa nova and was driving unsafely whilst texting and receiving messages on her mobile phone and Anatoli (car 4) was a sleepy person who liked classical music and was driving nowhere to find herself through spirituality. I was the person hitch hiking who sat in all cars. They all added those layers to the first task and developed the physicality of each solos further. We picked the material that worked best and tried to push it further physically. Once we had that we did an exercise to try how would I interact with each of them in each car and we developed draft duets and draft conversations that could start forming the story.

I had three ideas I wanted to try. One was to develop a music / sound track pretending the car radios were playing. I wanted to do that myself and have a play with that. The other one was to create dialogs and use some parts of it at the end as if all the voices / conversations we heard throughout the piece were now in the hitch hiking character’s head (louder every time, one on top of the other). And the third one was playing (physically) with the idea of pulling one person (me) from one extreme to the other (as if everyone was trying to avoid / or completely the opposite, trying to help, that person to reach Paris).

In my mind, the person hitch hiking wanted to get from London to Paris because there was something really important there (like in real life, when we think that once we reach a certain objective we will be happy but what’s important is the actual road to it).

After trying many qualities in the hitch hiking character, the one that worked best was being kind of reckless and strong, without laughing and being quite cool about everything happening around. That was the only quality that could make that character believable, going to Paris, without thinking much about it, just because… ‘why not?’.

We worked on links, beginning and ends. We worked on developing unisons and also to play with moment where they would all react to the same thing (ie. a car  accident) to bring all the characters together. To create the unison, I asked each of them to come with a really simple movement as I wanted the unisons to be really speedy (double speed in the counts to match the music) and robotic to give the feeling of something mechanical (ie. driving somewhere without really thinking). I got inspired by the choreographer  Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker in her piece Rosas⁸. I used that unison for the beginning and also in transitions in the middle of the piece.

The piece opens with all performers sitting on chairs dancing on unison to ‘Run Boy Run’ from Woodkid. Once the music stops, we realise that they are all sitting on cars, one as a passenger and the rest, driving. We first hear Sam (car 1) who listens to loud music, drinks whilst driving and does not really care about other drivers around him complaining, he even causes an accident, fights with a driver and comes back to his car to put the music louder (80s and disco music). 

We then hear Julia arguing with her kids whilst she tries to get dressed & put make up on in the car as the family is late for a wedding. We then see a person (me) with a cardboard that reads ‘Paris’, hitch hiking, trying to get to a car. The whole situation is quite surreal, first because no-one hitch hikes in England and secondly because going from London to Paris hitch hiking in one day for no reason is a silly idea that somehow works because it has a bit of tension due to the fact that you don’t really understand what’s happening. Sam stops and my character travels with him for a while, explains him why she is going to Paris and has a duet with him before deciding to jump off the car after seeing him too dangerously drunk, he has a cigarette and a bottle that he uses as props. 

My character (Laura) runs to get to the next car (Julia) which is not going anywhere near Paris nor in that direction so she has a short interaction and jumps off. The next car (Katie) is a relaxed girl who listens to bossa nova and is quite happy to take Laura to Paris whilst texting and playing with her mobile phone. Their duet is the most physical as a phone is used as a prop and both characters fight over it. 

Everytime you hear Woodkid, the  unison happens and Laura’s character travels from car to car – the idea of this was to have some breathing moments in the piece. The next car is driven by Anatoli who is really sleepy and although she is happy to take Laura to Paris, she misses the exit and Laura gets really frustrated. I did not have time to develop this moment further but I would have liked to describe Paris⁶ physically in the way Italo Calvino describes the invisible cities as a way to describe something that is intangible, an objective, an idea of happiness, before getting there and have a dreamy moment that went really well with Aanatoli’s character. All characters interact with each other during the journey and at the end everyone gets really nervous because everyone is on eachother’s way and a fight starts. We hear Electroswing music that goes louder and louder, and all characters going also louder and louder and everything getting chaotic, everything apart from a choreographed pulling and pushing of Laura’s character that goes into a loop to stop at the higher moment and push Laura to her objective: Paris. 

At that point all characters stop, as if all voices she had in her head did not matter and she finds herself alone in Paris. All characters go back to their cars and after feeling Paris is nothing, she sees another car approaching (Sam) that ask her ‘Hey, where are you going?’ and she replies ‘To London’ so we understand that she goes back to the beginning to go through the whole thing again.

When I created the piece, this was a way to end the piece in a way that made sense (although it did not quite work on the assignment day) but after reflecting on it I saw that this could be taken further and rather than being someone that decides to go somewhere and then realises that the Road is what matters / what’s fun / what makes sense or that the place where she came from was better, this could be a metaphor of our minds when we make decisions, one after the other, without thinking, just to keep in constant movement, to avoid thinking properly about what to do, just moving but without really progressing because the mind wants to make moves for the sake of moving.

I wrote this text after doing the piece:

 “The mind does not decide, it is the body who does it. I am that person who runs everywhere, confused, from one extreme to the other, within herself. Convinced that it is late for me, convinced that there is something that I’m missing, somewhere else. When I reach ‘somewhere else’ there is nothing there, and I prefer to go back where I initially was. The result from all this is a chronic tiredness that neutralises any generating energy”.

My next step would be to develop each character further, describe Paris in more dreamy way (with voice and also physical) and to make it clear that this is our mind, and that sometimes is better to be still in order to progress. I would love to play with voices further, use the voices to give rhythm and also drama to the end, be able to play and practise dancing to exhaustion at the same time as speaking and also push the dance and physicality further. I would like to make it much more simple and clear but much more full and deep at the same time. Also have longer unisons and more moments of the characters really interacting with each other. I would also like to play with video / using a webcam to show more details on what happens in the cars in a screen. And also work better on the sound and music.

Apart from directing Road, I was also a performer in Julia’s piece (Circus) which was also a great journey as my character became somehow a bit comical and it was really nice to go there and practice some clown exercises. I also helped the others with their technical cues in their pieces; it was challenging but really rewarding to do it!

References

1.‘A Choreographer’s Book’ Jonathan Burrows, 2010

2.‘Guston’ Robert Storr, Abbeville Press Publishers, 1986, p54

3.‘El Tricicle’ (Spanish comedian company) http://www.tricicle.com/sp/index.php

4.‘Devising Performance: A Critical History’ Deirdre & Milling, Jane. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005

5.‘The Creative Habit’ Twyla Tharp, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks.

6.‘Invisibble Cities’ Italo Calvino

7. ET The Mime https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPMBV3rd_hI 2011

8. Rosas / Rosas Danst Rosas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQCTbCcSxis 2008