Spinning
At this year’s Theater Lab, I went in with the goal of doing something crazy, and left having directed the only realist play at the festival. That being said, I was very happy with the play I directed, and it may well be my favorite directing process that I’ve ever executed. But I still hadn’t met my goal. So after theater lab was over I adopted Libby’s theater lab play, Spinning.
Spinning in an absurdist drama, in a dystopic world, it’s also 7 pages long. I am working with Libby to expand and rework the play into an even better piece of material. With the help of two other actors we will be presenting it at the winter art show on January 6th.
This project is all about process, and theory, I’m working with ideas from theatrical movements from the past, such as Theater of Cruelty, an idea proposed by Antonin Artaud in his book Theater and It’s Double.
Spinning in an absurdist drama, in a dystopic world, it’s also 7 pages long. I am working with Libby to expand and rework the play into an even better piece of material. With the help of two other actors we will be presenting it at the winter art show on January 6th.
This project is all about process, and theory, I’m working with ideas from theatrical movements from the past, such as Theater of Cruelty, an idea proposed by Antonin Artaud in his book Theater and It’s Double.
Rehearsals have started, we have discussed the script and it's intentions and I am beginning to work with Libby on revisions.
During rehearsals I have employed games and exercises from Augusto Boal's Games for Actors and Non Actors and experimented with roleplaying within the world of spinning. We have rehearsed on a real playground as to encourage the actors to let go of inhibitions and be creative with their interaction with space and structure. To the right is a video of an exercise where the actors performed spinning without using any of the dialogue, simple following the structure of the interactions, and using movement to express themselves. We did this three times in a row, the first two were limited to a single play structure, while the third was free to take up the whole playground. |
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I am very happy with how spinning turned out. It looked great when we presented it at the art show. We were able to do it twice in succession, which was wonderful because a fair portion of the bookwork I did with the actors pointed towards that being an appropriate way to perform it.
I was incredibly happy with the process we went through to get to the final product, we spent an incredibly short amount of time actually working with the script. The first days of rehearsal were spent talking about the world it took place in and learning about characters, and playing on playgrounds. Then we took a day and blocked the whole thing start to finish with lots of little details and I had examples of things to show to inform the actors of what exactly I wanted them to be doing, but I also made sure that there was room for them to create their version of it all. I worked with two theatrical theories in this production, the first was Antonin Artaud’s The theater of Cruelty, which is about expressing the theater outside of the words, instead using sounds and symbolism on the stage, which was exciting and will definitely be informing future productions that I do. The second theory was less developed and my own, I called it Dramatic Farce, it was created for Spinning and Spinning alone, because it was about the juxtaposition of the staging and bright colors, against the tragic story that the show tells. |