Physical Theatre

Our task, after research, was to devise our own Physical Theatre piece based on a political stimulus. In our group we spent a while coming up with a motive. We decided that we should go for a piece that highlights the issue of repression and how, from a young age, people are moulded into what religion wants them to be, that being individual and different is unacceptable. Our stimulus was the school girl Malala Yussuf, who was attacked as she was a girl going to school. We wanted to show that religion has a strong control on peoples lives, not necessarily for a good reason.

With this decided, we decided that we should choose music first to build around it, which happened to be Kanye West, "I am a God" ironically. We set our beginning in which people mould our main actor into shapes they want him to be in, before they surround him and he breaks out. Whilst this occurs some of us are on the floor slamming the ground at intervals. Our main focus of the piece was to show repression, to show the conflict religion causes, the expectation that everyone should be the same, that no ideas are challenged and those that do challenge society are unable to break out in the corrupt world of religion.

A lot of work went into devising this piece, as well as careful thought. This time, we cut back on the techniques and made sure we only used what worked. In our piece we have used motif, contact improvisation, movement, status  and proximity. Our main use of status was to show the power between people, and that those who are fixed in their beliefs have more power over those speaking out for change. Once the movement was set, we decided that we needed to add some dialogue in, but didn't want to add something in without meaning, so we researched the rosary in Latin, to which we found the line In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen. This was very useful and we implemented this into our start and all say Amen in unison. The prayer, we decided, would be good to play also, so we managed to combine the song with the prayer, which created a really quirky sound.