Lesson 5

 Butoh- Japanese dancing 
In the lesson we looked at Butoh dancing which is a type of Japanese dancing which focuses on how you, as an individual, moves. There is no correct way of doing this dancing, it just relies on you being free and open and listening to your body.
At the beginning of the lesson we did a short exercise where we tried to do our own Butoh dancing. I found it difficult because it was hard to let go of my inhibitions and let my body move in ways that might feel silly. The longer i was moving, the easier it became. It was also helpful that everybody else was dancing, because it is easier when you're not the only one looking silly!
From watching other people I realised that the more you commit to the movement, the more effective it looks. If a person is completely in tune with their body, the movements look beautiful.
This helped me realise that for our performance we need to commit to everything - our stories we are telling and Butoh dancing we are doing on the podiums. If we don't commit, the piece will look rubbish and will lack energy. The movement will only be effective if we try to forget any inhibitions we might have.

The Rough Run Through - W.W.W

• We have got better as a group at reading each other and finding the right moments to copy one another.
• We are taking a lot of risks, so we feel that we need to support each other. We have got better at going along with the stories and not questioning what another actor decides to do. 
• Hannah's Story- Hannah's story on the podium was a brilliant moment. She used lines from a Tom Waits song to get inspiration for her own story. The story was simple and she used the repetition of the lyrics to give herself time to think about what she should say next. It was really effective centering the story around the lyric and I think everyone who tells a story should do this. It means that the story it focused and the person doesn't start to talk aimlessly and lose grasp of their plot. 

Storytelling- What are the challenges? 

When improvising a story it is difficult to give it a clear direction, because you do not the conclusion is going to be. If you have no direction to your story it is easy to talk aimlessly, whilst you work out what to say next. This is boring for the audience and means that they lose interest. A solution to this in our piece would be to use some Tom Waits lyrics to help centre and story and if we ever start to talk aimlessly, we can come back to the lyrics. 

It is also important to be relaxed when telling a story because being in a state of relaxation gives you creativity. If you feel to tense when trying to improvise a story, we won't be able to come up with anything exciting or inventive. 

Everybody has to be ready to jump in and take risks. If nobody is going up to tell a story, you must be prepared to jump in and trust that everyone else will go along with it ! 

Characterisation

In order to improve our piece, everybody needs to do work on their characterisation. Our piece is experimental, so our characters need to be really bold and exaggerated. In order to go father with our characters, we need to do some character research and know our characters inside out. To have bold characters, we need to lose our inhibitions and be more free.