We began by presenting our research on the practitioner, Antonin Artaud, and his famous approach to theatre. Doing this exercise was very helpful as all of or research collated together ensured that no details were missed and we were all able to contribute something to our knowledge on The Theatre of Cruelty.
Following this, we were given a stimulus for us to devise a short Artaudian piece around in groups (Lorna, James, Ollie M, Ollie K, Charlie/Rob, Kat, Hope, Me) (keeping in mind that we wouldn't have Rob or Ollie M next lesson). Our stimulus was a painting by Salvador Dali pictured below:
My first idea was inspired by the authoritative figure in the top right corner of the photo holding a spear. Upon seeing this figure, I envisioned our piece clearly in my head: we'd have a clock ticking noise throughout and it would be set in a classroom. The class would be in a sort of detention scenario (due to not having enough people in our class to represent a whole class) and we would have a teacher. Upon a student dropping a pen or making too much noise tapping on their desk etc. the teacher would take a step towards the and blackout. When the lights come back on, that student would be gone. We'd repeat this until every student was gone, with the class looking more and more frightened after each disappearance. As great as it would've been to perform this piece, we believed that it wouldn't work out due to us only having two people as students.
From this idea, we continued on with the theme of murder and this led to us researching different murderers including Mick Phillpot, Robert Black and Mary Bell. But our attention led to the story of fourtenn-year-old, Joshua Phillips of Jacksonville, Florida. He was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole after he murdered his neighbour, Maddie Clifton, 8. His attempt at hiding the body was the most gruesome part of the story: he hid the body with his water bed and was only found when his mother recognised a peculiar leak.
We found this story very horrifying which was perfect for an Artaudian styled performance! We wanted the audience to feel just as horrified as we were. We decided that we wanted to put a huge emphasis on the waterbed but not make it obvious. We looked for sound effects for dripping noises to represent this but felt that this wasn't very relevant to a water, but more just water dripping. We then looked for water sloshing noises as this noise is much more relatable to a waterbed. However, we couldn't find any sound effects that worked very well so we drifted our focus away from technicalities and focused more on the piece itself. We wanted to have our murderer in the centre with their conscience telling them why they should (not) have committed their crime. We had Hope play the evil conscience while Kat played the good conscience.
When it came to deciding who would play the murderer, obvious choice was me as I was the only person left but we wanted to go outside the box. We wanted to give our audience the full Artaud experience of leaving a theatre feeling enriched by their experience; experience being the key word. So with this we decided that we'd have the audience extremely close to the action and one of them seated as the murderer. In this position, we'd have the consciences sat either side of the "murderer" and they'd argue their cases across him/her. I'd be sat behind the "murderer" giving the illusion that I was the murderer; but I was. The people in the audience would recognise that I was the murderer, but our "murderer" would think that he was while his consciences argue through him. When he/she least expects it, I come from behind him/her and hold them ready to choke them sharply followed by a blackout. We feel this would be very effective at spooking the audience.
As a solution to the sloshing sound issue, we decided that the consciences would both have a water bottle which they would slosh throughout, starting of soft but getting more vigorous through the piece.
Next lesson we will perform our Artaudian pieces.
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