THE JOY OF SOUND PART III

The Sacred Circle of Party Rings and Jaffa Cakes

In todays lesson we discovered what the Sacred Circle exercise was. This would later become the foundation for most of the performance. In this circle, we placed our objects of joy. One by one we entered the circle and began to play with them and improvise. The rule was that whoever was inside the circle must constantly being playing and committing whilst those who were on the outside stayed quiet and watched patiently.

My object of joy was my acoustic Freshman guitar which was the first guitar I ever bought with money I saved up for a long time with. Both Benji, Jimmy and myself brought our guitars into the circle, and thus a mini band was formed. Those with musical instruments began to play with each other following each others chords, sometimes sporadically changing the style of music to peaceful and then back to aggressive angst. This changed the entire dynamic of the circle as the others who were in the circle altered their reactions upon the tone of music. For example, Benji and I played an aggressive and fast song and this caused jimmy and Elijah to start throwing Jaffa Cakes at each other. This all changed when Benji broke off into a relaxing medley causing the anger to vanish and a peaceful and happy environment to grow. At this point I decided to leave the circle and watch as I wanted to see how the audience reacted.

I found this particularly to be one of the most exciting experiences of the devising process so far. It was the moment that I realised that music had a power to change peoples emotion in the same way words do, or a piece of dance. I always knew music had an emotional gravitas to each song but I've never seen a clearer image of it happening first hand.

One thing I really enjoyed from other peoples objects is when Nansi entered the space and began reading numbers from a diary. This caused Max, Eden and Gabriel to start playing a random number repeating game. This really excited me as it caused a ripple effect where over 5 or 6 people slowly began to join in on the game and eventually it became the essence of play we had been trying to find. This is something that really worked well as everyone was listening and responding to the natural stimulus that was being offered to us. I felt very overwhelmed by this section as, being an onlooker, made me want to jump in and play because it one hundred percent reminded me of when I was young. This will have an exciting effect on the audience if we invite them to join in on the game.

SURFIN' USA (CHRIS WOODLEY) 

In one of the science rooms above the musical theatre department, we devised an introduction into the Amygdala piece. This consisted of scientist stripper, Madonna and an over the top (intentionally cheesy) surfing/beach dance routine. This would be performed after our Living gallery pieces. After the introductory scene, we would perform a two minute piece in groups of five. My group consisted of Jake, Kymarni and Susanne. We devised a piece in which I play the guitar to the tune of Nirvana's - Marigold, and over the top they would each say a mini speech about what music means to them. This would then transition to Jimmy's group.

This was effective as in summarised the performance we were about to show in a short and quick 2 minute explanation.