Last night our rehearsal was led by Hilary-Ann. For her activity, she had us listen to music and move in whatever ways the music made us move. She also had us write 3 different words on slips of paper. These words had to do with American culture, our generation, or love. She pulled out the words while the music was playing and we were moving. She told us to let the words affect us as well. Hilary played four or five different songs for us, all of which she said she had played for a certain reason. I don’t remember (because I didn’t know them) many of the songs, nor do I know her purpose for choosing each of them. However, each song seemed to have a different mood and affect us all in a different way. Collectively as a group, we seemed to react pretty similarly. The energy in the room would change with each song and sometimes the song would give us a goal, sometimes it would take our goals away. After we did the activity, we talked about all of these things and what Hilary saw. One thing that we found quite poignant in what she saw was, “a struggle for nothing.” We talked about this idea and what it meant to us and then we decided to explore this idea physically. Hilary picked out a few more songs and we laid down to start the next activity. Kelly watched this one so that Hilary could participate. While we were laying down we each thought of something that we were struggling with and used this in conjunction with the music to see how it affected us. This also brought out some cool results and moments, which we talked about after the activity. There are some moments from this activity that we will explore in subsequent rehearsals as well as the idea of masks. One of the songs that Hilary played was “Babel” by Mumford and Sons. We all seemed to react strongly to this song and to its lyrics so we will keep playing around with this song.
In our next rehearsal we are going to make masks and watch the documentary Happy.
In the rehearsal after that, we will use these masks and I am going to look into doing an activity from Moni Yakim’s Creating a Character, using the chapter on the social self.
We have a lot of exciting ideas buzzy around now. I would like us to explore these ideas and hone them into what is most important so that we can put this into the piece.
Devising Project 