Questions of the cabinet

Today we worked as a large ensemble, as their is large number of us i feel that we all learnt how key it is to be focused and tuned into the energy of the room, doing this allowed everyone to be responsive to one another. For example when we first started working as a group answering questions things began to get heck tick, people were not looking out for each other and people's focus began to run off, this made it near impossible for everyone to work together and create a piece which was responsive but also visually looked good, so when we picked one person to respond to the questions and everyone else responded to that it became a lot clearer and more instinctual as that person was put on the spot.

However although at first it was sometimes chaotic and uncomfortable i actually really enjoyed the danger, the fact that you didn't know what was going to happen next, how far people were going to take it or how aggressive someone may be with you. The fear made me work harder to find the question and for me made it more exiting. I personally feel like we need to keep a dose of this in the real piece, the idea that you are slightly on edge because someones respond may be unexpected all we need to do is make sure we are ready as an ensemble to react to the energy in a calmer way.

It was important to make yourself open to exploring and discovering partially when answering the questions, being able to view everyone as a blank canvas instead of the people you know helped me to reveal a truthful answer to the questions. What i found most interesting and amazing to see was that everyone had their own interpretation of the question so you weren't copying the answers movements but responding to the energy they were giving out, this helped me answer my own questions and made me think about what the question meant to me. Breathing was also key as it aloud us to work with our instincts and continue working at manageable pace.

What really makes the whole piece work is when everyone is entirely focused on the person who is answering the question. As an ensemble you cant be selfish you have to accept that instead of one person taking the light you are all equal and working together to create something beautiful. I think when everyone realised this, stopped being selfish and allowed everyone to work communally thats when the piece worked. I can say this for myself because at the beginning i was answering the question in the way i thought would look good or make me look interesting but then i learnt that it wasn't about that, it was about sharing the moment with everyone and just being truthful, not answering with your head or caring about what anyone else thought.

The lovers

We have been creating work based around the piece of art by Rene Magritte's called The lovers.

In a group discussion we talked about what this piece meant to us and the reasoning behind Magritte's choice to cover the faces of "the lovers." I believed that the muslin could be a metaphor for the suffocation of their relationship. Others thought it could be a visual barrier showing that their is something in the way or hindering their relationship.


It was interesting to see how everyone interpreted the piece in a different way and took what the believed they were seeing. I was intrigued to know that the artist had no reasoning for the covered faces and stated that the painting meant nothing. I have learnt that you can use non meaningful stimulus to create meaning. Not always do we need to set out a purpose and a message to our audience but instead let the audience take away individual meanings. However one thing i would ask is, is it really possible to create art that is non meaningful. I ask this question because personally i feel as actors and story tellers we are accustom to finding characters that we can latch onto and giving the audience a journey they can follow. So although we may say it means nothing i believe that overtime the more you work the piece the more you will begin to discover and the art you are creating will become more meaningful.  

Something that has exited me during this process is the concept of automatism (Automatism - The process of writing or creating art without conscious thought.) I have found a vast amount of creative freedom from allowing myself to create work from a natural, instinctual place and not letting the constrictions of my head get in the way. For example sometimes when we can be self concious or afraid of making mistakes and this stops us from creating work that is challenging and different, so using automatism is defiantly a skill i have learnt that will continue to use in he future.

"The Surrealists borrowed many of the same techniques to stimulate their writing and art, with the belief that the creativity that came from deep within a person’s subconscious could be more powerful and authentic than any product of conscious thought."

I would agree with this statement that using automatism allows a persons creativity to come from within the subconscious mind as supposed to the concious mind which comes with restrictions, the work i have created through the subconscious has been better and more powerful in my opinion then concious work therefore i definitely understand why the surrealists were empowered by this method of devising.

I like how the muslin takes away our identities and makes us blank canvas's. It also creates other meanings for the audience like control, being a number, ,hiding yourself etc. 

Costume Ideas

I drew out the costume ideas to help me visually plan and see how the costume are going to look. Drawing helps me to mind map ideas in a creative and more interesting way.

I have insured that all the real colours of the costumes will be colours that match the piece of artwork we are using as stimulus. We are doing this because as a group we wanted to do the artwork justice by using as many key features as we could, like the melting and colliding of objects, the colours and the autumnal theme.

Staging Ideas

Salvador Dalí Research

Dali was a prominent spanish surrealist artist born in spain 1904. He was best known for his bizarre and often confusing dreamlike paintings. Dalí's expansive artistic portfolio included film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.

Dalí was highly imaginative, and also enjoyed indulging in unusual and extravagant behaviour. His manner and attention-grabbing public actions sometimes drew more attention to him rather than his artwork, to the dismay those who held his work in high esteem, and to the irritate his critics.

When he was five, Dalí was taken to his brother's grave and told by his parents that he was his brother's reincarnation, a concept that he came to believe. Images of his long-dead brother would reappear embedded in his later works, including Portrait of My Dead Brother (1963)

Dali's father strongly disapproved of his son's romance with his inspiration and wife Gala. He saw his connection to the Surrealists as a bad influence on his morals. The final straw was when Salvador Dali exhibited his work Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ in paris with a provocative inscription: "Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother's portrait."

(information sourced and then edited by me from Wikipedia)

The quote written in his painting stating that he spits on his mothers portrait for fun and the fact he was brash and bold in personality shocked me and made me think about how Dali didn't have many reservations when it came to art. He liked to challenge and push boundaries, in a un-sensitive way. Understanding that Dali was like this in real life has made me want to make our piece of theatre vulgar and more disturbing as if he was their watching or intact creating a piece of theatre himself I'm sure he would want it to be challenging and weird.I believe that we have a responsibility to Dali as an artist NOT to play it safe. 

Galatea of the spheres 1952