Essay on Physical Theatre performance.
By Cheryl Callaghan.
Character:
To help me create a character for this piece i took inspiration from the theatre company Forced Entertainment.
Forced Entertainment are, ‘a group of six artists… who started working together in 1984’. (Forced Entertainment, about us, 2013). Interestingly they use numerous ways to get a piece of work on its feet, for example they, ‘made lists, spoke gibberish, performed magic tricks and got drunk… ‘, (ibid). After looking at the company’s website, I made several lists on what type of acts you would see at a variety performance and what type of acts would be interesting to watch from an audience’s point of view. I then refined my lists to what acts I could incorporate physical theatre into to. After much deliberation I decided my act should be a magic act. The reason I thought this would be a sufficient act to have in the variety show is because this type of act kept coming up whilst researching this subject.
Looking at a piece of theatre called ‘Thrill of it all’ (2010) by Forced Entertainment.
In order to develop my magician’s character I looked online at several tricks. I then learnt these tricks and came back and showed the group what I had learnt. One particular trick I demonstrated to the group was how to make a coin go into a plastic bottle without taking the lid off. I found it easy to transform this simple trick into a physical theatre piece by using the techniques of travelling, turning and gesture to develop this act.
There was another act in the performance intending to do something similar but he was using an invisible assistant, because of the similarity of the two acts it was suggested that these two acts would be put together and I would become the magician’s assistant, “…you can take scenes that have already been developed or allow yourselves to improvise new material while in another characters’...