Artaud

The aim of Arto is to asses the audiences inner animal through the act of cruelty, hint why it is commonly refered to as the theatre of cruelty. He affects his audience with the use of the five senses. The whole idea of the inner animal is that without society we are all animals but it is hidden away in our subconcious.
In the play metamorphesis the man because he was constantly rushing/ scurrying around after the needs of his family. An exercise we did was to go into groups and create an emotion using just our breathing and our voice. Through this we found that you breathing can actually affect the audiebces heart to make them feel the emotion with you. Some themes in Arto are ritualism, naturalism, surrealism and expressionism. Also to create the idea that monsters are real and they should be feared.

Has a link to Butoh how you access the subconcious however it is switch so that the adience in arto help what the butoh performer feels.

Meyerhold

The main idea is of the passive and active performers. He also aranged movemt into three stages:

1. Preparation - Otkaz - I
2. Action - posil- ras
3. end point - tochka - do

The aim of the training was presishion, balance, coordination, effushancy, expressiveness and responceiveness. In class we minimised the script to allow us to create still sculpters that move based on te rythem of the active person. The creator was Russian who joined a German school and was influenced by fordism and cominist beliefes. In his works he uses biomachanics where you make people into high effishant machines to get the greatest responce. He got executed because his works became very popular and the ruler feared that the audience would be changed into radical thinkers. The russian dictator also thought that he was underminding cominism and also that he was trying to kill the leader.

There is a strong link to Gardinez with the use of rythem though not mutualiy agred on by performers.

Gardzienice

We started by walking at the same pace to get a rythem. We then got into pairs to get our breathing and running in time with each other. But to then go into jazz breathing for a short time then straight back into the rythem. We then hoped from one foot to the other with the aim being to do exactly the same start and finish. We found it easier if you did a slight movement to show you were about the start and we also changed our breathing when we were about to stop. A technique we used was columbian hypnosis in pairs when you follow the other persons hand. You need lots of focus to follow the hand and when we stopped you felt very weird which is when you realised your were in  trance like state. The main ideas of these is to empty the mind of everything to listen to ther people.
Simular to butoh in the way of clearing your mind but the goal of butoh is to frr the subconcious instead of using it to focu souling on one thing. The use of equality, reacting and bouncing off each other is simular to meyerhold but in meyerhold there is a dominent character who the others get their rythem from.

Butoh

A main idea in butoh is that a persons personality comes from their subconcious, kill it and a new personality forms. It is constantly dying from changes and events in our lives and a new one is constantly forming. The constant cycle of a persons personality is the stimuli for butoh dances. Hasu uhno uses confusing poems to take away the consious mind to reveal the subconcious.They use white face paint to remove all signes of the character, the consious and netralise the mind. The puppet master walk is used to remove the performers self control. Tatshumi hitchakata creates a set vocabulary of movements within in a performcnce to show the different forms of the fish from seewead to the fish swimming. Butoh fu is manily about the transitions when you could walk through an invisable wall and when on the other side you turn into fire for example.

First lesson we watched some example videos to introduce us to the general style of Butoh. The whole class then spaced and lyed down on the floor. Andy then read out a story about Hiroshima were you are are people who are burt and preserved after then bomb. From this stue state you turn into dust that blows away and from the dust a plant grows. The flower then very slowly wilts and dies but then grows again. Throughout the lesson we were all asked to write down any questions we had about Butoh to enable us to understand the subject fully.

At the start of the next lesson we were lead through warm ups to help us prepare to use to embody different states and use different parts of the body.
The exercises are as follows:

• clapping and electric pulse.
• Running in a circle, heads hanging, arms waving, legs flopping, weight forward.
• Jumping from one foot to the other.
• Jumping sideways from foot to foot. Keep toes on the ground. Keep heels on ground.
• Whole body collapses over legs, (string from head).
• Collapses and wave up. Smaller and more frequent.
• Starting at the hips.Wave around the clock. (12, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, 12, 11, 10, 9, 10, 11, 12)
• Chest forward and back. To the one side and to the other. Chest circles.
• Shake out

After this we had our introduction to the butoh puppet master walk
much like the Hiroshima story we did another abstract story :
 A maiden discovers a waterfall. She washes herself in a torrent of water. The water turns to ice and she freezes. The ice melts and she walks again. The sun burns her skin and she ages rapidly. Her body turns to sand. A tree grows out of the sand. The tree turns into a maiden etc. Representing the never ending cycle of peoples personalities.

Next and perhaps the most memorable lesson was the fish Lesson. Where we learned a basic vocabulary of fish movements that would be used in a performance. We did a simular but much shorter exercise to the last lesson then we all sat around and watched Sankai fish scene. The most dominant thing was how slowly they were moving but they were all perfectly in time.
 We then did a short movement sequence to warm us up and introduce us to the fish movements:

• forward rotation,
• backward rotation (legs over),
• arms out rock to left and right,
• bum rocking to crab,
• child pose.

The fish vocabulary that we built was:

• Lying on the ground the students are sand,
• swaying and swimming in the water.
• Sea weed begins to gather and float slowly upwards with the waves.
• Fish walk
• Fish Rise
• Injured fish
• The dying turns into sand and the cycle is complete

We went into groups and performed these in a loose sequence. Though it seems very childish many of the fish movements just looked funny perhaps we just didn't really understand it. With Tatsumi Hijikata is was just about your body resonding to the word very free and fluid. Whereas the set fish movements were set and the dymamics of the transformations were sometimes quite jerky.

Our next task was to create our own abstract stories from a collection of photos. Many of the photos were very grotesque with insects that reflect devouring and recycling of flesh. In our group we tried to put our in a kind of chrinilogical order. Now that i can reflect upon it I see that there doesn't need to be an order that makes sense because Butoh isn't supposed to.