Contact Improvisation

This is my group performing our piece that was inspired by contact improvisation and movement, we took one of our ideas from our brainstorm which was slavery, we then built from this idea to create this piece representing slaves being brought into a country they don't know and being miss treated and abused.

revolutionarts2016: Contact Improv Group 1

Research

The Kinder transport was an organized rescue effort that took place during the nine months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Free City of Danzig. The children were placed in British foster homes, hostels, schools and farms. Often they were the only members of their families who survived the Holocaust.

World Jewish Relief was established in 1933 to support in whatever way possible the needs of Jews both in Germany and Austria. Records for many of the children who arrived in the UK through the kinder transports are maintained by World Jewish Relief.

On 15 November 1938 a delegation of British Jewish and Quaker leaders appealed in person to the Prime Minister of the UK, Neville Chamberlain. Among other measures, they requested that the British government permit the temporary admission of unaccompanied Jewish children, without their parents.


The British Cabinet debated the issue the next day and subsequently prepared a Bill to present to Parliament. That Bill stated that the Government would waive certain immigration requirements to allow the entry of unaccompanied children ranging from infants up to the age of 17. No limit upon the permitted number of refugees was ever publicly announced. Initially the Jewish refugee agencies considered 5,000 as a realistic target goal. However, after the British Colonial Office turned down the Jewish agencies' separate request to allow the admission of 10,000 children to British-controlled Palestine, the Jewish agencies then increased their planned target number to 15,000 unaccompanied children to enter Great Britain in this way.


On the eve of a major House of Commons debate on refugees on 21 November 1938, Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare met a large delegation representing various Jewish, Quaker and other non-Jewish groups working on behalf of refugees. The groups were allied under a non-denominational organization called the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany. The Home Secretary agreed that, to speed up the immigration process, travel documents would be issued on the basis of group lists rather than individual applications. The agencies promised to find homes for all the children. They also promised to fund the operation and to ensure that none of the refugees would become a financial burden on the public. Every child would have a guarantee of £50 sterling to finance his or her eventual re-emigration, as it was expected the children would stay in the country only temporarily.

Script Work

Even though we are working on our devised unit today we were given a scripted scene to perform, this is to help with our dialogue when we come to creating our devised pieces as dialogue is normally the weaker part of devised for our class. Next lesson we will be adding onto this and also be doing script writing which I think will link to the scripted piece we got or have to be linked to our stimulus of Humanity in Crisis. Overall the piece we got wasn't too bad but I felt the script was kinda boring and didn't have much going on

Contact Improvisation/ Voice

Last lesson we started learning a little bit more on contact improvisation, we were put into pairs and had to chose our own stimulus, me and Freya chose to go with children that are friends and then grow up to have some sort of problem or argument. each group did their own piece but it wasn't really contact improvisation as we didn't just create the piece on the spot as we were performing it to the audience, we all got a few minutes to choreograph a little bit before hand. This is because none of us are confident with contact improvisation and if we had to do it properly I think we would all struggle.


We then were given the task of devising a piece based around physical theatre/ contact improvisation from our brainstorm of ideas. Our group chose to do a piece on slavery, we started by having us on a boat and stepping foot onto a new country and then we shower hw badly they were treated for no reason. Today we then completed this piece with the more contact improvisation inspired section which finished the piece off. 


The voice section of the lesson was after we performed our physical theatre/ contact improvisation style pieces we were asked to pick another topic on our brainstorms and create a piece revolved around only our voices. We chose to create a sound scape on the Hillsborough disaster. We did this by repeating the same phrase, either screams or cries of help to police telling the crowd to stop pushing forward. We then went into a bit were we each read of a fact about the disaster, and that represented the news reports that came after the disaster.    

Responding to Stimuli

To begin with I wasn't sure on the stimulus and now I think I hate it even more. I feel its very restrictive on what you can create and I almost feel that we cant create anything fun or comical and fear anything we do create is boring and dark.

One of my initial ideas was to do drug and alcohol issues in youth, my group weren't keen on this idea as they felt it was quite GCSE standard and has been done a lot and there wasn't a lot of originality about the idea. I do agree with my group in the fact that if its not done well it can become quite juvenile and similar to other pieces that have been done, but i wanted to create quite an abstract piece which showed drugs and the effect it had on the users and their family. I had the idea of showing someone take drugs and then having a split stage of someone being messed up and showing what happens when they're on drugs but the other side of the stage will show what is going on in the drug users head and this side will be colourful and bold with lots of movement where as the first side will be dark and depressing. Even this idea its self isn't original it is slightly less GCSE then just showing people take drugs and then shouting at each other on stage.

I also feel drugs are something a lot of youth are taking and doing and its an issue that is often overlooked by teachers and parents and this is something we would have been able to show in our piece.

Year 13

Today we found out our first unit in year 13 is devising. This is the second time we will be doing devising and we were split into groups by picking names out of a hat, some of us are with people that we worked with the last time but the groups have changed a little bit which is good because we all get to work with different people.

Our stimulus is 'Humanity in Crisis' we then did a big brain storm of everything that we could think of everything we think of that is based around crisis.
On our brain storm we came up with loads of ideas, these are a few I thought were the best

• Dictatorship
• War
• Refugees
• Natural Disaster
• Homophobia- Prejudice
• Terrorism
• Government
• Slavery
• Financial Disaster
• Drugs/ Alcohol 

After todays lesson I think I will struggle with this stimulus as nothing has come to me yet idea wise which worries me a little bit, but I know the quality of the story isn't as important as making sure we have good techniques within our piece and we have a good understanding of the stimulus and good research to back up our ideas and help gather more inspiration.