Frantic Assembly International Summer School

This week I took part in the Create Course at Frantic Assembly's International Summer School. It was detailed as:

 

'This five day residencies offers the opportunity to delve into the Frantic Method and explore how we devise new work. You will be working towards a show which will be performed on the Friday to an invited audience.'

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I have previously been on a training course with Frantic, so I was excited to experience the devising and making process with them. 

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In the first two days, we explored partner work and impulses. This meant our movement followed the contact made by our partner on our bodies. This exercise then developed into following a point on our partner's body and moving in alignment with that. This helped us to build relationships with each other and initiate the physical, dependent work.

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We looked at many partner and ensemble sequences, incorporating the movement of clothes and boxes. Then it was time for text. Our text was generated from answering questions. We were asked to finish the line 'The truth is...'. These were my responses:

 

'The truth is infront' (1 word response)

'The truth is not going to be found by me' (Any response)

'The truth is the cherry on the cake' (A saying)

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By the end of the week, 'the truth' became the through line of our piece. Our show played with lies, so-called truths, and different people's truths. It was episodic in form, and offered a colourful range in moods and atmosphere with both stand up comedy and tragic stories being played out. The name of the piece was 'A Sit Down Tragedy'.

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This experience has helped inspire my show structurally as I have been influenced by the use of motifs and silence. I have taken note of how the practitioners placed the happenings of action and stillness to its best effect. I realised I didn't have any moments of stillness or quietness that could juxtapose with my energised movement sequences. Therefore, I went away from my time with Frantic with the structure of my show and its dynamic flow in mind.

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