New Start – Cagebirds

 

Just before Easter break I had to take some time out of university due to unforeseen circumstances. However upon my return I discovered we had changed the play from Grimm Tales to David Campton’s Cagebirds. As the play wasn’t right for what our companies intentions were.

During Easter break we began working on Cagebirds, and I assisted in the directing and the blocking of this. Lil asked me to take the rehearsals due to unforeseen circumstances. So we were working closely as an ensemble constructing simple blocking and working on the characters intensions.

 

We decided to focus on recreating a large round birdcage and decided that selected areas of the cage would seclude themselves from other birds, marking their territory. As regards to the bird movement we decided that each bird would have some sort mannerism, which they would repeat. We started to experiment with different techniques and created more of a focus towards practitioners like Peter Brooke and Meyerhold. The biomechanical style seems to work really well within this piece. “a physical performance score as a vehicle for the psychic encounter between actor and spectator, reveal how he had synthesized the later praxis of Stanislavski with the methodology of performance composition developed by Meyerhold through biomechanics” Robert, Gordon (2006) p.291.

 

Work Cited

Robert, Gordon The Purpose of Playing Modern Acting Theories in Perspective (2006).