A quick-ish re-cap of week 1, to jog our memories. Part 1

Try to cast your mind back, back to a time when we were freshers and
everything seemed so new and scary!

The date is 29th September and Contemporary Theatremaking Group A has
just made it's way into the studio theatre in Sutherland House. We look
each other up and down, trying to guage whether or not we can talk to
each other without fearing some major lashback.

ahhh...wasn't that nice?

If you remember we started the lesson with a bit of a sit down, and
going round the group teaching Lynette our names (as we had already
burned the names of everyone on to our minds, and had no need to learn
them!)

from her on, because it was a few weeks ago now, the order of things
might get messed up somewhat.

Lynette introduced the course, and also introduced the majority, if not
all the group to a theatre company called 'Black Mime Theatre Co.'

Lynette, having previously worked with BMT as we came to call it, had
chosen them due to the nature of her particular interests in black
theatre, and feminist theatre.

BMT was formed in 1984 by interestingly two white people, Sarah Cahn,
andd David Boxer, in order to encourage Black artists in mime.
It was thought that black theatre would break conventions, possibly
create a feeling of ritualistic experience, that is, the audience
'joined in communion' with the stage.
Black Mime would be a minority theatre group, and being so, would raise
awareness of issues in that minority.
BMT would provoke, by upsetting the audience assumptions of a
performance, for example, a black actor portraying a traditionally
white role.

We then moved on to look a bit at what mime is.

The two terms the class settled with were:

Creating an object using the body and imagination.
&
Telling a story by replacing the words with physical movement and
actions.

We considered the stereotypes of mime artists, with stripey jumpers,
white faces, white gloves, invisible walls, and traditionally outside.
Silent.
The performance of mime is centred on impressions rather than a
story-line or plot. and it is often considered to be cartoon-esque,
with exaggerated movements.
It was seen as street performance, in a minimalist style, possibly a
musical accompaniment. and typically french, with highlight on Marcel
Marceau.

BMT went against the classical view of the white faces, gloves, silence
and french, into an energised performance with song, dance, movement
and radically dialogue or text.

Denise Wong referred to their work as Sketch Book. Broad vrush-strokes
being made by the actors, to make it simple.
It doesn't require a lot of previous knowledge of the history of the
performers, thus making it accessible to all.

The classic BMT way of devising a performance would be to devise and
devise and improvise. so the troupe of actors would come together and
simply play around with their own idea's and improvisations, until
about two weeks before a performance they would settle on the pieces
they would keep and rehearse those, but always allowing extra
improvistions to creep in, even on the night of the performance.

BMT would also use cross gendered performance, so men would play women,
women play men, in order to emphasise the performance, or make the
audience awaree of an issue.

Thats part 1 over, in the second part i will look at the video of
'Mantrail' that we watched, which gave us our first glimpse of BMT
men's troupe.

James Ellin