Warwick campus, the arts centre

Late night shot, no tripod. Awful photograph. I can only apologise. This is the Art’s Centre, with it’s lovely Koan sculpture. This thing lights up and spins…definitely the best thing for a university campus right?

Well it’s been a long ‘ole day. Started early, finished late. One of those days that you just don’t seem to stop at any point, and this was taken after the pub which was after Big Band which was after work. The Shakespeare seminar of today was really interesting, on movement within the theatre. Our seminar tutor had called in one of his friends…who just happened to be an actress who works with London Theatres and the RSC in terms of how actors move and place themselves on stage. We started with a very fun warm-up in which everyone walked around the studio and we were given instructions that we had to carry out. These were:-
- Stop
- Touch the floor
- Turn
- Eye – keeping someone in your sightline at all times
- Follow – the person who was in your sightline, you have to follow them. Problem is that they have to try and avoid you. The second problem was that Kat and I were both following each other, meaning that we ended up walking around in a circle with each other, trying to avoid Tom who was also following me!
- Triangle – with the nearest three people you have to try and create a triangle between you. The problem being that two of the sides will be trying to break out of the triangle while the other is keeping it steady
- Shake – shake hands with the nearest person to you. Once you have shook hands with them, you cannot let go until you shake hands with someone else. I tended to end up stuck between two people somehow…
- Terrier – grab the ankles!
- Abduct – grab the nearest person to you and try and drag them to the edges of the studio. If you have been grabbed you have to fight them. Again, the problem we had is that we are 50% girls, 50% boys…so all the guys just rugby-tackled the girls!

A really great warm-up…and we especially needed it with what was to come. We were all separated into groups, and given a Classical statue of which we had to mimic the pose given. I was with Hugo and Andrew. We got given an abduction statue in which the woman is hoisted up onto one of the men’s shoulders while the other looks on in horror. I’ll give you a clue, I neither hoisted nor horrored. Definitely something I did not envisage doing early on a Thursday morning I’m going to admit!

The next task was thinking about level of status of characters in Titus Andronicus. As we are the exact number of a Shakespearian troupe, we all had a character to play. The scene we acted was one with many different shifts of tone where characters simultaneously lower and push themselves higher in status at the same time. The fact that we actually went through the scene and saw the different shifts in “heights” of characters was very interesting…so if your character is seen to be of important status, you would stand on your chair (that was your “stage”) and vice versa, a low status character was sat on the floor. It was very interesting to note the movements of Tamora, the Queen of Goth who begins the scene on the floor, a captive of Titus, and ends the scene standing on her chair as the wife-to-be of the Emperor Saturninus. Hope that makes sense how I have written it!