7 Mar 2020
An account of weekly workshops by Isabel Dickens
An account of weekly workshops by Isabel Dickens
Platform Young Company are a group of committed performers aged 16 - 25 years led by Gudrun Soley Sigurdardottir and Eoin McKenzie. The group meet weekly and are currently creating and developing material for their new show. Workshops are assisted by Isabel Dickens and here, she provides an account of the creative process…
"Today we experimented with a series of moments relating to social interaction. We warmed up by playing performative cat and mouse tig where we announce who we are whenever we change roles and wink, making the chase more absurd and performative and taking the emphasis away from competition and more onto connecting with your audience.
Then people were asked to drop to the ground without hurting themselves. Can they do a monotone scream and then try this? Then can a partner stand and try to catch the person they’re with as they drop to the ground? Then can in pairs one person drop to the ground without their partner trying to help them at all?
We explored a moment where performers loitered around the edges of the stage as if they were in a very empty bar, whilst Lucy sang ‘One Moment in Time’ by Whitney Houston to a karaoke track.
Toward the end of the session, we explored a short dialogue where one person was a shop- keeper and the other buying a can of peas. These were all improvised to be slightly different but extremely basic words with understated tone and neutral posture. With 1 as the shopkeeper and 2 as the customer everyone had to use complicity to say their parts at the same time. It was challenging to maintain uniformity of tone when the dialogues were different. The tone almost sounded passive aggressive and Tighe noted the subtext of the customer’s demands and the shop-keepers resistance.
Today’s session was unusual because of the narratives cropping up in the experiments. It raised questions for the direction of the show. So far this term there have been a lot of different ideas and ‘vignettes’ that have been generated so there are decisions to be made about what can be kept, what will be discarded and what ideas work together for the sharing on the 7th of December."
Highlight of the session: Lucy’s Karaoke
