Physical Theatre Solo Evaluation

Although I feel like this possible wasn't my best work, I'm very proud of the final piece simply because of how hard I found creating it. There was a point in the devising process where I thought I would have to change to a different topic because delving deep into the issues around Grenfell brought up some intense emotions for me. There was a lot of emotional moments but in hindsight I feel like these only enriched my performance. I was able to connect to my material on a very deep level and therefore everything I did was done to my fullest because i was so emotionally caught up in that world. It meant that I didn't really have to do any acting because everything i was feeling during that piece was real to me. I found the whole thing to be quite a healing process as it brought up everything that you have a tendency to ignore to the surface and therefore confront. As a result of this I believe my perform was very powerful and hopefully would have had a large effect on the audience because I was using that piece as an oppurtunity to stand for something i truly believe in. I wasn't just performing for the sake of being told we had to make a physical theatre solo on human rights and therefore the topic on which i created my work by wasn't a random human rights issues that only exsits in a place i have never even encountered or could ever understand. For me it is something ive seen with my own eyes and experienced, therefore I would like to think I'm not ignorant in this issue.

However there was also a downside to this. In my opinion my final piece was very messy and chaotic  because of the fact that there was still a sort of block within me. Although I'm sure the emotions displayed in the piece were effective and a positive influence I wasn't in control of that, and there were a few times when rehearsing where I would just stop halfway. Fortunately this didn't happen in the performance but it could have because my own personal experiences and feelings were in charge instead of me as an performer and actor.  I also think that the work i created wasn't my best. Potentially i could have created a much longer piece that was far more physically representational and less text heavy, this would have been more like what i wanted to create. instead of this i ended up filling a lot of the piece with speech and much more naturalistic movement due to the fact my focus and mind was never quite on point while devising. Breath was also something that became uncontrolled as my emotions took over, and although I am a believe in connecting your breath to your physical piece it became a problem when I started to struggle to get the words out due to loss of breath. 

As a piece of physical theatre I felt a key strength was the flow. In my opinion the piece didn't stop and start while it was going on and therefore the continuous flow of movement meant the story and feelings were able to be woven and interlinked together. This in turn means the piece is more effective because the audience can all be fully immersed in what is going on because the world isn't broken. I also tried to vary the pace quite a lot because I became aware that the majority of it was a very fast pace which made it hard to understand for an audience. This links back to the piece becoming quite chaotic and frantic because of how it was effecting me. During the devising process someone pointed out to me that the frantic fast pace started to lower the quality. To change that I made sure some moments of stillness were included and I think these moments were particularly strong and powerful.