Frantic Assembly Workshop

Recently we had the opportunity to work with a member of Frantic Assembly during a full day workshop. What I most enjoined about this experience was not just being opened up to a new style of theatre which I now really love, but also being able to experience the kind of atmosphere that the Frantic Member created. There was no negativity surrounding the process, and in fact the environment was such a comfortable place to work in. In the past, I think stress has really inhibited my ability to create, but this has shown me the importance of creating a positive and supportive space to work in as a group.

After an intense warm up, we first worked on a slalom exercise. We had to run a course around sets of chairs, mirroring the person’s movements who ran beside us. At certain points our path would intersect either with that of our partner or with another group that was finishing or was about to set off. In order to manage this with the speed we had to maintain, it was important to be acutely focused on the movements of the people around you. Near the end point, a step was introduced where you had to hold hands with your partner, so that the starting pair could run between your arms. At this point many people began to slow down, afraid that they were going to run into each other. This is a natural response, but I think that the point of the exercise was to show the importance of awareness of the group you are working with. That in order to create great physical theatre you had to approach it from a group perspective rather than focusing on your individual success. What’s more, it emphasised the need for trust in the people you are working with. If the moment of moving under the arms was a part of a real piece, the effectiveness of the image would be diminished by the hesitance.

We then reinforced this idea of trust using an exercise where one person places their hand to another’s and applies pressure which the other person then reacts too. In this way, we practiced moving each other around the space using only touch. Once we got used to this, one person closed their eyes. I found that I didn’t realise how much I was anticipating the movements of the other person and trying to imitate their movement when they moved until I closed my eyes. After that point, the movement became much more fluid and I found that rather than trying to hold my body upright, I tended to loosen up and tilt more with the direction of the movement. The use of points of contact is part of the Frantic style, and as we went on to learn particularly important when trying to learn lifts.

We were paired up based on height and practiced some of the basic lifts. Because I am a particularly small person, and not very strong, I expected to struggle immensely with this part of the workshop. However what I learnt was that there were particular contact points on the body that when met, made lifts much easier. It showed that the style of Frantic assembly is not about throwing brute strength into the physicality, it is about the partnership and learning how to use your body to your advantage. What was important however was form. When doing a move, you had to lean your entire weight into the other person and meet the contact points in order for it to work, but if you didn’t hold your shape and instead went limp, it became very easy for these contact points to slip and for the move to not work.

1.       For the first lift, you stood side by side with your partner and found contact points in your shoulders, hips, knees and feet. You had to make sure this points were pressed their really tightly together with no space in between. This pressure, allowed you create the balance needed in order for you and your partner to lift your inside leg.

2.       The second lift involved similar contact points, only this time the person who was being lifted put their arm over the other persons shoulder, and the lifter places their hip slightly below the other persons. This allows you to use your hip as an anchor point which keeps the person from slipping down your body as you lift them and place them to the side

3.       With the clamp lift, one person places their arm over the others shoulder and presses the chest into their side and their arm into the persons back. This creates a large surface area of pressure which helps you to hold yourself up as the other person slowly moves to stand.

Next, we began to devise our first sequence, exploring the ways you can create a complex piece by building layers. I found that adding one simple rule at a time helped to prevent a block in creativity from taking over because we focused on fulfilling each individual step rather than trying to focus on the overall picture. The first step is called dot to dot because you draw lines from one point to another on your partner’s body, for example, I drew a line from Marlon’s chest to his back. We then experimented with building different sequences from these ten movements. The other layers include moving under or over partner’s limbs, adding in lifts and establishing a point of eye contact.

Marlon and I had the privilege of getting to workshop our devised piece with Sean, the Frantic Assembly member. As we had been creating it, I had begun to get a sense of the dance like movements but I found it really interesting the way he chose to interpret it. He added some 50s music to the piece, and this immediately transformed our understanding of the piece. During the 1950s, people got married young and stayed together most of their lives, so by using in this music it used our shared understanding to create this idea of a couple with a very close and important relationship. What’s more, by removing me, it creates this sense that Marlon has lost me somehow- because of the era death seems most likely- and his continued actions show the empty space my loss has left in his life. When I return, it feels to me that the piece tells this story of an older man, who chooses to remember his wife when they were both young, and suggests that it is only his memories that he truly feels like he still has her.

I think with another run of that, I would like to greater explore the emotion of the piece. In that run, I was still needing to focus on remembering the movements, but it would have been interesting to try and move away from the dot to dot and explore making the movements more gentle and focused. It would have been interesting to emphasise the emotions of the story to either keep eye contact with each other or to focus on the points where our hands touched to skin to create this sense of intimacy.

We then moved on to making group work, using the lifts we had learnt earlier. The idea was to create a bodyguard sequence, where one person would move around the room and choose moments to fall. The others then needed to find a way of catching the person whilst incorporating the lifts. We chose a pace that was slower than James’ in order to create this sense of urgency when he fell.

 

The use of the light focused on James face, created this sense of isolation, perhaps of being stuck inside his own head. Some people said that it seemed like he was dreaming or drowning. For me the second one resonated because of the way our lifts tilted him up into the air. I got the sense that the sequence had become reflective of a feeling that is very personal, which holds a sense of loneliness and empty space surrounding you, a space that it is very easy to fall in too. I think those surrounding him represented the people who were supporting him, but that in the dark (or that mind frame) were almost impossible to see.  

The final way we explored devising was through the use of nerve breakers. We were told to find lines from points of our bodies back to our hearts. Initially we did this in a circle facing outwards so that no one could see another person’s movements. I think that in part this was done so that each person’s movements were unique, but also to try and remove the self-conscious feeling of doing this individually. We chose four of these movements and in groups, taught them to each other to create a sequence. We had the idea of creating this sequence on different surfaces and settled on the wall. We wanted to create this rule that one part of our body had to be touching the wall at all times. I think the limitations of this definitely made us experiment in more creative ways but it took much longer to devise than we expected. I really liked the sense of building this rhythm using the returning hit against the wall. And the way in which Bruce and I switched places is a dynamic movement which is really The ways in which the wall pushed us also meant that it was a much longer process and this is why the final piece is not as complete as I would have liked it to be. You can see in the video that we attempt to use unison and canon, as well as rising and falling progressions. The use of the wall and music created this idea of a police line up in my head.

 

Over all, this workshop as opened me up to a new way of devising theatre and one which I much prefer to working with the traditional style. I love the simple way pieces can be built through using rules and experimentation, as well as the way sequences created could be adapted to suit different stories. Frantic is a beautiful style, with endless possibilities, and one which promotes positive working and group mentality. I would love to work with this style of theatre again in the future.