ISTA TAPS!

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Oh.My.God. ISTA TAPS was literally the best 4 days of my life, and I'm not just saying that to over-exaggerate or keep the teachers happy, I'm being genuine. I loved every minute of it! I met soooo many amazing friends from all over the world who I'm definitely going to keep in contact with and the best thing that amazed me was working with professionals such as frantic assembly in professional spaces such as RADA and Pineapple dance studios (which has been my dream to visit since I was around 10)!! Also the food there was amazing;-) If I could go back and do it all again I really would. It was such an indescribable experience!! 

 But it wasn't all about meeting new people and the food...the main reason for going on the trip was to develop my knowledge and understanding of the IB drama course, and I definitely did!

I worked with James (picture above); such an amazing teacher that pushed us to the limit to make us learn and participate with 100%. (Quick fact James taught the old drama teacher in IST who is now off in America working on films, so basically that could be me, just saying). If James ever reads this I just want to say thankyou so so much for putting your time into this TAPS weekend & making it both enjoyable and educational because I learnt so much that will help me through this course when I go back to France and I also have an idea of a career path I want to follow in the future (which the idea was created through TAPS). Thankyouuuuuuuu!

 After getting to know everyone, the first exercise we did was walking around the space in different tempos/speeds with three instructions;

  1. clear the space (in which you had to run to the side and touch the wall)
  2. drop (in which you had to drop to the floor and curl up in a ball)
  3. middle (in which you had to go to the middle of the room and put your head on someone else's shoulder)
The point of this exercise was to show how when you're performing on stage things can be very hectic so you need to be aware of the people around you to make it safe while travelling from one location to another.

Before creating any piece of drama you need to know the 7 tension states and how they feel as if you create a performance with just one or two tension states throughout it will become very boring. The 7 tension states are;
  1. Exhausted- no energy to move/jellyfish
  2. Laid back- Californian style/just got out of bed
  3. Neutral
  4. Alert- curious
  5. Suspense- melodrama/there may be a bomb in the room
  6. Passionate- there is definitely a bomb in the room/opera
  7. Tragic- petrified/frozen with fear/the bomb has just gone off
We discussed as a group the differences between the two theatre productions we saw; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Electra. Nearly everyone agreed that Electra lost the audiences attention (literally I spotted two people in the audience who had fallen asleep, and one was in the front row!!) and this was due to it being at the same tension state throughout the whole play and when there was a climatic part, they created light-hearted humour which in my opinion detracted the catharsis. 

Another activity we did with James which I found very different yet fun and interesting was responding to impulses. We had to respond to our impulses in three stages;
  1. with music
  2. with a partner 
  3. to the room
The first one we did was with music. What we had to do was listen to a piece of music that James put on and do whatever our body wanted to do no matter how "stupid" you might think it was. At first everyone was really shy to do this and we all weren't getting into it. However, by the end of the class we were all dripping in sweat (i'm not joking, we really were). We all really got into the activity and just did what our body wanted to which felt great! 
The second one we did was with a partner. James played music again and we had to make eye contact with anyone in the room and respond to their impulses. We found after a while that our sequence of impulses were beginning to create a story and if we recorded the activity we would be able to review it and pick out aspects we loved and develop it into a piece (a bit like what we did with Frantic Assembly which I will get onto later in the blog). This activity working with a partner really helped develop friendships in the group with people I may not have spoken much to in the first day as we all just looked stupid together while creating something beautiful. 
The third one we did was responding to the room. I found that this one was the hardest out of them all as you had no music, no speech, nothing. You just had to do what your body wanted to do in silence while you responded to the room around you. This is a very helpful technique when you first get into an unfamiliar space which you are about to create a performance in as you get to explore the room and "test its limits" in a sense. 

After we got the idea of responding to our impulses we got into partners and were given a short poem. One person would play the ghost and one person would play the impulse. The ghost would whisper part of the poem into the impulses ear and the person playing the impulse would have to respond to their impulse immediately. 
Me and my partner Hyoha had to perform ours to the rest of the ensemble at the same time as another pair; Martin and Eva. Both me and Martin played the impulse and the amazing thing which happened was that some of mine and Martins impulses were exactly the same! This showed that when really focusing you can feel a connection between fellow actors. I found this amazing yet creepy at the same time!
Another thing I noticed which really freaked me out was that when I was watching a performance of Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night-time at one point I felt myself wanting to react to an impulse that I could feel in my arms and fighting the impulse felt really strange. This freaked me out quite alot because something I had learnt from James was physically affecting me. 

We also developed fighting our impulses with James too. What we had to do was face a wall while James said an emotion. We all instantly could feel an impulse but we had to resist the impulse and not move. When James said "go" we had to go and do an action we would do in our daily lives (for me it was putting on a ring and then taking it off). For each different emotion James said we all carried out the actions differently due to us fighting the impulse and then finally being able to carry out the impulse. I never knew impulses were such strong things that affected us until this activity.

FRANTIC ASSEMBLY
Frantic Assembly really allowed me to explore different aspects of physical theatre which I absolutely loved! After this intensive workshop I learnt to do things in drama that I wouldn't have thought about doing if I was creating a piece of drama in school such as lifts and rolls. 
We did two warmups in the session;
  1. jumping
  2. moving
The jumping warmup was where we had to stand in 4 rows of 4 people and each row had to jump continuously after one another however changing the amount of jumps each time by 8,6,4,2,1. This exercise really made you think about your next move as while jumping sometimes we would add actions such as a punch or a flick of the hands. Sometimes I found it very hard to do all the actions at once while jumping because you had to be very in time with the music and also in time with other people in your row. However, as we practised this warmup for quite some time I found that by the end I got to grips with what to do. Below is a video I found on YouTube of the exercise, however this one is done with just 4 people.



The second warmup we did was the movement warm up in which we had 5 instructions;
  1. normal jumps (just jumping on the spot)
  2. scoops (in which you would stand shoulder width apart bending at the knees to go and touch the floor then reach out in front of you, reach behind you through your legs and then reach up as far as you could) (this one was my favourite)
  3. spotty dogs (in which you had to put your left leg and right arm out in front of you and then alternate by a jump)
  4. fists (in which you would clench your fists and "body pump" them as high as you could reach and then down by your hips)
  5. left and right (in which you would move left to right in a ski motion)
This warmup was very intense as we did it for 3 minutes non stop. However, when the leader from Frantic Assembly told us they did this warmup for an hour straight I started to feel a little better. 

After getting all warmed up we got into partners to do the squeeze activity.
In this activity you had to squeeze 3 parts of your partners body wherever you wanted and they would do the same to you. You then had to link these squeezes by movements. 
When we finished we presented them all the rest of the ensemble and we quickly learnt that each performance told a story- even though we didn't intend to! We then went on to play around with this story aspect by adding other people walking around the performance, adding in strong eye contact and changing the background music and we found that it changed the story completely. The Frantic Assembly leader told us that this is what they sometimes did when they work on creating performances from scratch and they go on to take the storyline which they find in the activity and develop it.
Here is a video from Frantic Assembly themselves showing you this activity but sitting down;
I find this activity amazing as it's a new form of improvisation and each time you get a storyline out of it.

The final thing we did with Frantic Assembly which I found very challenging were the lifts. We were taught two different lifts which we had to perform both stationary and moving.We were taught that the lifts weren't anything to do with the weight of the people you were working with; you could have the fattest person in the world and the skinniest working together and they could still perform a solid lift as its all about finding the equal balance point between two people (it is mainly just below the hips or back to back). You will be able to see a demonstration of the lifts that we learnt in the end video of this blog.
I found the lifts quite challenging due to trust issues as I was working with someone I'd only just met and I was trying to put all my trust in them to lift me off the ground and move with me. If I was to do this lift with someone I'd known for a while and I was close with however, I would have foudnt eh exercise much more easier. But one thing I've also leant is that if you were a west end performer and you were told to do a lift in a performance you wouldn't have known the people you are working with for very long, you just need to learn to trust. 

With James we learnt how to perform rolls which was part of Frantic Assembly. We were taught that when performing a roll with a partner, wherever they're supposedly rolling you over from (the head, the feet, the stomach), that body part is the first thing to move over and then the rest of your body follows.

Helen Leblique Royal Shakespeare Company
The second intensive workshop we did was with Helen Leblique from the Royal Shakespeare Company (impressive or what?!). 
The first activity we did was a similar one to which we did with James on the first day. We had to move around the space on our own however when we made eye contact with another person we had to try and jump and land at the same time.
We then developed the activity and tried to trick the person we made eye contact with by making them think we are going to jump and then not jumping. The point of this was to get across the point of Shakespeares slapstick humour which he used in several performances. 

We then did an activity where we all took one card from a pile which represented our class (1-low to Jack-highest). We then had to pretend that we were entering a university common room for the first time and we had to bare in mind our class. So someone that had a card with a 1 on it would be very shy compared to someone who had a Jack who would be very up themselves and think they're very important. After this exercise Helen asked us to keep that idea of class into out heads while we progressed through the session. 

We then got given an extract from the play Much Ado About Nothing where Dogberry and Verges are trying to tell Leonato about Heros deceit. We had to work in pairs of 4 and pick out the key words from the extract. We picked out "Neighbour" and "Sir". For these words we had to pick an action and perform the extract adding in the actions. We chose to slap eachother on the back for the work neighbour and bow when saying the word sir. We watched everyone perform theirs and found that exaggerated actions created humour. 
We then went on to perform the extract again, however this time changing the classes of the characters. For example in our Dogberry was the most important and Leonato was the least important. This showed how by changing peoples powers in the scene can create a different story.  
This linked to Frantic Assembly when we added eye contact, different music and other people into the performance to change a story. 

So over the three days we learnt all of the above so in the fourth day we had to use it all to create our own performance with no help. We got into groups of five and were given a stimulus of three poems. Each group produced amazing results which looked nothing like they started with. 
In our group we chose two out of the three poems we liked the most and split into two groups of 3 and 2 (each with different poems) to carry out the ghost and impulse activity we learnt with James. After this we did the squeeze activity we learnt in Frantic Assembly. We then developed this with rolls, eye contact, lifts and repetition to create our final result;
In order from left to right in the line at the end; Ali, Chloe (me), Martin, Cap, Eva.

 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory- When watching this performance I couldn't believe my eyes! The set design, transitions of scene changes, the projections, music, sound, lighting, wow! I just couldn't believe it! It broke the 4th wall which really allowed the audience to feel like they were in the chocolate factory with the actors which was an amazing feeling. The use of puppetry with the umpa lumpas was amazing and very well thought out. This perfomance was definitely total theatre. 

 Electra- This perfomance was...well...different, very different to Charlie! I loved the set in theatre of the round however I found some of the set quite unnecessary (like the big tree which was infront of me blocking my view to the rest of the stage). I found that it needed an interval as it was all quite "samey" with no scene changes or costume changes. The thing that made the perfomance tiring and boring to watch was how it stayed at a constant tension level throughout the whole perfomance and when there was such an intense moment, they would add in a joke which really detracted from the catharsis. I understand that it was a tragedy, however it was bleak. From start to finish it was full of screaming, and the same tension. 

 Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time- This performance contained so many aspects of theatre that I didn't know were possible. WOW. Frantic Assembly was really brought out in this performance which was amazing because a day before I was working with them!! Every single movement was done to perfection with no mistakes, even the complex movements. The use of sound and projections were amazing in this performance and physically building set while performing (the train set) was a very good idea. The actor who played Christopher was incredibly talented as when playing the role of a person with learning difficulties you have to be very sensitive and be sure to get it right & he really did! It was unbelievable. It was really convincing.


So thats it, 4 full days of work condensed into a blog post. I would do this whole experience again if I could and if you get the chance to go DO IT! I can't stress that enough! Don't be shy about not knowing anyone because everyone's in the same boat and you make amazing friends by the end of it. I want to say a massive thankyou to Mr Fearnehough and Miss Alonso for organizing the trip and a huge thankyou to James and Ian for looking after us and allowing us to work with the Royal Shakespeare Company and Frantic Assembly! 
TAPS FAM 4 LIFE.














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