Saturday, November 15, 2008

Viewpoints Sunday Nov 16th

Warm-Up: (7 minutes)
1. Walk through the room. Feel your feet, notice others around you, notice the gaps between you and move into those gaps. Find the empty spaces in the room, while also moving between the gaps between you and the others.

2. Pick a person to follow, don't let them know you are following them. Follow a new person. Now form a triangle with two people in the room. Move to make it a perfect triangle. Drop those two people and walk. Now find two new people and create a straight line with you on one end.

Lanes: (5 minutes)
3. Walk, run, jump, stop or fall.
A) Tempo...how fast can you do these activities? How slow?
B) Duration...how long can you lie down for? How long can you jump for, explore the extremes.
C) Kinesthetic Response....notice and respond to the sounds and movements of the others in the room.

Grid: (5 minutes)
4. Open it up into a grid of straight lines. Walk, run, jump, stop or fall on the grid.
A) Continue to work with a focus on tempo, duration and kinesthetic response.
B) Spatial Relationship...notice the space around you, in you, between you and others. Allow yourself to be a moving body in space, free, spontaneous and infinite. Notice the shape of your body, notice the shapes all of our bodies make together.

Open Viewpoints (5 minutes)
5. Open it up to the whole space
C) Gesture. Add in everday behavioral gestures. Physical gestures you see in the pilates studio, the Met, the elevator at Fordham, the office, the zendo, the subway, the street. Let them be bigger. Let the gestures expand, let them transform.
D) Repetition...repeat the gestures of others.
E) Architecture. Use the room, the floor, the walls, the stage, be aware of the ceiling and the huge space above your head, be aware of the floor, and your feet and your breathing and the wave.

Viewpointing with audience (8 to 10 minutes)
6. Divide into two groups. Some up some down. Begin. Use all of the different aspects of viewpoints: Tempo, duration, kinesthetic response, spatial relationship, gestures, repetition, architecture
7. Switch.

1 comment:

Magis Theatre Company said...

Good stuff Wendy,
A good outline for a really solid viewpoints session.
A couple of adjustments:
I find that usually the viewpoints to start with are Kinesthetic Response and Repetition. By starting with Tempo you may run the risk of diverting the attention too quickly away from the way one responds to the stimulus of another. Often with the demands of the viewpoints tempo happens naturally, but it seems better to start with kinesthetic response. Likewise for duration.. it's more of a "fine tuning" viewpoint once the more foundational viewpoints are in place.
See you soon,
George