Blog Task

1. The ‘R’ (research/resource) in Porto is the stage of discovering your character within the piece.
In means of discovering your character in Porto you need to look back at the ways which help the individual find it, discovering the character development is done through their personal memories, and also building the characters heightened emotions by engaging with other people in the devised work. A majority of Porto’s research is mainly from everyday life experience.

‘To value theatre is to value life, not to escape from it. The everyday is at once the most habitual and demanding dimension of life which theatre has most responsibility to.’ (Read A, Theatre & Everyday Life, pg 103)

The ‘S’ (score) in Porto is using the research in the development stage for the character. The people in Porto have o make the stage they are on their world, a sense that the outside world does not matter anymore, but what is going on inside the space that is being used.

‘Each person must become an ingredient in the mixing of a piece…Social conventions, routine habits of polite or impolite daily life; suppress the sensory and imaginative world from which this begins. Normal social selves must be shed and attention re-directed to the work as a whole’.
(Tufnell, Crickmay.C, Body Space Image, pg 73).


2. As Porto is starting to be scored, there is a narrative emerging from the work. The original idea of people engaging with other peoples stimuli is because of the similarities between them which creates a relationship. There are two ensembles within the work which give examples of these, the first which is the Train scene.
The train scene involves people who can only show a relationship with each other, this is done through body language and eye contact. Although the particular scene it may be based on a train, it may also relate to other things such as relationships and arguments being in a house, on the street. These everyday movements (pedestrian) are used vastly.

The second ensemble is of the Photo group. A character only seems to communicate with another, if they share the same type of relationship between the photo and themselves. All the characters in the Photo group have the same similarities between themselves and the photo they hold, but only communicate through an emotional awareness.

‘For the phenomenologist, the human body is not in space but of space , a crucial perception from which it follows that an individual’s relationship with the world is manifested not as a series of linguistic signs, but as sensory, somatic and mental phenomena.’ (Murray.S, Keefe.J, Physical Theatres, A Critical Introduction, pg 25).

The work seems to offer a rather productive way of beginning to grasp a deep structure within the work of Porto.

3. With my own character in Porto, I have learnt to release my emotion. Whilst I was in the ‘R’ phase of the work, I was able to grasp ideas of what I wanted to do and how I wanted to communicate but I was not able to do neither because of my thoughts being so exterior and not making my characters relationship in the space I was given.
The result of my ‘R’ stage in Porto has affected my ‘S’ stage in Porto drastically, ruling out a majority of my emotional development to nothingness and starting all over again, which has made it harder for me to catch up with in the devised piece.

My change in character within the work is due to the stimuli I have, this is because my character is destined to be alone as I am already uncomfortable with being in my characters skin, because of the contents in my bag.

The work which I am now developing is not what I am able to do physically but how the character can function emotionally, this will be a much bigger challenge for me, as I am already uncomfortable in front of everyone with my Prayer Mat and Book, it is a very private part of my life which is already within its emotional context.

Bibliography

Murray Simon, Keefe John (2007), Physical Theatres - A Critical Introduction: Routledge, USA.

Oddey Alison, (1994), Devising Theatre – A practical and theoretical handbook: Routledge, London.

Read Alan, (1993) Theatre & Everyday Life, An Ethics of Performance:
USA, Routledge.