Tuesday 15th September

We have been working on our physical theatre and contact improvisation, so we were given the task of creating a shirt piece based on one of the ideas from our brainstorm incorporating these techniques. Our group chose to do slavery as we thought this was a more general idea that would be good to workshop. We started by imitating the conditions they were kept in in the ships they were carried in, all squashed together, chained so they could not escape. 

We tried to focus on the mistreatment of them, and how little control the slaves had over each other by having two 'masters' controlling and pushing the slaves around. For the last section we thought we would use some contact improvisation. I thought we could separate off into pairs as it is easier and more effective to do contact improvisation in this way. Also I thought it would be good to show how the 'masters' could influence the other slaves and really emphasize their power even when it is not directly them doing by having the one of the slaves dominate the other in the pairs, highlighting the male power over females in that time.