Annoyance Level One - Week Seven

Try and guess how class started tonight....if you said with an interpretive dance session you're either a smarmy A-hole, or have not been reading this blog before today. If you said open scenes as a Warm-up to get us in the mood - you'd actually be wrong (I know shocker). We started off class today with a little pow wow with Dan, since it is the second to last class (a single tear drops on to my keyboard even as I type that) he wanted to know id there was anything in particular we really wanted to work on - anything from the earlier classes that really struck a chord with us, or we weren't quite sure about - or any expectations/questions that we had coming into the class about the Annoyance style or improv in general that we wanted to focus on.

We decided to go back over some of the object and environment work and then also focus more on prolonged character stuff - same characters in multiple scenes, and then snapping into different characters quickly (and really fleshing them out quickly).

We then jumped into some open warm up scenes to shake off the cob webs.

After that Dan had us each pick up a unique object that was either in the room or we had brought with us (preferably not pencils or papers, but something with some weight to it). We then stood in a circle and just took a little time feeling the object, seeing how we held it - then placing it down and miming that object in our hands (I chose my wallet - there sadly wasn't much to work wit in the room).
After a bit we passed our objects to our right and began again - felling the new object, really paying attention to how we handled it.
After we had done it with all the objects - Dan had us start doing two person scenes, at first actually using our physical objects. At random points Dan would walk into the scene and pluck the physical object out of our hands and tell us to keep going and keep using the object - just miming now. He'd watch how we were using it miming then randomly insert the object back into our hands - being very adamant that when he inserted it we were not to try and adjust our hand position.
After a while it became pretty evident that some times a few people lost the feel of their object after it was taken out of the scene for a while - though after a few scenes everyone was doing amazingly.

We then put our objects down (or in my case back in my pocket) and continued on with more scenes where we focused on creating and using objects and using our environment - all the while Dan was keeping on eye on what we were doing - sometimes stepping in and just adjusting us slightly to give a little more space - or asking what happened to the table - it was never intrusive, or disruptive - and just kept people on their toes. After a while he really didn't have to do anything.

Next we did a number of scenes focusing on varying character between each of them. After a while this transitioned into before each scene Dan had one person step out and start a simple mono scene - sometimes he would give people a character (for example one of my suggestions was: You are the best mechanic in the world) and then you have about 30 seconds to just exist as that character in an environment. Then once it was clear you had a feel for the character another player would enter the scene - already in progress (again you weren't pretending to talk to someone who wasn't there you were just existing as that character - maybe talking to yourself, possibly silent - relying completely on physicality to embody that character - so the entrances were real entrances) and a scene would commence.

After doing a number of these we ended the class with a series of two person scenes where we were free to take inspiration from anywhere - be it stuff we had worked on in this class, previous classes - or our own personal challenges we had been given in week 5 (for me last week) - or again anything that we fancied.

A few bits of advice we took from this class:
You can practice object work at home - and don't be afraid to take your time with it
Finding a Character is as easy as taking a step or making a sound (it's all in how you take that step or make that sound)
How you do what you do is who you are
Always Challenge Yourself