I really enjoyed the devising workshop today! The texts we read through were both very interesting but in different ways. My interpretation of the mouse and cat fable unintentionally drew from my memories of playing Javert, which was cool to realize. Like the mouse, Javert is so sure of his worldview that he can’t fathom there being any exceptions to the rule. The cat only tells the mouse there was another way right before eating it. When Jean Valjean gets Javert to question his own morals, he can’t love with the implications, and so ends his own life to escape “the world of Jean Valjean”. This isn’t really related to the workshop, just a fun thing I though of but didn’t want to have to explain if I brought it up in the moment.
Some of the movement excersizes were familiar to me from last year, but I preferred doing it with a bigger group of people and seeing what everyone else came up with. It trains you to act on your first instinct and then make it work from there, which I imagine will be useful for our devised project.
I think my favorite part of the workshop was coming up with the impossible stage directions. With mine, I wanted to capture what it feels like to not be fully engaged with the world around you, to be stuck in a mindset where everything seems inconsequential and your own being feels empty. The way I wrote it, it ended up almost like a short story or poem, and I really liked it. Going on to stage it, while incorporating other aspects of the workshop, was lots of fun. It was good to work with a slightly larger group than normal, since when we do our project, we’ll have six people throwing around ideas.
Overall, I felt like I got a lot out of this experience. I feel prepared to collaborate with my classmates and turn our ideas into a cohesive piece.
