Physical theatre

physical theatre is anything that puts the human body at the centre of the story telling process. As a result it's usually abstract in style using movement in a stylised and representational way. 

DV8 Are an australian male heavy group, main practitioners of physical theatre. They are very famous. A lot of work they do takes place in London. Around the  country and internationally. Potential of working with movement. Do use dialogue and tell stories. Set stuff in site specific places. Relationship styled stories. Display effective ways of exploring emotions without it being cringy.  

Frantic Assembly. Created a lot of famous movements in productions like curious incident. Work a lot with the national theatre. Use quite a bit of dialogue. Work a lot more on script. 

Stylised  movement. A lot of action scenes end up being described. Shakespeare. But Kenneth Branagh made a new version in 2013 which was described as very good for its physical difference. It was very physical. People becoming things. 

Combining art forms. Other art forms such as music, dance and other media or visual images. Actors rely on there bodies more to be understood. Commedia dell'arte, stock characters e.g: goodie. Baddie. Hero. 

Techniques: mime-

Gesture- 

Status

Proximity

Stance

Harshness and tenderness

Movement

Not moving 

Mask work 

Dance work

Motif 

Contact improv 

Between two people. How you move around that person. Three basic rules absorb and impulse by partner 

Resist or ignore it 

To respond to it 

The piece we are doing is very clever. We are using a lot of movement pieces and use a lot of physical theatre. The story is mostly shown through movement. For example at one point we make a park, I become a bin at one point. And at another point I make a chair.  Me and Ashley use contact improvisation when he kills me. We do a small movement which looks very effective. We attack every scene with the emotion that is involved. Like in the scene where we are becoming over powered by Ashley and Harry. We all show frustration and anger in our movement and facial expressions. We have to over exaggerate our movement scenes because we don't have much dialogue. So the audience will have to understand the story line through the way we move and speak through movement, also in this scene Ashley and Harry don't move. Which is another technique showing there power. A lot of the movement pieces are like sequences. We go back to the same movement piece at many different points and sometimes app do the same movement at the same time! The performance went really well. We had really good feedback from the other group. We used the song "once upon a time, the battle of life and death", and it worked perfectly with the movement we were doing. And the fact that the music was extremely eerie and really dramatic. It fit the performance well,. I liked the way we for instance became a park. Or became an office. For instance in the part where we became a park, I became a bin, and in the office scene I became a chair.  We didn't use any props, just ourselfs. It was by far the performance I have enjoyed the most so far. And I'd love to do something like this again. Devised physical theatre is probably my favourite acting style.