Individual Skill Dramatic Sequence Critical Commentary (Draft 2) – Freedom of Death
1. Directorial Vision
Concept
[Background story of character and DV] This piece focuses on the internal struggle of a paralyzed woman, Clara, and how she chooses to die despite the efforts of the people around her trying to prolong her life. Adapting the true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby in the movie “The Diving Bell and The Butterfly” (refer to Annex A), Clara suffered a massive stroke at the age of 43 and lapsed into a coma for 20 days. When she wakes up, she realizes that she is entirely paralyzed and can only blink her left eye despite being mentally alert. In this rare condition called “Lock-in Syndrome”, she struggles to find the only solution, death, to relieve her loved ones and herself of this burden. I want the audience to understand the point of view of a woman who is permanently deprived of movement and speech, whereby sometimes only through death, can she find freedom. Death should be a choice for the “living”. I will perform this piece by expressing her thoughts through the use of my body and the involvement of sounds to set the mood and support my movements.
Script structure
[Episodic? What, why?] My piece consists of 4 scenes. The script follows the episodic structure which describes what is happening in each scene (refer to Annex B). This background story helps to form my motivations and derive different emotions in each scene, allowing the audience to receive the effect I aim to achieve. In every scene, I have focused on one specific type of emotion for my character to feel, and the type of reaction or emotion aimed for the audience to receive. My piece does not aim to narrate the story to the audience, but rather understand and believe the character’s thoughts and struggle. I chose this approach because I personally feel that narration of the piece is not enough for the audience to put themselves in the character’s shoes. Death is not a small issue to deal with and to be able to allow the audience to not only understand but also believe that death is a choice not for them of course, but for those who are in extremely desperate condition to live artificially by life support machines like Clara, I need to jar the audience emotionally.
Objectives and Intention
[How do your scenes contribute to your DV?] Each scene is created with a purpose to gradually lead the audience mentally and emotionally to the stated performance intention. The transition of intended audience reception, namely sympathy, pain and discomfort, hopeful to resignation, aims to build up the emotional state of the audience in order to direct them to the intention of the piece. The pain that the character goes through has to be consistent for the audience to feel the unease and retreat, gradually going towards my directorial vision.
2. Performance Theory and History of Tradition
Ankoku Butoh – Tatsumi Hijikata
[Butoh traditions and theories, purpose? Who? When? What?] In the movement aspect, I incorporated the use of a Japanese avant garde performance art which originated in the 1960s, Butoh. Butoh was created out of chaos in the Second World War, when Japan was a country in transition. It was a country still holding onto its old world traditional values while being forced into western democratic values by America's conquest. During this time there was much student unrest and protest. Butoh is a hybrid form of art, incorporating elements of theatre, dance, mime, Noh, Kabuki and at times the Chinese arts of Chi Kung and Tai Chi. It is up to the individual artist to find their own dance. But it should be a "dance" of discovery, rather than a calculated series of movements meant to manipulate the audience into a desired response. Tatsumi Hijikata (refer to Annex C) was the founder of Ankoku Butoh and his performances were often grotesque, dark and perverse. Ankoku Butoh means “Dance of Darkness”. Butoh allowed the body to speak for itself through the unconscious improvisation of movement. Hijikata’s language rejects interpretation as his Butoh assumes the appearance of a swindle, in which the subject and object are undergoing metamorphosis so rapidly, it swindles even his dancers’ bodies. Hijikata established his form of Butoh physicality whereby actors bent their legs to view the world from a lower level and distort the body to free the body of the social constraints. Faces are distorted to make the expressions and also to strip away the socially acceptable movements and traditional idea of beauty. He makes use of this form of physicality to derive to the emotions.
Application/ Relating to performance – Effects and Intention
[Why Butoh? How does it match your performance?] Through the use of Butoh, the internal struggle of my character can be shown more clearly as I, the actor, will have more space for improvisation and imagination for the body to respond subconsciously. Also, I will be able to find a way of moving truthfully, creating many dramatic, original and emotionally charged improvisations. Hidden elements of my own personality may also surface during this experiment. Having the tradition of being dark and grotesque, Butoh is able to help execute the darkest side of Clara’s life and bring the audience along into her mindscape to allow them to understand her point of view. The slow and distorted movements that Butoh bases on can allow the audience to not only see but feel the excruciating pain that the character goes through.
[How? What are the useful exercises?] Hijikata has searched through new combinations with disconnected parts of the flesh and body. This method would not be that of dualistic thought by a “superior” brain, but of “thought by the flesh” or “thought through image”, meaning to not think of moving but be moved. Under the assumption that “image is the entity of consciousness and it is only humans that can move through image”, which advocates “learning directly from nature”, is called “image exercise”. Only the contraction of muscles is typical of exercise, while the phrase of “gravity to be the primary energy and weight to be thought and thought, image,” can share common ground with the relation between the flesh as substance and the mind containing thought and image with the conclusion that “technique without images is barren and images without technique, unreliable.” Being caught up in time and space dynamics or the gradual collapse of the inner body with every passing moment and even points to the states and means of recognizing and verbalizing the living flesh is the first step to having capacity to become a physical body. By relaxing the boundaries of our physical being, it allows us to listen to our visceral internal voice because we have experienced the passing of time known to rocks and plants. It can enable us to become our original fundamental selves through directly reconnecting with the power of the universal rhythms of the meditative womb state.
Sound – Robert Rich
[Sound traditions?] For Sound, I used the sounds created by Robert Rich. Robert Rich is an ambient musician and composer based in California, United States. With a discography spanning over 20 years, he is widely regarded as a figure whose sound has greatly influenced today's ambient, new age, and even Intelligent Dance Music (IDM – electronic music genre). Robert Rich has helped define the genres of ambient music, dark-ambient, tribal and trance, yet his music remains hard to categorize. Part of his unique sound comes from using home-made acoustic and electronic instruments, microtonal harmonies, computer-based signal processing, chaotic systems and feedback networks (refer to Annex D). The abstract sounds that these instruments made could set the mood of my piece effectively, allowing the audience to receive the intended effect. Putting main focus on Butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata often dance to silence or to simple percussion scores, because he felt that music should not dictate or control the movement of the dancers, but should support the dancer’s movements.
Application/ Relating to performance – Effects and Intention
[How does it match your piece?] Hence, in order not to force my initial idea of the involvement of vocals into my piece, I decided to scrap the idea of recording voices to represent the voices of the other characters involved. Instead I will follow how Hijikata uses sound whereby sound supports my movement and sets the mood. Sound should not and will not involve complicated conversations and sounds. In my 4 scenes, the use of sounds is crucial as it affects the audience reception and hence has to be chosen and modified carefully.
[Effects] Music has to be distorted and give a tinge of mystery to evoke curiosity and disturbance to support the movements. Hence, in the music I chose, all of them have this buzzing background effect, or sometimes clashing notes which produce minor, diminished or augmented chords. The music may sometimes be of major chords hence I have modified them to sound more of the modern period, whereby addition of clashing notes and awkward pauses help to distort the melody. In the last scene (refer to Annex B), I chose to heighten the climax by going against soothing melodious sounds of piano and involving live music to make it more real and intimate with the audience. I want to provide the audience with the “darker” side of piano sounds. By ending the piece with live music accompaniment, the effect indulging them further and enabling myself to reach deeper into the audiences’ hearts forces them into resignation.
3. Evaluation of creative processes
Annex A
Jean Dominique Bauby
By THOMAS MALLON
A year and a half ago, following a catastrophic stroke and weeks of deep coma in that same hospital, Jean-Dominique Bauby gradually ‘’surfaced’’ into a new existence as a victim of ‘’locked-in syndrome,’’ mentally alert but deprived of movement and speech. Just 44 years old, his body useless but still painful (‘’my hands, lying curled on the yellow sheets, are hurting, although I can’t tell if they are burning hot or ice cold’’), he was forced to recognize that his former life in Paris as the witty, high-living editor in chief of Elle magazine had become as unreachable as the books and trinkets across his hospital room, where he now lived ‘’like a hermit crab dug into his rock.’’
His time ‘’as a perfectly functioning earthling’’ ended, one might say, in the blink of an eye. But it was blinking – that age-old image of heedless speed turned into literal, concentrated labor – that saved Bauby from becoming just another object in the room. By moving his left eyelid in response to an alphabet rearranged according to the letters’ frequency of use, Bauby managed to write a book as moving as Job’s and as expansive, in its way, as any composed by the wheelchaired, boundless Stephen Hawking.
Jean-Dominique Bauby was the victim of a stroke that left his mind and one eye functioning – enough to enable him to dictate “The Diving Suit and the Butterfly” to Claude Mendibil before dying of heart failure. (Jean-Louis Sieff)
‘’It is a simple enough system,’’ he explains. ‘’You read off the alphabet . . . until, with a blink of my eye, I stop you at the letter to be noted. The maneuver is repeated for the letters that follow, so that fairly soon you have a whole word.’’ Fairly soon! Less soon when the amanuensis anticipates and makes mistakes: ‘’One day when, attempting to ask for my glasses (lunettes), I was asked what I wanted to do with the moon (lune).’’
Bauby allows that his ‘’communication system disqualifies repartee,’’ but it does beautiful service to all sorts of physical and emotional description. ‘’There comes a time,’’ he explains, ‘’when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter,’’ but in this strong, slim volume the author displays a writerly control equal to his honesty: ‘’One day . . . I can find it amusing, in my 45th year, to be cleaned up and turned over, to have my bottom wiped and swaddled like a newborn’s. I even derive a guilty pleasure from this total lapse into infancy. But the next day, the same procedure seems to me unbearably sad, and a tear rolls down through the lather a nurse’s aide spreads over my cheeks.’’ There are scenes in Bauby’s narrative – his discovery, in a windowpane, that he is not just ‘’reduced to the existence of a jellyfish’’ but ‘’also horrible to behold’’ – that one might be inclined to describe as unbearably sad, if ‘’unbearable,’’ thanks to this book, were not a word one will never again use quite so loosely.
The diving bell of Bauby’s title is his corporeal trap, the butterfly his imagination: ‘’There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas’s court.’’ Childhood fantasies of war heroism alternate with elaborate dreams of cooking, in which his pantry is a previous lifetime’s memories of smells, tastes and textures: ‘’You can sit down to a meal at any hour, with no fuss or ceremony. If it’s a restaurant, no need to call ahead. . . . The boeuf bourguignon is tender, the boeuf en gelee translucent, the apricot pie possesses just the requisite tartness.’’ It’s as if he’d reversed the most famous moment in Proust and used memory to bring back the adeleine.
Calamity turns Bauby into a connoisseur of irony and eeriness. He recalls how, while visiting his aged father just days before the stroke, he stood near ‘’a black-and-white photo of myself on a miniature golf course. I was 11, my ears protruded and I looked like a somewhat simpleminded schoolboy.’’ When, later, the elder Bauby sends this photo to the hospital, the author is puzzled until the picture is turned over and he sees that a cruel coincidence has been detected. ‘’In his strong, angular handwriting, Dad had simply noted: Berck-sur-Mer, April 1963.’’
Shortly before the stroke, Bauby had begun to diet, not knowing he would lose 66 pounds in the next 20 weeks, and he had reread ‘’The Count of Monte Cristo,’’ in which the elderly Noirtier de Villefort ‘’is literature’s first – and so far only – case of locked-in syndrome.’’ From his bed, Bauby ponders the way he’s swapped circumstances with an old friend who spent ‘’several years in a darkened Beirut dungeon’’ as a hostage of Hezbollah.
The author cultivates strong feelings, especially anger, to keep his spirit from atrophying along with his limbs. But despite occasional sarcastic eruptions, the book’s tone, in Jeremy Leggatt’s translation, is dominated by a sweet, even humorous, lyricism. Bauby notes with pleasure how, in his reordered alphabet, ‘’T and U, the tender components of tu . . . have not been separated,’’ and he recounts his practical distribution of all the prayers coming his way: ‘’A woman I know enlisted a Cameroon holy man to procure me the goodwill of Africa’s gods: I have assigned him my right eye. For my hearing problems I rely on the relationship between my devout mother-in-law and the monks of a Bordeaux brotherhood.’’ Continuing pride in his fashionableness makes him insist that he do his drooling on his own cashmere instead of the hospital-issue jogging suit. If a certain sentimentality enters some of his imaginings, such as a fantasy reconstruction of the Empress Eugenie’s visit to the hospital in 1864 (‘’I was so merry that I would willingly have risen and invited Eugenie to dance’’), awe at its very rendition will keep most readers from condemning it too harshly.
During the book’s composition, Bauby’s long-term prognosis was uncertain. He was thought likely to experience some improvement with digestion and respiration, and perhaps even to reach a point where he might ‘’muster enough breath to make my vocal cords vibrate.’’ But he died suddenly on March 9, just two days after the French publication of ‘’The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.’’ His startling book from Berck-sur-Mer is best experienced by remaining mindful of having the luck to be reading it between the many blinks of one’s eyes. I myself read most of Bauby’s words during an uncomfortable train ride, astonished and finally humbled that he should be relieving my feelings of confinement.
Annex B
Working Script
DV: Death should be a choice for the “living”. Script structure – Episodic
Scene 1 – Refusal
Character: Fearful, unable to accept the truth
Audience reception: Sympathize, discomfort
Clara hangs upside down on the rope (Music: Robert Rich’s Lumin) – Idea of hanging in between life and death, stuck in the position
Background story:
- Clara is seen on the hospital bed.
- She wakes up suddenly from her coma.
- She does not know what has happened, where she is and is extremely afraid.
- She sees how everyone is running towards her body and realizes the condition she is in.
- She detests how she looks like now and refuses to accept her current physical state.
Scene 2 – Resistance
Character: In pain
Audience reception: Painful to watch, discomfort
Clara’s internal struggle (Music: Robert Rich’s Refuse) – Idea of opposing forces
Background story:
- Interaction with physiotherapist PT: PT tries her best to help but she doesn’t want to help herself; conflict of interest
- Struggle for freedom
Scene 3 – Hope
Character: Hopeful
Audience reception: Hopeful
Clara sits on a wheelchair – (Music: Robert Rich’s Circle Unwound) – Idea of being able to rely on others/dependency/ optimism
Background story:
Doctors found a way to cure her (Clara is hopeful and more optimistic – Movements become lighter and less distorted, more flow) She cooperates with physiotherapist
Scene 4 – Void
Character: Sense of finality, helpless
Audience reception: Hopes crushed, resignation
Clara plays the piano and then hangs herself upside down, back to first position in Scene 1 – (Music: Robert Rich’s Open Window) – Idea of exhaustion and finality
Background story: Found to have pneumonia and has worsen her condition and increased her medical fees Clara feels that she’s a burden to her loved ones
Annex C
Tatsumi Hijikata Biography (9 Mar. 1928 - 21 Jan 1986)
Tatsumi Hijikata was a Japanese performer and choreographer who is widely recognized as one of the founders of butoh dance. He studied at the Ando Mitsuko Modern Dance Institute and joined Ando's company in 1953. In 1959 he created his first work Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours), based on the work of Genet. It is commonly regarded as the first example of butoh, although Hijikata did not coin the term ankoku butoh until 1961. His early works, influenced by the novelist Mishima, frequently centred on homoerotic sadism and subversive political imagery. In his middle period, termed Hijikata butoh, his works began to feature female as well as male performers and expanded to larger-scale productions whose imagery reflected the natural world and Japanese traditions. In his final period he began to incorporate elements from kabuki. Hijikata was an innovator in movement technique. He was a master of the use of energy qualities in constructing expressive movement. He would use sounds, paintings, sculptures, and words to construct movement, not exclusively in a formal or literal memetic application, but by integrating these elements via visualization into the nervous system to produce movement qualities that could be very subtle, light, angelic and ghost-like, or demonic, heavy, dark, grotesque, violent and extreme.
Hijikata was dissatisfied with the Japanese modern dance scene, feeling that it was merely a copy of the work being done in the West. He wanted to find a form of expression that was purely Japanese, and one that allowed the body to "speak" for itself, through unconscious improvised movement. His first experiments were called Ankoku Butoh, or the Dance of Darkness. This darkness referred to the area of what was unknown to man, either within himself or in his surroundings. His butoh sought to tap the long dormant genetic forces that lay hidden in the shrinking consciousness of modern man.
His first public performances were wild, primal and sexually explicit. They quite naturally shocked the conservative Japanese dance community, and he was banned from appearing at future organized events. This was the spark that gave birth to butoh. Many of Japan's dancers, poets, visual artists and theatre performers rallied around this exciting and dangerous new art form. Underground performances became increasingly popular, and soon there were numerous groups being formed in the Tokyo area. Musicians, photographers and writers including Japan's leading novelist, Yukio Mishima joined Hijikata to collaborate on spectacular underground performances.
Butoh loosely translated means stomp dance, or earth dance. Hijikata believed that by distorting the body, and by moving slowly on bent legs he could get away from the traditional idea of the beautiful body, and return to a more organic natural beauty. The beauty of an old woman bent against a sharp wind, as she struggles home with a basket of rice on her back. Or the beauty of a lone child splashing about in a mud puddle - this was the natural movement Hijikata wanted to explore. Hijikata grew up in the harsh climate of Northern Japan in an area known as Tohoku. The grown-ups he watched worked long hours in the rice fields, and as a result, their bodies were often bent and twisted from the ravages of the physical labor. These were the bodies that resonated with Hijikata. Not the "perfect" upright bodies of western dance, or the consciously controlled movements of Noh and Kabuki. He sought a truthful, ritualistic and primal earthdance- One that allowed the performer to make discoveries as she/he created/was created by the dance.
Annex D
Robert Rich Biography
Rich began building his own analog synthesizers in 1976, when he was 13 years old and later studied for a year at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).
Rich released his first album Sunyata in 1982. Most of his subsequent recordings came out in Europe until 1989, when Rich began a string of critically acclaimed releases for Fathom/Hearts of Space, including Rainforest (1989), Gaudà (1991), Propagation (1994) and Seven Veils (1998). His two collaborations with Steve Roach, Strata (1990) and Soma (1992), both charted for several months in Billboard. Other respected collaborations include Stalker (1995 with B. Lustmord), Fissures (1997 with Alio Die) and Outpost (2002 with Ian Boddy.) Rich’s contributions to multi-artist compilations have been collected on his solo albums A Troubled Resting Place (1996) and Below Zero (1998). His group, Amoeba, explored atmospheric songcraft on their CDs Watchful (1997) and Pivot (2000). Live albums such as Calling Down the Sky (2004) and 3-CD Humidity (2000) document the unique improvised flow of his performances.
Rich has performed in caves, cathedrals, planetaria, art galleries and concert halls throughout Europe and North America. His all-night Sleep Concerts, first performed in 1982, became legendary in the San Francisco area. In 1996 he revived his all-night concert format, playing Sleep Concerts for live and radio audiences across the U.S. during a three month tour. In 2001 Rich released the 7 hour DVD Somnium, a studio distillation of the Sleep Concert experience, possibly the longest continuous piece of music ever released at the time.
Rich has designed sounds for television and film scores, including the films Pitch Black, Crazy Beautiful, Behind Enemy Lines and others. His musical scores grace films by Yahia Mehamdi (Thank you for your Patience, 2003) and Daniel Colvin (Atlas Dei, 2007, with 90 minutes of Rich’s music in surround); and a video installation by Michael Somoroff (Illumination, 2007). Rich works closely with electronic instrument manufacturers, and his sound design has filled preset libraries of Emu’s Proteus 3 and Morpheus, Seer Systems’ Reality, sampling disks Things that Go Bump in the Night, ACID Loop Library Liquid Planet, WayOutWare’s TimewARP2600, and synths by Camel Audio. Rich has written software for composers who work in just intonation, and he helped develop the MIDI microtuning specification. As mastering engineer and mixer, he has applied his ear to albums in all styles, and his studio was featured twice in Keyboard Magazine, and elsewhere worldwide.
Annex E
Inspiration (yet to be elaborated in creative process)
Costume:
Make-up:
Bibliography1. “Jean Dominique Bauby: In a Blink of an Eye” Thomas Mallon. The New York Times. Online. 15 June 1997
CC has drastic changes and I'm almost done with it. Just have to cut down on the word count for now.
