Skip to main content

Exploring Slapstick Comedy

After exploring R.A.D.S, we then moved onto exploring slapstick comedy in movement. Slapstick is a stylistic type of movement that focuses on the exaggeration of actions, they become more lively and are also used to create humour.

This lesson we focused on taking inspiration from the 1952 film 'Singin' in the Rain', targeting the number "Make em laugh" performed by Cosmo aka Donald O'Connor. After watching the video it was clear that most of his movements were very clumsy and silly however that was the sole purpose of them-to make the audience laugh, Though whilst he's movement was humorous Donald's expressions, posture and the way he carried his body had 100% dedication, his number was also full of  energy which kept the humour in place.

After the video we was assigned into trios and 4's to come up with a short and set he task of creating our own version of a slapstick comedy, we thought it would be comical if we went with a love triangle idea. For example, I liked Cameron, Cameron liked Taylor and Taylor liked me. The humour being that Taylor is falling for a gay man, I'm after a straight man, and Cameron is after a girl who admires this gay guy. We also played upon the idea that we each despise the one we do not admire e.g I despise Taylor. 

Here is our slapstick comedy:



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Creating a mirror

This lesson we decided to focus on my part of our piece. As a group we had decided that we wanted to each represent a some sort of character that as a type of body dysmorphia, I wanted to focus on the issues that surround transgender people, focusing on the the way they feel- they're born in the wrong body. Alice was going to take part in my piece so we was given ownership over this part of our masterpiece. Alice suggested that we use a number from the hit musical 'Kinky Boots', called 'I'm Not My Father's Son'. Although this song is about being a drag queen, we believed that the lyrics still transmit the same notion as it would to a transgender person in some way. We did try and devise some movement to the original soundtrack however we soon discovered that it was too fast for us so we considered looking for another version, luckily we came across an acoustic version which we decided to go with- the acoustic version also gave us the right tempo for our move...

Stimuli for Devising

This lesson we began work on our masterpiece. We was split up into two groups: Team 1 Owen Will Cameron Alice Chloe Team 2 Henri Taylor Tyler Warren Joe We was also given a stimulus pack which held a range of pictures from landscapes to posters to facts etc, Here they are: Here are some of the ideas we have started to draw from these stimuli: We have decided to go with a story line to our movement piece, it is set in a dystopian future where reproduction has been abolished by a virus created by the government and Alice is immune to this virus. (We was heavily influenced by the film 'Divergent' ). Me and Alice are twins so people think she is going to have twins, kind of like a maidens tale etc. Chloe is infertile- she wants Alice's baby and Will and Cameron are the crazy scientists who created this virus.However to top it all we are all friends. We started to create the very first scene in the movement to t...

R.A.D.S- Relationships

This lesson we focused on relationships sector of R.A.D.S in movement. There are many keywords that revolve around the word Relationships. They are the following. Side-by-side Waiting Back-to-back One behind the other Mirror Unison Canon Interaction Answer and Question Lead + Follow Passing Contrast We was given the task of working in pairs to create a small movement piece incorporating these key words into our movements, Our stimulus was a phrase "The breakdown of a relationship"  I was paired with Henri. We both decided that we should come up with a movement piece first before we add music, This way we could decide the emotion and pace with the music separately, as long as we had a base idea. We tried to incorporate each keyword into our movements. After lots of decisions we made a list of movements. Here is the list below: Here is the video of our performance:  As you can see in the video we tried to focus and inc...