Movement and Emotion Piece - Reflection

Over the past two weeks, our IB Theatre Class has been designing movement sequences related to and in the style of Frantic Assembly’s Things I Know To Be True. The work started with a search for song lyrics that could be used in a monologue and would inspire emotions similarly to the play. I chose to use the lyrics from a Mitski song called “First Love / Late Spring”, specifically the chorus and second verse. When thinking over all of the monologues from TIKTBT, I felt that this song fit incredibly well for Rosie’s familial empathy and  confusion that she expresses at the start of the play.

I came into class the first day feeling excited but also somewhat unprepared to  create the movement aspect of the assignment. Although I didn’t really mind being picked first for directing, it was difficult to convey some of my ideas verbally. I didn’t use clear language at the start and was anxious about giving directions. I’m not a naturally assertive person, so I mostly confused the class before anything else. However, everyone in our class is very supportive and took the opportunity to improvise new ideas into existence. Even if it took a while to reach it, I really enjoyed the final product and was even more excited to act in others’ pieces.

All of the other individual works that I read for and acted in gave me a special chance to see how our classmates interpreted the various personalities in TIKTBT. Some chose to focus on a single character’s arc and had a prominent narrator; some others showed the struggles of the whole family and used each person to fill the stage with movements. When we finished, everyone came back together to see where we had overlapping themes, emotions, actions, and more. One of the most prominent ideas, and the one that we chose as our main focus for the final collaborative piece, was the idea of evolution.

Even though the phrase “coming of age” is usually associated with stories about young adults, our class saw that this phrase applied to even the oldest characters of the play. We were missing Millie on our first collaborative work day, but made sure to keep some of the lyrics from both hers and everyone else’s original pieces. This first day in class was also a bit unfocused, so our progress was simple and slow. Today was the time that we secured our ideas and, much to my happiness, everyone got to try approaches until the final piece flowed very smoothly.

This assignment, although it required some deeper thinking than others, was really enjoyable because it allowed us to take on lots of different roles that then helped us understand the methods of studios such as Frantic Assembly. There was a great level of creative freedom, and I think this was some of the most effective group work we’ve done so far!

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