Let's Punchdrunk! - By Hemakshi Soni Dartford Grammar School for girls

Let's Punchdrunk! - By Hemakshi Soni   Dartford Grammar School for girls

Dartford Grammar School for girls organised a trip for the GCSE year 10 drama class on Monday 19th or on Friday 23rd to the Punchdrunk theatre in London.

This 2 1/2 hour session was an insight to the game changing form of theatre called immersive theatre. Immersive theatre is where the audience is free to choose what to watch and where to go. Punchdrunk theatre was founded by artistic director Felix Barrett in 2000.

During the trip, the students were shown a video about a village and moments later the video ended and the students realised the screen was actually a window and they saw the set come to life. They were allowed to explore the set for a couple of minutes and then their guide, told them a set of instructions to do whilst walking around in the space (e.g acting like someone is following you). He tells them to be aware of their facial expressions and body language. A couple of students were picked to position themselves in a way that they thought reflected the instruction “act like you have a big secret”. The rest of the students were told to pick a space to watch and stay in that space. They were then told to pick another place to watch from. After this, the class said that perspective is very important because looking at the same thing in different directions could change the meaning or the interpretation of the still image. 

Then, they were told to get together in partners. He told them that one person should guide their partner with their hand and their partner has to follow the hand wherever it goes. However, if person 1 closes their hands, their partner has to immediately freeze. He told the students to experiment with this. One group found that the person following the hand, could actually be the leader instead of the follower, using facial expressions they made the roles reverse. Then he showed them the importance of eye contact. Instead of the person using their hand, they used their eyes. Without any gestures, they were trying to compel their partner to follow them. This means that one person had to work harder to get their partner’s attention, using different things (e.g in one group, the first person stared at either a specific place or right in their eyes to try and make them move ). 

Then they were told to make up a dance like sequence with minimum speech with their partner using the word the instructor gave them (e.g persuasion). They were told to find a place in the set and incorporate it into the piece so that it makes the piece unique. They were told to make their performance into a loop so that at soon as it finished it would start again.

Whilst they were performing, the other students could walk around the piece and look from different angles. 

One challenge some students faced was staying in character and continuing their piece when an audience member was in their way. The instructor said a good way to get past this is to use eye contact from the previous exercise to compel them to move. 

Overall, the students really enjoyed the workshop because it was fun and taught them the importance of facial and body expressions. Since they usually use dialogue, they tend to focus more on the speech instead of eye contact etc. The students said that it was an interesting style of drama and many students have decided to add some of the techniques learnt into their GCSE devised drama piece.