Antonin Artaud. - Starter exercise - Instruments in a circle - Basic Ritual. 

Today we kicked the lesson off with the ritual, using musical instruments and our hands only. 
We started off all in a giant circle in the room-(which was all dark) and we all picked up a musical instrument (or if there wasn't one infront of us, we used our hands) and stood up and someone from the class would start making a tune/rhythm and the rest would copy the "leader". Even though we did a similar thing the week before, it was slightly different as we didn't a specified leader as we did last week who was Andy. Instead we had to decide among us who was going to start it off without talking. So we were sat awkwardly for a while, but then Yunusa started and we all copied him.
I think the reason it took a while for someone to start it is because they were not sure if everyone would copy, this is where you have to have trust in the other members of our class.
Once we had done this ritual for a while we all sat down afterwards and compared this time to last time. Personally, I felt that this one was a lot more "free", because I knew I could take over any time I wanted too, whilst last week we all had to copy what Andy was doing, so I felt that one was a lot more controlled.


Emotion through breathing. 

For this exercise we all sat really close together in a circle and we had to try and portray different emotions through different ways of breathing.
Andy would choose someone within the circle to start the breath off and when an individual agreed that's how they would breathe with that emotion they would then join in with the breath. The emotions we had to do were; sad, angry, scared and lust. For me I found the lust one quite an embarrassing one to do because it's such a personal, intimate thing I felt uncomfortable.
I think Andy chose these emotions because they can easily be portrayed through words, but through breath it's a lot harder. Also, these are a lot of the emotions-(especially lust!) are in Dracula quite frequently.

There was more to this lesson, but I went to Glad Rags wit Sue

Renfield!!!!

Renfield, my character is a fictional character from Bram Stoker's "Dracula".
Renfield is Dracula's "puppet" through most of the play.

Renfield is a "poor" lunatic from Dr. Seward's asylum.
He is a "paranoid schizophrenic with alternating homicidal and suicidal phases..."

In the play, he is known for eating living creatures, starting with flies, then spiders, then birds. He starts getting a taste for living creatures after his encounter with Count Dracula. The resultant belief that he can extend his life by draining the life of others-(like a vampire)- (this can link back to the research we did a few weeks ago about vampire myths. Lochhead could have got this idea of "external life" from Elizabeth Bathory's belief of killing virgins to keep herself young and beautiful forever).

Even though you don't see Renfield as a sane person in the play, I know he was a lawyer. I'm not entirely sure how Dracula managed to drive him mad, but my theory is that Renfield was always scared of death. So I think Dracula used this against him, and convinced him that by eating living things, it will give him life, that is why in act 1 scene 2 when he eats the fly he says "it's fat with life, strong life and gives life to me", so I believe Dracula somehow made him believe that. Lochhead could of got the idea of eating living things giving you external life from Elizabeth Bathory's theory, which is explained up above.