Artist in Residence

 

This week in drama we had a wonderful artist in residence come and teach us. The artist in residence is named Ian Johnstone (Ian Harvey Stone is his stage name). He is stage combat artist, hypnotist, Shakespeare artist, mentalist, magician, and mime. He is from England and has two kids.

He taught us a lot of skills like isolation, translation, rotation, inclination, fixed point, and the robot.

Isolation really will help us with our current unit in drama- mime. The reason why I say this is because isolation is when you isolate every part of your body except one part and focus on that one part when carefully. In mime I sometimes tend to speed up and isolating parts of my body one at a time will help me focus on my actions and go slower.

Translation is one of the moves that we humans do everyday in ordinary things like walking, but we just don't notice it or know what it's called. Translation is moving forward and backwards. So when we walk forward or backwards we are doing translation.

Inclination is also one of the moves that we humans do everyday in ordinary movements. Rotation is moving up and down. So when you want to sit your body moves down to sit on the chair, so you re using inclination. When you are getting up to get out of the chair you are also using inclination.

Rotation is also one of the moves that humans use a lot. Rotation is moving any bone in your body that can rotate in a circle. So when you shake someones hand you use your wrist, and your wrist can rotate in a full circle if it wanted to.

The robot is very big in isolation so it helps us when miming, because we notice and make sure that every move is very slow and careful. When moving a part of your body or a bone you always have to first move a that part of your body in the opposite direction that you want to move and then move in the direction that you wanted. So suppose I had both my arms straight next to my body and then I wanted to bring my forearm up. I would first move it down- the opposite direction. But, when I move it down I only move it a very little bit and then I do a big movement bringing it up again. When I bring it up again my forearm has to sort of dangle a bit to make it look like a real robot movement.

Fixed point is when you stay in put in one place/area. When learning the robot and miming we learnt how to walk in a fixed point. Having a fixed point is very important if you are moving around a lot when miming. If you don't have a fixed point you may just walk right through things without knowing. Suppose you were opening a door and then you walked about then wanting to open the door again. You will probably not know where that door was before and this will break the illusion.