The Lovers

This is a painting titled The Lovers by Rene Magritte. We were showed this painting in class, it was the inspiration for our final piece and we were asked to capture the thought process we had when looking at this image. We then were given a paper and pen and told to continuously write our thoughts without stopping for five minutes. I chose to write a list of every word that popped into my head at the given time. Words like 'lust' 'blue' 'depression' 'love' 'sex' 'entrapment' 'misunderstood' 'determined' came into my mind and slowly it became and unconscious movement of just writing whatever I thought. When looking back at at the words I wrote I notice they all appear with many sinister and dark undertones. This image has more than meets the eye and I feel that could be beautifully expressed in a performance. We were then asked to pick a partner and create a piece including someone else's words from the painting. We has muslin cloth as our prop and we would move our bodies and twist and control the cloth through one another to convey a slow moving piece of physical theatre style work. Our piece contained turns and manipulation of the body with the cloth and we soon created a piece that flowed well. Our piece was meant to show love and hate in a relationship and the secrets you keep hidden to protect one another. We wanted to convey how love is an internal emotion and exterior is something that is unlikely to change feelings. We were then asked to add whatever words or phrases we wanted from the piece of text a peer and written. My partner and I chose the words that stood out for us the most and told a story beneath the lines. We chose the words "connection" and "love" to be said at the same time with a movement to reflect the narrative.The class itself consisted of a semi improvise piece, every cast member had muslin cloth over their face in order to reflect our focus image; "the lovers". We then continued by walking in an imaginary grid at different speeds. This particular section of the piece looked robotic and industrialised. In some ways I felt in contrasted dramatically with a lot of our duos. It has aspects of encapsulating what humans would be like without expression and individuality; blank and machine like without "feelings". Our next section was a transition into "becoming fire"; the physicality of fire and actually being fire. We transition in slow motion movements that make the piece have more ease and flow. I enjoyed "being" things, I like creating representations with my body; having the ability to discover a variety of movements that are usually "dormant" - similar to the "names" exercise we began the term with. The piece continued with "becoming lava" and group work of "fire". With the group exercises, I enjoyed the motion of moving as one and all becoming separate personalities within a group fire-like movement. I think the piece as a whole contains an understated message of an industrialised world, and whether the place we live in today is places love over materialistic items or not.