Spiders & Bats

Scene six was one of the scene to touch upon on our movement classes, since it had two major animalistic parts that we needed help with. First, after Nisbett exits the stage all the lunatic and Renfield turn into spiders. We started by thinking about how spiders looked like, with their eight limbs that are bent and straight. They don't have much flexibility to them and their movements are quick and short. So, as we are all on the ground on our fours, it was easy to create a mockery image of a spider by having our elbows bent and head quite low, allowing our back be straight.
   The next thing we looked at were the bats. We had decided that it would be a cool transition to have us slowly turn into bats from the spiders and then scatter around the stage before forming into the doors of castle Dracula. Siou directed us to have the movement come from our backs, rather than just flapping our arms around. We did a brief exercise where in pairs one would lead as a bat, trying to use different paces and levels to create the movement. This really helped us with different kind of sprints and soars with the bats.
In the actual scene, we would all first gather stage middle and after Sophie gives us the mark, we would separate into two groups, scattering to two sides of the stages, then back to the middle and after that to our starting positions for scene 7. This worked at first, but then we realized it was too organized and the bats were too slow, so later we changed the bats slightly, by allowing us to use our insane personalities in the bats more. This really brought the hectic feel to the flight and allowed us to scatter more freely around the stage.