On the 12th of November, I had the pleasure to watch the latest version of the show Restless by GOLKK Theatre Company at The Cockpit. GOLKK is a physical theater company, founded by graduate theater students from Canterbury. It all started as a university project for a graduation play. As time passed, however, they realized how much they enjoy working together and how great their collective energy. Three years later, just as passionate and devoted as in the beginning, they are ready to present the third version of their original play called Restless.
Even though I know Kristin for about three years now, I never had the chance to see any of her performances. Knowing nothing but the name of the show, I am sitting impatiently in the audience, waiting for my very first physical theater experience. The lights go off, and I find myself in a world where people are just worker bees, caught so tightly in their daily routines that they do not notice anything else. Day by day, they all do the same things over and over again – wake up, get ready, go to work, go home, go to bed. Even though their routines were different, the outcome was the same – they were all part of a vicious cycle, a made-up life deprived of meaning. Suddenly, one of the bees sees a light so bright and beautiful she forgets she has to work. Following this ray of happiness, she allows herself to feel free for the first time and just rest for a minute. Seeing one of their fellow workers happy, the other bees think she is crazy, so they drag her back to her “normal” life. Losing her only moment of joy, she goes back to being part of the soulless machine.
Watching them play made me think about how our lives are just empty actions devoid of emotion and purpose. We live in a world in which we worship titles and money, completely ignoring our inner “wealth”. We buy objects we do not even need just for validation and to increase our levels of dopamine for a minute, and we pay for them with currency far more valuable than money – our time.
We waste years on jobs we hate just to satisfy our artificial needs created by society. A society that accuses gambling of being immoral and marking it like a vise, but simultaneously promotes social platforms built on the same principles as the slots in a casino. A society where freedom of choice is just a concept and everyone is a part of a carefully targeted audience of an algorithm.
The play leaves the audience with an open ending: the last bee sees the light … and the curtains fall. So what will happen next? In the end, we are responsible for our happiness. As we know from the butterfly effect: even a small change could have a great impact. Sometimes, one person can spark the fire of a thousand others and break the system.
But enough with my existential monologue.
From an animator’s point of view, watching the play showed me the power of movement. Even the slightest change in the behavior of the actors brought something new to the performance. Simply, by watching their daily routines, I was able to understand their characters and see their personality traits. Observing the sense of touch, I knew which two bees were a couple and that they have some unresolved issues with each other.
To learn more about physical theatre and how to use it more successfully, as we have to present our animal analysis in a week, I asked Kristin to tell me more about her experience and some practices she uses to prepare for her performances. I will post the short-no-so-much-of-an-interview conversation in the next couple of days.
Bread & Butter,
Nicole