Emotional Riffing

Exploring the emotional riffing exercise really opened my eyes to the wide spectrum of human emotions and how I found, as the exercise developed, it easier to access my own emotions in a way that didn't get effected by my brain or too many thoughts dictating how I expressed them. Personally I feel I'm quite guarded when it comes to expressing extreme emotions, especially so openly - however, this exercise allowed me to completely let go of all conflicting thoughts and explore myself and what I am capable of presenting. It was quite freeing to be able to explore the different emotions with complete unadulterated effort being pumped into the expressions, I was quite exhausted when the activity finished. It was really interesting to see the entire class bounce off one another's offers, with no one taking the easy way out or putting minimal effort in. Everyone was working at an extremely high level, putting in constant effort and I feel that if everyone hadn't, then the exercise and the effect would've definitely had fallen flat. I also found it particularly interesting that by the end of the exercise, every single person's responsive was unique in some kind of a way - even when copying one another, we were all completely letting go and all approaching it differently.

The way the exercise developed from being obvious portrayals of emotion, for example; crying to express sadness or laughing to express amusement, into more subtle emotions - really showed the wide range of emotions the human body carries and all the different ways you can express them. It really highlighted the less conventional ways to show emotion, something that's extremely important in creating experimental theatre as you want to approach it in the less conventional and most creative way possible.

I was able to get to a point in the exercise where I completely stopped thinking about everything that was going on, only responding to the emotions in the room and the offers being made. At that point, I honestly felt I could literally portray anything presented or offered to me. I feel being able to access your emotions easily and truthfully is extremely important when exploring experimental theatre as it offers a complete spectrum of possibilities; you would be holding back your expression and creativity if you didn't use your emotions, you'd be unable to really create something valuable if there wasn't an emotional drive to either the idea behind it or pushing the development. I really enjoyed that session and in particular this exercise, it really pushed me out of my own personal comfort zone and I feel i definitely came out on top. as both a person and an actor.