The Emotion Line

The Emotional Line was an experiment all about the build up of emotions and just how much you can push yourself to the limit of them. We had 6 actors in a line and our teacher gave them a number and an emotion. The number represented the stages in which the emotion is mostly to be portrayed at (1 being basic and 6 being it pushed to the limit) and then they had to act it out. You were made to feed off the person with the numbers before yours and this made it both easier and harder. It was easier because you had some idea of what to do just by witnessing theirs, but it was also harder because if someone had pushed it to its upmost limit, you still had to find a way to do that further, which was the point of the exercise. For example if the emotion was “anger” and you were number 6, it was your job to go absolutely ape shit despite the person before you already having gone those extra 15 miles.

Myself and those who joined me on this exercise had the emotion of ‘panic.’ I was number 6 so I was the very limit of this emotion and I found it so very exhausting! Number 5 was shivering and screaming and their body was just one giant convulsion and I wondered how on earth and all the planets I was going to top that. When you really put your mind to it and you work hard enough and let yourself go, it is achievable. It was a real joy and fun performing this exercise because it enabled you to do just those things – let go, explore these emotions, be free, scream and shout and know that no emotion ever actually has an ending.

 It was as equally as interesting from an audiences’ perspective too. It was really beneficial to watch these emotions progress, especially when the group after mine had two numbers, so number 1 ended up having to show the first stages of the emotion such as anger and also the 7^th, halfway through the pushing of the emotion. It was interesting to see how they differed.

The exercise really emphasised some of Artaud’s beliefs and theories as a practitioner. He believed that theatre is "not to entertain - nor instruct – affect.” We certainly exercised this theory by the emotion line task and practised the mind over body and the body over mind.
We explored our human mind as individuals and when things got really pushed, we dipped into our emotion memory and worked with that. We featured some “in your face theatre” within this exercise as our emotions that we extended and pushed and pulled to its limit were thrown up our audience.