Renowned theatre group The Wardrobe Ensemble visited Bloxham School, giving many of our Drama students the chance to enjoy their critically acclaimed production of “Riot”, as well as running an evening workshop

Many thanks to India Willes for her response to this fantastic production of Riot and workshop led by the cast that our Drama students enjoyed last Tuesday.

The Wardrobe Ensemble performed their acclaimed 5-star show Riot in The Great Hall on Tuesday 16th September for Academic Drama, Third Form and a number of other students who came to see what it was all about.

 

The Performance

Riot was based around the 2005 Ikea opening that caused chaos when customers abandoned normal behaviour in a fight for the best bargains. Although there were only ten actors in the cast, an exciting combination of techniques highlighted the volume and intensity of the customers that flocked to the store that night. The use of music was impressive; when the actors were not multi-rolling they played instruments such as the trombone and saxophone, creating a distinct mood of chaos, while at points this created humour, for example, the over-exaggerated running of one character (James Blumpt). Throughout the play, Ikea lamps were used on-stage by the actors to spotlight a character when talking, I thought this was a very clever way to set the scene and made it look very impressive visually. Overall, this was one of the best performances I have seen as it highlighted how human personalities can change whilst blinded by greed and longing, and how others respond to unexpected situations.

The Workshop

The main focus of the workshop was ensemble, we were encouraged to support one another, an example of this was when we all stood in our own space and waited for someone to spontaneously start to make a noise, when we recognised who was producing the sound everyone else ran over to the person and added to the sound, creating an assemblage of noises which we then developed to sound like a setting. Later, we walked around the space experimenting with tempo and duration of our movement, gestures, using another person’s movement to shape your own and support (as in the earlier activity). With all of these techniques combined we could start to see fragments of scenes unfolding which then could start to form the basis for devising our own pieces.

I feel this workshop started us on our journey towards understanding how the cast of Riot worked towards their production – through our exploration of working as an ensemble we could start to get a sense of how important it is to support each other whilst performing. It also provided us with important tools we can use to devise our own performances.