Stockholm Resource Pack - Frantic Assembly

Development of 'Us'
We were interested in our couple as hostages. Not as literal
hostages. Nor as being particularly conscious of the their
hostage status but we wanted to find a way of suggesting
another force between them, around them, without them.
We played around with a particularly effective technique
that we saw performed brilliantly in Snowshow by Russian
clown Slava Polunin. We saw this show in 1996 and it is
still doing the rounds!
To replicate our version of this stage trick hang up 3 coats
close together, ideally on a coat stand or rack. Two
performers then put on the out side arm of the two outside
coats but they also nonchalantly put their arm through a
sleeve each of the central coat. They then grab at their
throats with the arm in the central coat. This coat opens up
to suggest the back of a large being that has our two
protagonists by the throat. The actors struggle and look up
to where the figure's head should be.
kitchen. The challenge here is for the actors to stay true to
the choreography from the waist down but to simultaneously
stay true to the waist up exercise of putting away cutlery
and crockery.
The resultant effect was of a strange physical union. It
became totally believable from the outside that the couple
had no idea that they were acting in unison, even when the
task brought them very close together spatially. It seemed
to give them a very elegant history that needed no
enforcement, a synchronicity without effort and, at slower
speeds, an achingly beautiful sense of being “the one” for
each other.
When this works, it really works.
We tried out actors talking as hostages, as victims of this
force that exists between them and renders them helpless.
We had them bark out the demands of the mysterious
hostage takers talking to them. We also tried it with the
hostage takers talking to us (the audience).
All of this was the groundwork and food for thought for the
development of the 'Us' characters.
Kitchen Feet
(by Steven Hoggett)
An additional exercise we ran also made use of our
makeshift kitchen environment. The actors created a foot
sequence that was a freestyle dance routine created in an
open space that had no grounding in any formal dance
style. The objective was to make a string that would seem
like a selection of moves enjoyed by the individual but were
seen to be personal in some way, played underneath the
self rather than played out. The moves themselves were
confident and known but had to retain a sense of privacy.
The actors were placed in pairs and taught each other their
string. From here, they repeated the exercise of putting
things away in the kitchen but this time the floor pattern
was made up of them recreating the foot sequence in the
Georgina Lamb
Photo Scott Graham
11