Waking up for the first time

This was a cleverly design warm up to get us to stop acting and start feeling. We were told to lay down on the floor like we were sleeping and in relative terms to the play this how we start it off. In order to get into the mind set of this exercise I completely 100% cleared my mind of everything that made me,me because If I was waking up for the first time I would have no essence of the person I was. I also considered what someone suffering from amnesia might feel when they first open their eyes to this new world.

I had to consider that everything was alien and new and scary and exciting and every emotion under the sun could be zipping through my head but I couldn't just act out these emotions I had to feel each individual one. As I first opened my eyes I felt compelled to reach for the floor and inspect the ground as if it was the first time I had ever touched carpet but I hesitated... I had to think whether it could burn my skin or it could engulf me whole so I proceeded with caution and felt it gently. Then I started to think what am I feeling the floor with? My hands. I began to investigate my skin and my hands and it felt weird that this was a completely new concept. Would I even know what to call it? I then began observing my facial features as I felt it was more instinctual for me to be concerned about my self before I started probing my environment.

This exercise helped me to consider all the possibilities of this situation, while writing this conclusion I felt like I needed some textual evidence so I could compare this exercise to another one or something so I went to find a book to aid me, I found THEATRE GAMES by Clive Barker and within the chapter marked the mind I came across something interesting! What I took from this chapter is that games like this help to subconsciously apprehend characteristic but physically, It takes more than just thinking about what the character might feel but to go further and as a result of doing physical work we absorb these idiosyncrasies. Compared to one of the games featured in the book is "the fight in the dark" if you wish to read about the fundamentals of this game I have found an online version of this book but in a nut shell much like waking up for the first time it embodies the sense of trading the mindset you have and trading it for a different one in order to survive because after all if we don't figure out who we are how else are we going to live?

 Theatre Games by Clive Barker