The Pin Hinge Collective have established the theme of their first show: Love. Mundane love, ordinary love, real love. Our company is extremely interested in pinning together what it means to be human, and as we explored how one may discover their identity, we found that we have all had experiences with love – these experiences have shaped our lives and helped us discover ourselves. This, we recognised, is a universal wonder.

What better way to discover love stories than to recount our own? Each member of our company prepared short stories to share with each other, specifically about our experiences of love. We brought to the table a range of narratives, from inspirational lovers to adultery, to historic love and to listing the personal, little things in love that make us happy. These stories helped us to create a structure for our performance.

Love is a physical being, it exists not only emotionally but physically. As we worked through a storyboard, we outlined how a simple story of love can be portrayed through movement. To explore further into this possibility, I looked into Frantic Assembly, a physical theatre company founded in 1994. Their movement explores the energy between performers, something which is particularly interesting to me as Movement Choreographer. A movement story of love must inevitably involve a close connection between performers; energy must be ever present and must pass through each actor as they work together.

Here are some videos of the company exploring movement, and our recent experiments with physicality.

To find out each actor’s movement capabilities, we discussed who was comfortable with physical movement, and who has prior experience with methods of physical theatre. I then led a warm up and a series of physical theatre exercises to explore people’s flexibility, strength and abilities in physicality. These exercises included contact improvisation and lifts, as well as ‘push hands’ exercise, of which Frantic Assembly describes that it “helps participants get used to the notion of non-verbal and essentially physical communication between performers” (Graham and Hoggett, 2009, 105).

You can see from the two videos below the advancements we made in our rehearsal, going from three lifters to two lifters. These are developments we hope to continue as we move forward with movement routines.

As Movement Choreographer for The Pin Hinge Collective, my aim for future sessions is to build trust between performers, and continue with exercises such as ‘round by through’, which “requires fluidity and balance” (ibid, 131) and ‘hymns hands’, which is used “to show the flexibility of choreography” (ibid, 155).  Movement can show the strong emotional connection between characters, and has the potential to be a beautiful addition to our first performance as a company.

Graham, S. and Hoggett, S. (2009) The Frantic Assembly book of Devising Theatre. Abingdon: Routledge.