Puritan Faith

As a company we have been working on the idea of Religion this last week, as the group are performing scenes from 'The Crucible' By Arthur Miller.  The Puritan faith is a major theme in this play and I wanted the group to grasp how vital an understanding of religion is.

The pieces will be explored using the Stanislavski method of Acting, so it is important that the group feel what it was like to be so religious, and not to intelectualise what it was like. They must explore their feeling of God, their feeling of spirituality.

We set about creating this feeling by firstly removing ourselves from 2009.  In order to do this we created a pile of visual images to set up what Salem looked like - we used our senses to smell Salem to touch Salem and to taste Salem...Foods we ate were important to create reality...and to do this as a whole group was important so we make the decisions collectively - we created the place together.

After working as a group of Puritans it was important to now work as an individual, so we then decided to have a 'conversation with God'  This was the most productive part of the day and the actors really got a sense of spirituality with this exercise.  We used music to open up the channel of conversation and the visual images created were very clear.

A very productive day creating visual pictures of Salem and producing feelings of spirituality and religious contentment.

Next Week : 'The Truth is in the Eyes'