Scene #2 Sloth Reflection

After finishing the scene of Gluttony, we moved on to Sloth. 

Ruby started her workshop by defining sloth: 

"There are two meaning in Sloth:

-Sloth can be an attitude of procrastination; it can be the kind of laziness which shows disregard for the importance of others. Sloth is putting physical comfort before spiritual work.

-Sloth is spiritual laziness which is a way of disrespecting God. Sloth means not being diligent in spiritual matters, like neglecting daily prayers, never reading the Bible or practicing devotions, and not paying attention at church. Sloth is the act of not feeding the soul." (R. Kan 2010)

After we understood the definition, she showed us her first stimulus- a song. 

The song had a very repetitive beat and tune. It reminded me off sleepless nights, and lying in bed for hours and hours but not either, being able to go to sleep, or not being bothered to get out of bed. I found it fairly intimidating as it's so repetitive and irksome in a way- it reminded me very much of the sin sloth. 

Together we brainstormed and wrote down different words that the song evoked. We were then asked to move in a way that represented the words we came up to the music. Since I have previous dance experience from outside of school, movement is usually my strength. Despite this, I still find it fairly challenging to move in a Butoh way. In dance, several movements are fast, bold, exciting etc. and they are often 

designed mainly to look impressive/excelling etc. In Butoh it's the opposite and it's this I'm finding challenging. I often find myself wanting to do more movements bolder, faster, different etc. instead of grotesque, slow, meaningful etc. 

After the song, Ruby showed us two other stimiluses (how do you spell this?) in the form of images. 

 

I find both of these fairly provocative, disturbing and inspirational. The first image relates to struggling, fighting/battle etc. while the second image partly represents what happens to a person that commits the sin of sloth. Once again, we were asked to move in a way that related to these two images. 

Finally the director, Ruby, combined the different movements we came up with in order to finalize the blocking and eventually the whole scene.