Evaluation of performance

Evaluation

For our performance this week we had a number of different weaknesses but for every weakness we had more strengths. Karen made a little evaluation sheet with some simple questions to help us to know what they thought of it, why they thought that and what could be improved. Well for 'Box' we got mainly positive feedback for our performance and high ratings for our energy and good (but could be better) for our vocal strength. I agree with both of these as one of our weaknesses was sometimes our projection. I think this could have been due to uncertainty in some scenes, in the order of which we spoke, for example in our final scene where we all had a line, or in the dream scene where we didn't have a lot of light so we needed to really on our vocal strength to keep the scene engaging.

One of many strengths, was that nobody forgot their lines. Well even if they did, it definitely was not noticeable by me, so wouldn't have been noticeable by the audience. I feel a weakness though was that we were not brilliantly prepared for the start of the show, for example, the drum for the first scene which I needed to use wasn't in place, so I had to get it into the right place before we started which caused a delay and took away focus from the others. Luckily I think that was our weakest point and the show went upwards from there. The timing of the piece was not affected by the previous mishap and was possibly the best we had ever ran it. The beating of the drum really brought a nice aspect as it made it seem like the pace was just right, not to slow but also not too fast.

Some of the emotions the audience felt:

-Pain
-Prejudice
-Pity
-Sorrow
-Sympathy
-Sadness
-Happiness
-Confusion
-Hope
-Tension

All the audience had their own opinion on what scene they liked best, but the majority of the vote went to 'The Race'. Some of them liked this scene because they liked the build up with the music, or just because they liked the energy. At least every scene was mentioned in this category at least once, so I feel this made all of our work worthwhile. I feel like we did well to put across the subject matter, by creating a aim to follow which was 'Through physical representation ‘Box’ presents the varying capabilities and restrictions of the human body, in order to confront the prejudice and ignorance in society today.' We used a lot of symbolism in our piece for example the puppet scene, by using the idea of puppets; it mirrors the idea of Anna having to be dependent. From the feedback we got given the audience felt as if we achieved our aim in our outcome, as the majority of the feedback was positive.

Our group worked very well as a team, it might have taken us a little while to come together but we finally did it in the end.  I think one of the reasons for this could be because I joined the group late so we had to go through the whole process of meeting and getting to know each other but I felt very welcome. We managed to come up with some very interesting and creative ideas and represent them in intriguing ways together. In the final performance we worked together as a team and reassured and reminded each other where things needed to be and what scene was next. We also worked well in the sense that we all wanted and respected the fact that we wanted to do well and so got on with rehearsals by focusing and being there as much as we could. Characterization was something that we definitely included as everyone had their own character, for example Joe and Reece both had a lot of mentions in the ‘who stood out’ question. Reece and Joe were named ‘E’ and ‘G’ for evil and good. They mirrored each other and this was effective as like the audience said, they stood out, they also wore face paint to so a smile and a frown.

Our use of dynamics and energy were both strong, we represented these throughout as we always had control of our characters and what they were doing. We used a range of dynamics, the most obvious were shown in the transition between the race and the finish line scene, very we used music to show the change in soft movements to represent Anna when she is at her happiest, and gentle and uplifting music was played, to a more sinister and troubled atmosphere where we changed to struggling and stiff movements using tense bodies. We did this when the music accented and the light turned to red. 

A good example of a strength is how focused the group was. This was probably shown most obviously in the first scene with the chairs and how focused everyone needed to be to concentrate on timing. Everyone needed to be aware of what was happening around them as I was in charge of the drum beats though we couldn't see each other and had to go by ear. As well as focusing by ear the group did well the focus on one spot whilst doing the movements, this created a more dramatic atmosphere which could of easily been taken away by just one person being distracted from the piece. 

Devising Week Two

Week Two: (Wednesday)

I attended college on Monday last week, but I did not attend all of Wednesday because I was ill. I came in fore the last hour to make sure I could catch up on what had be created, changed or developed. On Monday we decided to re cap on what we had already done, and started to come up with ideas for a moral, or a point that we are trying to put across to the audience. We also had to name our performance and through our group conversation we came up with the title 'Box'. The name fits well with the situation as it represents the restrictions of the body and this is one of the themes we were trying to piece together. This also went with the aim of the performance which was,

 'Through physical representation ‘Box’ presents the varying capabilities and restrictions of the human body, in order to confront the prejudice and ignorance in society today.'

We decided to change the name from Christina to Anna, to keep it a little bit different and devised. We also went back and looked at two scenes we had already which was the 'Chair Scene' and the 'Puppet Scene' and we developed these by staggering the chairs in the puppet scene to try and tidy it up and make sure that the audiences focus is equally shared with each actors movement. The feedback we got for this scene when we showed it was that we needed to tidy it up, and make it a bit more engaging. So we thought about changing the facial expressions from neutral and blank to some people have their smiles put on for them, for example Zac painted on Charlotte's face, still fitting in with the puppet theme.

We also revisited some of our first ideas that were never really evolved  to try and give our performance more depth. One of these ideas that was inspired by the painting was the theme of a 'dream', and so that is what sparked the idea of creating the 'Dream' scene. The dream scene started off with Karen getting us all to try a exercise where we all scuttling from one side of the room to the other creating more and more energy. The exercise we did seemed to get the energy flowing as we all sparked some creative ideas after this. We all loved the idea of the scuttling across, and so we decided to keep this movement and create around it. We came with all sorts of possible characters, personalities, plots, ways in which we could blend scenes and so on, but we decided this week to create a sense of imagination by using torches as 'light' from what would seem to be 'Anna's' sort of happy place. The light idea brought the scene to life as well as coming up with the idea to move what ended up a spotlight at the back of the stage to Anna with the torches so it looked like we were moving the light to her. We wanted the audience to think we were physically moving the spotlight towards her and so it was an idea we could take to our final performance. Joe and Reece both created a scene as well which was called 'Duality' Reece named himself 'E' for evil and Joe 'G' for good. The purpose of this scene was to show Anna's good and bad thoughts, and so Joe and Reece came up with the idea of mirroring each other. They got this idea from the inspiration of 'Alice in Wonderland' that more that one of us got so we used it. Reece liked the idea of using Tweedledee and Tweedledum, so that was wear they then built their characters from.

Blog Two additions:

Includes what I had specifically contributed to the work this week:

During this week the actual groups energy was becoming a little bit more positive and exciting as we were coming up with more unique and creative ideas, and also ideas to develop what we already had. Although I must be honest and was still a bit hesitant of putting ideas forward I contributed to the idea of the dream as I choreographed a smooth and mellow energy dance to a piece of music composed by Zac. This helped bring the dream theme to life as it was very angelic and peaceful to the audience and contrasted with some of the more serious but important scenes for example the puppets, which looked brilliant but the atmosphere was tense, though it was definitely supposed to be at this point. I also sparked some ideas towards the group like the use of 'bread' which I was inspired by from the painting, but that idea didn't really go anywhere, as we couldn't really come up with an idea to include this. I also contributed the idea of changing the name from Christina to Anna as I thought personally it should be different from the other group, but also Anna is her first name in real life, the painting was based on her middle name. 
Since I wasn't here when they first created 'The Puppet Scene' and 'The Chair Scene' I was always needed to check for timing, focus and facial expression. By making the same focus point for everyone in the chair scene it looked a lot better and effective in the scene it looked slick towards the audience. The timing had always been quite tricky in the chair scene so our idea was to put in a drum beat to keep it in time. This also helped develop the piece and so I did this until we thought it was slick enough. We were not going to actually put the drum in it was just to help get timing right but we did a team vote as some of us did not want the drum in although the majority of us did. I started with four beats to count in everyone. No one could see me so it was all about concentration from everyone, and we all needed to be aware in the final performance.

This was not only my idea, and I don't wan't to take all the credit, but I did contribute in developing someones original idea of using boxes, in the dance scene between Paige and Zac. We had the idea of banging on the boxes to create a tense atmosphere but also because it looked and sounded effective with four of us (Me, Charlotte, Abbi and Elle) doing it together  We experimented with different ideas for example, tapping, knocking, thumping. Each sounding a little different. The first sound we did was a banging sound which sounded like a heart beat and so added a lot of feeling to the piece. I certainly felt by hearing the heart beat like noise whilst watching the dance, it made me feel like it was my own heart, and so I thought this was a strong piece of drama to put across. The second noise had to go with the idea of dead weight which we used to represent with a more delayed bang, which could make you feel a bit sympathetic towards Anna. The last was more gentle and relaxed and so we used a small tapping of the fingers which gradually got faster and faster. We came to the decision to use these by trying out different methods and picking the ones we felt were more appropriate.

The picture below shows Reece and Joe during 'Duality' they mirror each other whilst one is good and one is evil. Anna is based in the middle and E and G are either side this show a  similarity to the picture below which shows an angel and a devil. It often shows right and wrong or like they are named 'Good' and 'Evil'. This seemed effective as they both have their own characters and I thought it would be good if everyone had their own characters so the following week we decided to make sure this was the case.

Devising Week Three

Week Three (Monday/Wednesday)

This week we had been in full swing trying to polish, develop what needed to be develop and tried to tie it all together to try and give the best performance we could. We were working with lights, music, different dynamics, changing levels and space and all the while still trying to get it all finished.

Things we did this week..

-Added speech

One of our overall weaknesses were that some of our scenes didn't have enough or were to dull. We looked at our scenes in which had speech and which did not have speech and we decided on the scenes we don't have speech to either add music or something more to make the scene a bit more engaging because we found with the more silent scenes, if they were all silent it felt very long, and that something was missing.

-Looked at our physical theater

We re visited our tableaux and decided it was a bit bland and could still be developed. So we took the opportunity in our movement class to ask Kirsty for her opinion. She gave us a few ideas to work with, one being to come in contact with the narrator more, and so we took that idea and become the tableaux of the house but instead of staying still we came to life when Paige moved us. This made it a lot more effective as it had a lot more to look at and take in than just a tableaux  We also added the idea of 'The watcher' which came from one of our initial ideas from the painting which was the feeling someone was watching 'Anna'. So we used Reece to play the watcher and he also got involved with the moving tableaux. The idea of the watcher came from the inspiration of the painter who didn't actually help her, he just watched her. We also decided to add more levels by positioning yourself differently, for example we put Paige on a chair behind the tableaux so it no longer felt we were up staging her.

-Added music

We ended up adding music to a number of our scenes, the first being to the chair scene, and I was asked to play a drum beat in time to the movement, and so for the majority of monday morning we were working out and fitting these drum beats to the movement. The drum beat worked really well with the movement as both worked really well together to create tension. The second scene we added music to was to the puppets which was straight after the chair scene, and so both scenes lacked the same properties. By adding music to the puppet scene, it also created tension, but also opened up a new perspective. The puppet scene at first seemed quite humorous but adding the music allowed it to create the atmosphere we wanted to pursue. This atmosphere was quite manipulative but gave across a simple message. The emotion we wanted the audience to experience was along the lines of sympathy, caged, a sense of restriction. The puppets mirrored how Anna was dependent on others. The third scene we added music to was the dream scene, we wanted something quite magical and soft to take a more hopeful and positive side to create a contrast to the more tense scenes shown before. We asked Zac who wasn't in this scene to play around with a few pieces of music, Zac played an original piece that worked amazingly well with the scene, it also added just that extra touch to create a sensual and dreamy scene. The fourth and final scene we added music too was a very last minute addition. Even though it may have been last minute it was worth the struggle to get it finished on time. I had found a piece of music that had just the right amount of time to not change any dialog that had already been created, and to only include simple, easy but effective choreography. The music was by Marco Beltrami, and the piece was could 'suite' it is a ten minute piece of music written for the film 'soul surfer' but I edited it down to the time starting from '3-40' and ending at '7-49'. This added more time to our piece and showed a clear build up in the climax too. The music ran over for two of our scenes which were ' The Race' and The Finish Line' we needed a piece of music that was gentle and touching enough for the race but also changed to a strong a fierce sound for the finish line to show the struggle of Anna's emotions. I thought this piece of music fit just right for this as at '5-04' the music changed rapidly to a speedier tempo. I feel this music really brought out our ability when going for the struggle.

Link below is the music described:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2EOBJ2QB3I

-Added Choreography

The choreography we added this week was to the 'Dream scene' where I came up with the idea to create a small but meaningful dance to go with Zacs music. The choreography consisted of small dainty arm movements which Anna would copy from me, Elle, Paige and Charlotte. We also were the characters which helped Anna into the 'light'. Another piece of choreography was in the race scene where Charlotte and Paige were on the blocks doing movements in time with the music and that flowed well with the music, but also reflected supporting Anna and cheering her on. This linked on with the last piece of choreography, which I had choreographed the night before the performance just in case the others decided they liked the idea to add it in. The choreography consisted of a sudden change in dynamics as; the music indicated the changing of scenes. Joe and Reece ran on and used the finish line to wrap around Anna. This indicated the restrictions of not only her body but her emotions. I thought of the idea of her emotions struggling with her and so I choreographed everyone struggling in their own way, using big movements and breathing heavily to show the struggle in sounds as well as big body movements. Then whilst we were struggling we were urging her on to fight against it, this created a sense of guidance, which we felt showed Anna's battle. A piece of choreography I added was at ‘6.22’ where I thought a powerful move would be to suddenly stop struggling and do a strong movement by moving the arm back whilst looking at it, and this happens when the music accents. The movement was powerful because everyone did it and no one was afraid of the stillness. She finally ends the struggle and defeats her own emotions, and this was shown with a powerful 'NO' at '6.50' in the music. The build-up stops and everyone stands to copy Anna, who was in fact walking, as if she has taken her first steps. Anna is still in her dream world at this point. The movements finished at '7.49' where the chorus faded out and Anna was at the front looking straight ahead, and the music also fades out with the center of attention on Anna, (played by Abbi).

-Made movement bigger

We made movements bigger in the race, during the choreography as described above. This is because when we previewed it, the feedback we got to improve on this scene was to make our movements even bigger to show clear and powerful dynamics used to represent the struggle.

-Discussed costume

We decided to wear all black but with either something unique to show our different characters and/or have our faces painted. I chose to have my face painted with silver and pink to show off in the dream scene where my face would be mainly lit by my torch. Another example would be Paige who wore something pink to fit with the sort of fairy characters we were trying to bring to life.

-Discussed Lighting

This week we discussed and played, and ran the lighting. On Wednesday we skipped through scenes and plotted lights with Karen. Being in the theater and seeing our work being ran with the lights and the proper working space really enhanced everything and made it look already ten times better. The lights we chose to work with showed off our creations as well as we could. We worked with Imogen and Rae-Anne who did our lights. An example of how we had our lighting is in the Finish line scene, with the sudden change to Anna’s struggle, it went straight to red which I think is quite a controlling colour which was really effective and went brilliantly with what was going on.

-Worked on beginning

We decided to use an idea created by Karen, to use petals to be put into the box. The petals were scattered around at the beginning by me and a petal was put into the box by each character before each scene. We enhanced the box by putting a spotlight on it every time someone did this. This also gave us the opportunity to make a smooth transaction while the audience is being distracted by this movement.

-Worked on ending

We needed to work on the ending since we needed to explain the point of the petals. The petals reflected a sentence in which uplifted Anna, and were created to go with each scene. Each character had a line that was put into the box at some point during the show. So the ending revealed the meaning of each petal chosen by each character. The ending also showed a purpose for our performance name 'Box'. We added levels to this scene to try and make it seem a bit more engaging, as it was our final scene after all. We were slightly lit but had the main focus on the box and Paige who was playing Anna at this point.

Our main focus before the show was to smooth out our transitions because we didn't want to over use black outs as this would take away a lot of the energy from the piece. We achieved this by running it over as many times as we could, and adding in suitable and neat transitions. For example the transition from the race scene into the finish line, smoothed into each other and no one came off stage, but we showed the transition, by the dynamic in the music, the atmosphere became more tense, and the lighting changed to red. We made the atmosphere more tense by using more scared and struggling faces to show we were in trouble and couldn't move. 

Our final scenes:
1.Chairs
2.Puppets
3.The Watcher
4.Dream
5.Duality 
6.Race
7.Dance
8.Box

Lighting.

The lighting played a huge part in our final performance because it helped lift scenes where they needed to be lifted and darken more sinister scenes. For example in the race scene, where Anna is happy there was a pink wash as it really reflected the emotion and also could relate to her pink dress. It gave a nice contrast to our costumes which were black and also contrasted with the next scene which turned to a blood red, to show Anna's sudden change in emotion and that she was in trouble. The black costumes also worked well with this as the black went well with every colour. Who ever played 'Anna' wore a ribbon in their hair.

Week One: (Wednesday 2nd October)

This week we were given a stimulus to help us start devising a piece of drama. The stimulus we were given was a painting named Christina's World. The painting was painted in 1948 by an American painter named Andrew Wyeth. The painting was based on a woman named Christina Olson. I had only just started on the course and so the group had already started devising with their own ideas, and I had been asked to look at the painting and note down any inspiration I got from the piece, with out being told any of the paintings background before hand.

From the painting I got this inspiration:

Smells: fresh, earthy, smoke.
Taste: baking, bread
Touch: wind, cool air, smooth grass
Feeling: A sense of hope, longing for something, exhaustion, a sense of sadness
Shapes: I found a sense of sharp shapes that were crooked

After we shared our own ideas, we then were told the facts about the painting, for example the painter of the piece used Christine as the subject of the painting who was a woman with a muscle deterioration that paralyzed her lower body. This is a condition called polio and Christine was known to had suffered from this. The painter was inspired to paint this as Christine one day, caught his eye as she struggled to pull herself across the field. The top half of the painting was painted in the style of Wyeth's wife Betsy, as he wanted to give the girl in the painting a more youthful image, and the second half was Christine's own shape. The painting was known to be a very popular piece of art and any one who was interested in art knew about it or had it somewhere in their homes. 

Sharing Ideas.

Next I was put into a group who had already started devising and so I started to watch what they already had. I was then asked to share my own ideas, for example from what i listed above, as an emotion, I listed hope. They instantly liked the idea of including the word hope into the piece. We liked the idea of using hope to start thing of a positive ending as the rest of the devised piece seemed a lot more negative to begin with. 

We started devising to other pieces which included physical theater and text. One in which was a tableaux and was developed from the picture itself. We formed into the picture for example I was part of an outbuilding leaning of the house in the picture. I crawled into a shape to represent the crooked shape and to show levels. We decided to take another idea of 'wind blowing' from the noise section and include it to create the atmosphere and almost bring the tableaux to life. 

The second piece we came up was evolved around a piece of text. We decided we wanted a scene that included some text and so we used a poem written by one of our group members. I think we still need to come up with some ideas on how to develop this scene for example, we only have each other walking in and standing and saying things at the same volume. I think we will experiment with volumes. 

I feel it is a very inspiring piece, especially having never seen it before. I feel it has more messages that might be known deep within the painting and I would like to research more and try and bring these more in depth messages to the pieces of drama. 

Week One: (Thursday)

On Thursday we were asked to carry on with our division and also to go back to some of the scenes we had already done and try to develop them into longer and more engaging scenes. 

We were able to incorporate the idea of some lifts and expanded this idea into more of a scene. We took one lift between Paige and Zack and decided to include more lifts and decided to use more people to fill the space. We thought of a routine used in unison to develop the piece and to try and sustain creativity. We are not sure about keeping this idea but I think we should keep it and develop it. 

Our group went back to our two scenes that we developed on the Wednesday and included feed back from Karen and how we should think about expanding and giving it more of a core. Karen suggested experimenting different volumes and paces withing the poem scene and for the tableaux scene to be longer and bigger. We spent the afternoon mainly looking at the scene with the poem experimenting with voices, levels, space, pace and focus points to see what we liked and what we thought we could take and use for a different scene.

For example we tried using louder voices, quiet voice, using one voice, or two voices, and in the end we decided we like using most voices as a whispers and having the person directly behind Christine to use his own level of volume, so not a whisper but not a shout. We liked this as we thought it brought a slight chill atmosphere and  it seemed like an effective technique.

We decided to maybe use the tableaux scene to lead on to a new scene which we have created in the idea of Christine's imagination. We got the inspiration from the words 'Christine's World' as if she was in a different world and we are going to start devising that next week.

Blog One additions:

During the first week, it took me a little while to get to grips with the task as I had come in, right at the very last chance. A weakness to or group was no ones fault, but I was apprehensive of putting my ideas across since I didn't want to interfere with something I hadn't fully understood yet. A strength however was that I was lucky enough to have lovely people in my group who would help explain what they had already done 'The Chair Scene' 'The Puppets' and try and show why they have put specific things in. At this point it was quite fresh and hadn't been developed and so a lot of work needed to be done to it. My group explained how they wanted to bring to life her emotions some how and by using puppets it shows bodily restrictions. The energy in the group at this point was a little bit mellow and maybe was lacking ideas. I think it may have been a bit challenging to create ideas at first but the more we took it apart the more ideas we came up with. I liked the idea of having the exhaustion energy as it is quite powerful but we left this for a while. We then re visited this idea and used it to develop 'The Finish Line' This energy helped show the struggle in Anna's emotions, and everyone around her looked exhausted and also sounded exhausted. We did this by creating dead weight movements and using our bodies to look heavy and tired. The sounds we made to represent this emotion was created by using different dynamics in our breathing, for example, some of us were breathing loud, or quick, or even gasping for air to show not only exhaustion but a real fight. Another piece of this emotion came after the struggle where everything slowed right down, as normally after a fight against something, causes exhaustion.