Friday, 25 October 2013

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.


1 comment:

  1. A good entry with description and explanation of your discoveries- be specific to what you have offered to the process- well done. MERIT

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