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.