Proformance Evaluation (Devising)

Overall I think that the performance was good, but not as smooth and slick as we had previously rehearsed it. A few minor bits were missed and sometimes our timing with getting on stage was not very good.

Scene 1 (Hospital)

The movement of the scene flowed well, in terms of the fight sequence, but some of the dialogue was a bit off, for instance the lines that were said in the rehearsal process were altered slightly, not making the sentence make sense. But the fight sequence was slick and therefore worked really well to add tension between the characters of the parents, played by Bradley Williams and Yasmin Fellah.

Scene 2 (Trap)

In this scene it worked as we had planned in the rehearsal, although I felt like Alicia was slipping on the lift, I managed to maintain my character and therefore it wasn't noticeable. The only problem I felt about this scene was the fact my face was meant to be completely blank, but when we watched it back I just looked bored, if I was given the opportunity to redo this I would have widen my eye's more and stared out to the clock.

Scene 3 (Im the real Christina)

This scene was great in the way in which it was exactly the way we rehearsed it, the timing with our heads out of the curtain was good, and also the bit we had worked on with all being in sync was the best we had ever done it. Our only problems were that the audience found the curtain bit and the crawling funny, which was not our intention, and also two people turned round late when Dan's lift happened, but luckily we caught him. If we had to look at the scene again I probably would have had us choreograph what we were saying so that there were not any bits of dialogue that the audience would find funny, and also I would have had the others enter in a different way rather than crawling, maybe have them walk forward to there spot looking into the audience with facial expressions and body language that match the version of Christina they were playing.

Scene 4 (The Circle)

The circle was ok, the beginning was a bit delayed due to getting the blocks of from the scene before, and they dialogue wasn't projected as much as it could have been, but apart from that the mini monologues that everyone had to say were believable, unlike the rehearsals where we had problems with this.

Scene 5 (Obstacles)

The obstacle scene was my favourite, we were all in sync with one another, including the music, for me this was a great scene to build up tension in our performance and the green eerie lighting fitted perfectly with it.

Scene 6 (Bus Stop)

In my opinion this scenes maybe let down the others in our piece, as it was straight after the Obstacle scene where we had built a lot of tension, which then kind of fizzled out in this scene. Also on a personal criticism I think I overplayed my part, so it sounded more pantomime then was intended, and therefore my character wasn't as believable as it could have been.

Scene 7 (Am I Free?)

Am I free was the best scene to leave our audience, we used the repetition from each one of Christina's monologue's and put them into one, and then used the "I Am Free" line which was spelt out on the rest of the groups t-shirts. But what really got the audience was the plot twist of "Am I Free?" And I could tell this by their reaction at the end of the scene, which was just what we were looking for.

Audience's Views

When it came to our strength in voice we were 5/10's, 8/10's all sorts of different numbers and I think this is because of the nerves at the beginning got in the way and so the projection of the dialogue was a little off, but as it got through the performance you could tell in our voices that we were getting more compftable with the piece.

One of the questions on the sheet we gave the audience was "did any characters stand out to you?" And the majority of people said no, which was what we were going for, we wanted to show how difficult it is to find yourself in a contampry way, and so if we had one character stand out then instantly that would me that they have found themselves.

Audience's Comments:

Some of the audience had left comments and here is a few I have chosen to share with you.

"The atmosphere spoke for its self."
"Loneliness and curiosity in one."
"Offered many feelings towards Christina."
"It confused me in a good way."
"I'm curious to know who the real Christina is."

My views on the group and rehearsal process

In our group we did have some differences at the beginning, but we used these different ideas we had to create stronger scenes then they were on their own. And even at some points some of us felt that we were not getting our ideas across, so when this happened we split into two groups to make use of all these different ideas. We all contributed to every scene in some way.
The communication in our group was good, we were talking on Facebook discussing notes, also ideas and helping each other with blog entries when we were stuck.

The rehearsal process itself was slow at first but once we got through the mental block for ideas, it opened up a whole bunch of them and personally I like the scenes we had created even if some were stronger than others.

Conclusion

I believe that the performance had room for improvements, but the focus from the group was brilliant in and out of the devised piece, also the hard work put in by everyone did create something that was completely different from the stimulus but it still linked in some way.

I think that the aim "explores the notion of identity, isolation and freedom through the action of movement and to confront and challenge the perception of the "self."" was lived up to due to the audiences feedback.

And overall it was a great experience for me, as I found it helped me work well in a group, and also devise better, as I could not devise pieces very well before this.

Week 4 (Devising)

Week 4 was performance week, we had two scenes to create and a few to polish up, here is how it went:

We first devised one of our three scenes, originally at the start when we were creating ideas we split into two groups to devise a scene each and then critique one another, Imogen, Bradly, Shelby and Yasmin came up with the train scene, it was about showing how different we all are through different emotions, for instance Imogen was shy and reserved, Yasmin was angry and agitated, Shelby was open minded and free and Bradly was kindness. But when we watched the scene it was really naturalistic, so therefore the piece was long, very slow paced and so it lost the audience at time. So we thought that we would take the idea of this original scene and use it in our performance, we thought it could work well in devising piece because "The Real Christina" is all about finding who you are and so the different emotions could work well in  a scene.
For this scene everyone apart from Yasmin (who was Christina for this scene) stood staggered around the stage staring blankly into the audience, until Christina came to talk to us we thought that it would be like Christina is bring the different emotions of hers alive, so when we were brought to life our emotion would be shown by body language, facial expressions and how we spoke. We tried to pick very different emotions from one another in the group, so that the audience could tell that each character was separate.

After this we created our final scene, we had an idea for a while during the creation process of having a twist at the end and also that we could all wear letters through-out the performance rather than referring to one another using names. So we took both ideas and created our last scene, we thought it had to be simple without taking away the tension we have created in other scenes, so we used the sentence "I AM FREE" because there were seven of us, it fitted into the performance and there was a way of adding in the final person of our group, so we lined up with our letters taped to us in this order, Shelby (who was Christina in this scene) said a monologue at the front, we wanted her to go back to the start almost brining back some of that text but in a different way, we used the "can you feel that? Because I cant, can you hear that? Because I cant," but instead changing it to because I can, to make the audience feel like she's there she finally knows who she is then Shelby says "I am strong, I am independent and I am free, am I free?" we turn around at this point in our line to reveal that the word has changed from I AM FREE, to AM I FREE? Shelby joined the line as the question mark then, we planned for a fading black out.

We rehearsed the whole scene but it wasn't long enough, so the group thought of an idea, that maybe we could show how Christina got here, so we created the hospital scene, most of this scene was spoken to the audience, like frantic assembly's work, and we also added in a movement piece it was the mother and father fighting over their daughter, who had just gone into a coma, and Rae (who played Christina this scene) watched over the whole scene trying to make the stop.


The next day we had to work on the lighting, we were given a few minutes to rehears our piece before the tech run, but oddly enough we came up with an idea by just playing about in the curtains. The photo to the left, shows us sticking our heads through the curtains, now at the time we were messing about saying things like im the real Christina, then we realised that this could be incorporated into our box scene.

The lighting we had worked well with the piece and had shown a variety of different colours here is a list of what we had:


Hospital Scene: Scene one we had a simple wash at the beginning for the dialogue to the audience, but then when the fight/movement scene started, we had them change to blue.

Trap Scene: Scene two we had red when Alicia was sat on her own and also whilst we "trapped" her in the chair, when me, Rae and Dan moved back we had a spotlight on Alicia, so that for the next bit you could not see me Dan or Rae. Then finally we finished with a fading black out, as we had to get blocks on stage.

Box Scene: Scene three we had our heads through the curtains, so we had two lights from either side so that everyone could be seen at the back without lighting the rest of the stage, once everyone started to move out of the curtain, the lights became a simple wash again. And then the scene ended with a black out as we had to get the blocks off.

Circle Scene: Scene four we had a spotlight on Yasmin, so that when we eventually circled around her, some of us would be lit for the monologues and then when we span others would be.

Obstacle Scene: Scene five we had the lights change to green when Yasmin started to walk back, the lights remained this way through-out the mirror/obstacle scene until we all caved around Yasmin at the front.

Train Scene: Scene six was straight after the mirror/obstacle scene, so we changed the lighting from green to a simple wash once again.

I am free Scene: Scene seven used two lights like the ones for the curtain bit, but these were blue lighting the line we created the was a little strip of light for Shelby to then do her monologue. And then we finished with a slow fading blackout.

After our tech run we needed to polish scenes, such as the box scene and the train scene, but we were also told that our end scene loses the tension we create in our obstacle scene, so we developed that more as well.

Week 3 (Devising)

On Monday we started coming up with ideas and developing a new scene, one of our ideas was combining two exercises we had learned in previous classes, the first being an obstacle scene where one person would try and make it from one side of a room to another by crawling, but at the same time people were making obstacles in front of the person crawling, when we first did this exercise I thought of it as Christian's struggle in life, I now thought we could fit the obstacle idea into our piece as it is about the struggle of a young girl finding out who she is. We later developed the scene by adding on a mirror scene, after our character struggles through the obstacles, she is then met by lots of different versions of herself that copy what she does, we thought that this could be Christina (our version) trying to break free from the world, just like Jim Carrey's last scene in "The Truman Show" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6NNGxVt7h4) but instead of it being a wall, its an endless set of mirrors stopping her. We later thought we needed to start the scene some how, so we stuck with the idea of having a monologue every so often so that the audience could understand what was going on, my idea was to have Christina saying a monologue in the middle of the stage and the rest of us standing with out backs to her, until she say "can you feel that?" Then we held hands and curved round our character creating a circle, I also had the idea that each of us in the circle should say a short sentence that would be meant for Christina, but if we say it to the audience, then it would fit with our aim of trying to making them think who are we. Rae came up with the idea of us using a rule in our monologues, where we could each label our selves positive and negative, but the positive people followed up from the negatives with a but, and the negatives finished the sentence with a question. Then Yasmin thought of the idea that after each monologue we could turn into the next spot rather than stepping, we had to wait for the person speaking to stop and then count three beats before all turning at the same time.



On Wednesday we went back over the obstacle/mirror scene, and decided to add some music for quite a pacey scene, so Imogen played the song from the nutcracker, but she played around with the tempo that she would play it in, we then carried on polishing this scene.

We then added everyone into our "the real Christina" scene, by having Rae and Alicia kneeling in front of the boxes, and when everyone said "we are all the real Christina" they would rise, and Shelby, Bradley and Yasmin stepped of the boxes, then me, Dan and Bradley stepped back up onto the boxes, which later led into us all doing the same movement sequence that the others created earlier, we then came up with a lift, Dan would stand on a block and get pushed of by Shelby where the rest of us would catch him. We carried on perfecting the whole scene so that we could work out how we could move around the stage.

Later we started board storming ideas for some new scenes because we needed more minutes, so we came up with a hospital scene at the beginning, to show how Christina slips into a coma, but we planned to work on it next Monday.

Thursday Week 2 (Devising)

We had to now start piecing 8 scenes together and come up with our main, name, aims, themes and specific audience here's the final outcome of the story:

• Name: Lost in Sanity.
•  Aim: Lost in sanity explores the notion of identity, isolation and freedom through the action of movement and to confront and challenge the perception of the "self."
• Themes: Isolation and Self Identification.
• Audience: 16+

Our aim and audience both link together, as at the age of 16 you are in your final year of secondary school, you are having all these colleges, and ideas for the rest of your life thrown at you, you are also going to have a fresh start during the next year, new friends and teachers, and on top of this your taking your GCSE's and this can be hard for some young adults because your faced with hardest question "who are you?" Well this piece explores this subject in an abstract way.

The other half of our group the day before came up with a train scene, but we thought it was to naturalistic, so what we did was we, had the idea of "who is the real Christina?" She is being pushed down deep inside by all these emotions, so that is literally what we had done, we took three strong emotions, sadness, anger and happiness, each emotion was played by someone, and they said something that came from Christina's memories and every time the "real Christina" popped up the emotions would push her down further.

We had to later preform the scenes we had to the other group and the feed back we got for our chair scene was the same, as we had spent our time developing the others scene with them, but the emotions scene's feedback wad as follows:

• We needed to lengthen the piece more, and we had planned to use our movement class to develop an idea of using the whole group, like a flock of birds copying one person at the front all together.
• More emotions: the emotion characters need to completely separate themselves from one another the emotions need to come on very strong towards how they are feeling.

Wednesday Week 2 (Devising)

The group started off by splitting into two, Me, Dan, Rae and Alicia were working on a scene, which we later named trap, this scene used my older idea of the flames trapping someone in a chair, but with a few more ideas to lengthen the piece. The whole idea of this scene was to make sure the main character stayed in the chair no matter what, because we were trying to show that the character is being trapped by here own thoughts, we tried to use frantic assembly's physical theatre style to make the piece look more abstract.

The ideas we used to lengthen the piece were:

• Three move rule: two people sat beside Alicia they had three moves to trap her, she then had three moves to un trap herself, we later added text into the piece, which Alicia brought in and we only used the first paragraph. "I am strong, I am independent and I am free" but every time she said this text the rest of us tried to take away her sense of freedom.
• Flipping of the chair: the chair that the character needed to sit on gets moved during the scene so we needed a clean but smooth way of putting the chair back without banging or crashing, so me and Rae came up with the idea of flipping the chair over Alicia's head, this was a different, but also quite neat looking way of moving the chair to where we would have wanted it to go.
• Lift: we wanted to add a lift in because, if we did the scene very quick and slick the lift would have looked quite cool, so we finished the flame trap scene, and then had Alicia lean forward where me and Dan would catch her arms, then Rae would lift her legs and we all swung her, I think  this looked effective because it was as if we, her thoughts, were letting her go forward but yet pulling her back all of a sudden.

We later showed this to our lecturer, in order to get some feed back, here is what we had been given:

• Emotion/Really blank, we needed to either show an emotion on our faces, or if the scene need to have our faces blank, we needed to make it bigger, as we all looked like we were bored rather than expressionless.
• Make the flame scene bigger, we need to make the scene bigger by reaching out further and for longer, so it looks like Alicia is trying really hard to get away, and we a trying hard to keep her from getting away.
• Make the three moves bit longer, maybe add in some more movements or just repeat at different speeds.
• Heart beat sound, when we are going into a slow motion moment use a noise from our throats to make it sound like someone's heart beat.

Business In Theatre (job roles.)

Here is some of the work I have been doing in my Business in Theatre class, we are currently looking at a project, where we are looking at the roles of different people, if we were to put a show on in the Edinburgh Festival.

Thursday Week 1 (Devising)

Second day of week one, we had gotten straight into our groups, in order to share the research that we had gathered the night before, and we discussed what we had found, for instance I researched what effects drug abuse has on family's of the user, and the search actually turned into what can lead a person to turn to drugs and it came up with:

• Bad childhood or adulthood issues.
• The relationships between the parents and child.  
• Relationships with a partner (domestic abuse.)
• The area in which they a brought up.
• The friends they grow up with.

Now Bradley wasn't in during the Wednesday session, so we listened to his first impressions on the stimulus, and how we could either pair it with our ideas already or even create a new idea entirely.

Eventually after lots of discussing, and a few constructive debates we had an idea for a story that we could create a scene for, we had the idea of a girl who's family were in a fire, that she survived, and she gets sent to a horrible orphanage, were she shows here battle (struggle) with mental illness.

Now the scene we came up with, was that our character was having a mental breakdown about the fire, and we used her family to manipulate her using guilt, the family were backstage (representing spirits,) explain the fire as two people would play the flames, my idea with this was to almost make the flames look like the were controlling her and doing what fires do, trapping her so the audience could watch her struggle, what the flames did was a sequence with the character where they would be throwing her about but not letting her leave the chair she was sat in, now we used a build up with a yell, but we were later given feedback, and were told its been done too much so maybe if we build up and have silence, or even just a terrible noise playing, we were also told that we should make the sequence with the flames much bigger.


Our second scene we didn't spend to much time on, but it was meant to be our character looking back at one Christmas dinner with the family, we had two people playing our female main character one, was the past time version, and the other was a present time crazed version. Now we spend too long on the scene, but we were planning to add rules, like if someone said family, happiness, sanity or anything to do with fire the scene would freeze and the crazed character would say a short monologue. We were given feedback that we should make the family dinner table more abstract, so what we planned to do was to sit on the floor in a circle connected by our feet, I had the Idea of placing the crazed character in the middle so she was surrounded by a memory that was haunting her.


We did an extra activity that day where one person would play Christina (the lady in the stimulus) and they would try and crawl from onside of the room to another but everyone else would try to be obstacles stopping that person, this gave us an inside look into the struggle Christina went through everyday.

Wednesday Week 1 (Devising)

During our first lesson of the devising module, we were given a stimulus, which was a painting named "Christina's World" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina's_World (as seen here.) We were asked what our first impressions were and mine are as follows:

Colours:

• The house is dark, which makes me think of symbolism, and that the house symbolises misery.
• The woman in the image is wearing bright colours, this makes her eye catching, and stand out in the image.
• The grass uses really grungy yellows and greens.

Characters/Stories:

• Looking at the scenery, it reminds me of a farm, with a field, a small hut and a manor house, and the position the woman is in looks quite helpless, so I think that the character in the painting, is either a famers wife or daughter and that domestic abuse plays a part in the story, which has led her to run away, as she turns back she takes one last look at the farm, and it brings bad memory's to her causing her to fall to the floor.
• The image does look as if the house has a dark history and that no-one wants to go back.

Shapes/Textures:

• The field and the house look quite scratchy, as if they were painted with a stroke technique.
• And the ladies clothes look like they have a softness to them, which makes me think that the character in the image is quite soft and mild.
• Yet there is one strand of hair that looks as if its floating with the wind, which makes me think she wants to be independent and break away from the rest.
• In the painting the field and woman are painted using lots of curves, yet the house is painted using jagged or sharp shapes, making it look as if it dangerous.

Later that session we were given the name of the painting and the time it was painted, here are my thoughts on these:

Title "Christina's World"

• The title of this painting gave me two ideas, either she is watching as her life fades into the distance, as the house is quite far from the lady, and that she is just watching it fade away, but she is helpless and cant do anything about it.
• Or this is a dream she has, of living on a farm far away from everything because she wants to get away from the life she is living at this point in time.

Time Frame "1948"-USA

• The date of this painting, and the area it was painted in, made me instantly think end of World War 2, and the great depression, and so I thought that this woman in the photo was watching everything being taken away from her.
• When I didn't know the date this was painting, I thought of World War 1 and the evacuations of children to the countryside. 

We later did some research into the painting and here is what I found an interest in:

• The Painter, Andrew Wyeth's father was killed in a railway crossing before this painted
• Anna Christina Olson, the woman in the painting, had polio and this is her, doing what she did everyday and crawling through the field back to her home.
• The house in the painting is actually real. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olson_House_(Cushing,_Maine)

Now I later linked both, the fact that his father was killed crossing a railway, must have had an effect on Andrew Wyeth, if you link this to the fact that Christina crawls from the field to the house everyday, it shows Andrew Wyeth using this painting to show his struggle (like Christina struggling to her house.) with the fact his father had died.


We were later put into groups, The Mighty Oosh (our groups name,) consisted of Dan, Bradley, Alicia, Shelby, Yasmin, Rae-Ann and Imogen. Once we were put into groups we started to share out ideas together, we had a few story ideas:

• I came up with the idea of a girl who's either the farmers wife or daughter, which I told you about earlier in this blog, and she is struggling with domestic abuse, as he father locks her away (now this can link to the polio as its caused by a lack of sunlight.) and the whole piece is her struggle to keep hope and achieve freedom.
• Dan came up with an idea, based around morphine abuse back in the USA during 1948, I backed him up by saying that the title "Christina's World" could actually be a reference to drug abuse and how she gets away from everyday life, this idea made me think Alice in wonderland straight away.
• I later went on to say, what if she had run away from home along time back, and now she comes home and seeing the house just floods her with emotions and she drops down, because we could preform it as her starting that way and gradually each scene is a memory, good or bad, of the farm.
• We thought briefly of an idea, where a woman gives up here child, but we didn't go that far into it, we actually said we would research, and look more into giving up children and adoption.

In a different session that day, we had to do three freeze frames, one of us looking at someone, the second of us looking at someone but not wanting them to see us, and finally looking at someone but making it obvious, we started to walking around the space and when 1 was called out we stopped and did our first pose, then two for the second and three for the third. Eventually we had one person standing at the front and we were focusing on looking at him/her, the reactions they gave were that the first one was intimidating, the second pose just looked silly and the third pose didn't really have and effect, it wasn't until we started slowly walking to the people that they started to feel uncomftable.

In our final session we put ourselves in Christina's shoes and also used the looking poses in this activity, we had half of the class on one side of the room in the position that Christina is in, in the painting, and then they would crawl across the room whilst the other half would watching them changing the poses that we had created in the last session.

• When I was the watcher, I felt really bad and wanted to help up the people crawling along the floor.
• When I was Christina, I felt really uncomftable as I don't enjoy having people watching, and staring at me struggling.