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.