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.