Final Rehearsals

When going through our finals rehearsals we made sure that props and other things that we needed for the performance were in place. For example, we realised that Ami needed to tie a letter to her foot which we couldn't do in bare foot. To solve this, we placed a pair of shoes by one of the chairs so that she could put them on during a blackout. Also, when doing a full run through, we realised that we each need a letter for the ending to place in a pile on the ground. when we came to this scene, not everyone had a letter by them. to solve this we placed an extra letter by each chair to ensure that everyone had access to  letter throughout he performance.

When rehearsing the 'chair scene' the letter was threw away from the chair and I had to come out of the group to pick it up, so we decided that this should be incorporated into the performance as it draws the audience's attention to the person who has emerged from the group to retrieve the letter. This also solved the issue of the letter being thrown into a random direction on the night of the performance to reduce the chances of error.

We also realised that at the end of the performance it ends up to be a pile of letters at front and centre stage. However, a letter was left near by from the chair scene which distracted the audience's focus. To solve this, we decided that when I walk off with the chair in the chair scene, I pick the letter up as well as the chair and walk off with both.

Rehearsal and Development for our Devised performance

For this session, we worked on the live singing scene. We worked on timing and finishing the end part of the piece. When we ran through it we realised that some transitions didn't work for example Chloe entering from the left side of the stage. we thought this did not look as clean and effective as we thought so we came up with the idea of Chloe entering from the audience. For the end part of the piece, we thought it would be very effective to have everyone doing the main dance piece as we begin by doing our own small pieces.

We all thought that this part of the performance was very effective as it was very symmetrical and included cross cutting into our performance and various scenes were taking place and once. We wanted to create the effect of a persons life and mind through physicality. Me and Ellie portrayed the relationships this person has, Chloe represented the physical body, Demi, Eleni and Katie showed the person's emotions and Ami, Tia and Meaghan represented the free unpredictable thoughts.

If I was to do this performance again, I would have Chloe walking around everything that was happening to show that she was linked with it all. I would also possibly have her walk round and then join in with that scene then move on to another scene to also show that she is linked.

stimulus of the week - Letters

Word of the week: Ensemble
 - When the group work together

(Tish's session)

Our stimulus for the week was letters. In our next session, we began by holding an envelope and focusing on it. We then thought about a scenario of receiving the letter and knowing exactly who it is from instantly and reacting to this in a naturalistic way. We the thought about how we would be feeling about the letter and about what could be inside; for example we could have been nervous for receiving exam results or excited because its from a relative or partner. Once we had done this, we added this to the performance we had created with Tish earlier in the day. This gave the performance emotion and created a clear link to what the letter had made us feel. After this, we created our own stylised piece to express our how we felt about what we had read within the letter. My scene was about a girl who had just received the news that a friend had passed away. To show this, I used very sharp, fast and aggressive movements to show I was angry as well as sad. I also decided to perform most of my piece on the floor as I imagined my character would be feeling low and isolated and wanting to hide from the world.

Tmesis Workshop

For this session, what had the privilege of working with Tmesis. Tmesis are a theatre company that specialises in physical theatre. Tmesis Theatre is a physical theatre company based in Liverpool. The company create, develop and share world-class physical theatre through performance, participation and an international festival, Physical Fest.

For the past ten years the company have toured nationally and internationally with the shows; Tmesis, Memento More, Anima, The Dreadful Hours, Wolf Red and Variations of the Heart. They have worked with some of the world's leading practitioners in the process including, Tanya Khabarova (Derevo), Malou Auriado (Pina Bausch) and Nigel Charnock.

During this workshop, we focused on using our bodies show various elements and to show how emotion can have an effect on movement.

We began by improvising how the different natural elements (earth, fire, water and wind) We thought that because earth is a solid and has a large density, that it would have very sharp and fast movements. With water, it is the complete opposite, every movement would flow from one to another, smoothly and slowly. Fire is very unpredictable so we thought that it would be very fast and the movements would be scattered and messy. Wind can be very smooth but fast and unpredictable so for this we used movements similar to water but a lot faster and bigger.

After this, we worked on bringing our our primal instincts and acting similar to apes or cavemen. we began by starting off with small movements such as dropping to the floor and worked our way up to high levels of mindless anger; this involved much larger movements such as running and throwing yourself across the floor. When we did this, our natural instinct when we reached high levels was to add sound. We started screaming at each other in anger or screaming in fear of the other person. 

Rehearing and Putting each section of our performance together

In this weeks sessions we worked on running through our full performance and teaching certain parts to other people who were absent when we came up with the routine.

For Tish's session, we created a commercial dance routine. A commercial dance is a very common dance routine that a lot of other people do such as street. We decided to add this routine into our final performance at the end of the cheer leading scene. Once we had created this dance, we came up with forming a small group at back centre stage the dropping to the floor. From this, we realised that this small dance routine was an effective transition to get from the cheer leading scene to the chair scene.

For the next session, we worked on running through our performance again so we all knew exactly where we were supposed to go and when we were supposed to move. Some parts still looked slightly messy. For example, during the youth dance routine, the three people doing emotions at the back did not look in time and also looked a bit unsure. To solve this we talked it through and came up with specific movements they could do in a specific order as this would look more sharp and tidy.

Rehearsing and tying our performance together

For this weeks sessions, we started by doing a rough run through of our whole performance so we could have a rough estimate of how long our performance was going to be. We got a rough time of about 25 minutes allowing an extra five or ten minutes more.

We then discussed the parts that jumped out at us that we didn't intend on including in the performance but we thought worked really well. For example, when working on the ending or the performance, Tia and Meghan were facing one way and Ami was facing the other way; there was a part in the ending when we take a step forward and then drop our heads and arms to the floor, when doing this they were in a 'zig zag' form and when the stepped forward they met in the middle to form a line. I thought this looked really effective and it used slight mirroring and also looked very sharp.

For some sections, the music lasted longer than the routine or didn't really have an ending to it such as the grotesque dance routine. For this we came up with the idea that as we end up in a small group at front and centre stage, this reminded us of bohemian rhapsody. We thought we should use this as it adds comedy into the performance. However, this did not tie in with the theme of our performance so we thought that it would be an effective idea to have the music cut off and Tia and Meghan say "that was very inappropriate for a funeral" This would also be an effective transition into the dance routine that followed it as we could walk into our next positions in an 'awkward' style.

As we did not have an ending, we began to brain storm some ideas. In the end we came up with the
idea of circulating back to the beginning of the performance where we open the letters; we then worked around this. We came up with the idea of having small groups and one letter being passed from group to group with important news on it. However, every time the letter was passed the reaction to the news would be different, as if we had all received different news. As I am the last person to have the letter, we thought that it would be effective for me to look at the letter then put it back in the envelope for the ending. We then came up with the idea of having Meghan singing in the background. We chose the song Home Town by Adele as this song is very peaceful but also sad

After this, we worked on running through the performance and making each movement and transition more precise. We also discussed costumes. We came up with the idea of all having plain t-shirts but different colours to show that we're all different  but all look the same as each other.

We then had a costume run through to see if the costumes worked well together and they did. They were light so we could move around easily and didnt get too hot.

Stimulus of the week - Images

For our first session we looked at a picture of Artaud that he had drawn of how he saw himself. Artaud



First we began to discuss what the image could mean and what ideas we could use from it. Some ideas that we came up with were that he was broken and a mess. we also thought that the other people in the picture could represent multiple personalities like the good part of him (bottom left) and the bad part of him (bottom right) and the person in the middle is the human and the mess it has become because of his other personalities. 

Another idea we came up with related to the style of Berkoff; very grotesque and dark. From this we began to create our physical theatre piece. We decided to use the idea of the people in his mind trying to control him and take over. We extended onto our piece that we had created with Tish in the style of Berkoff. Our first movement was one person being enclosed into a circle of other people. We did this to represent them being in control of the people in his mind because they were controlling him.

Our next movement was the person bursting out and all the people around them being thrown to the floor to symbolise that they were trying to break free. Then this person sat on the floor, heavy breathing as we all lay on our backs, moving our chests up and down to show that we were all connected with one another. After this we continued to try and trap this person by creeping over to them as they try and get away from us. We wanted to show the pain that this person must have been going through. To show this we ran towards them screaming and then dragged them with us to centre stage. To finish our piece we wanted to interperate Artaud's lifestyle so we threw ourselves to the floor and the person who represented Artaud formed the position of tying his shoe as this was how he died. All of us were lying on the floor to show that because Artaud was now dead, the people inside his head were dead too.

Our next session focused on an abstract image of a woman.

We thought that this woman had a horrified look on her face as if she had just witnessed something terrible. 
From this we created a physical theatre piece based on some from of physical conflict and the innocent bystander (the woman in the image). We wanted to show the physical theatre style of a fight happening and make it look quite abstract as the image shows very abstract colours and patterns on the woman's face. We thought that this woman had a very flirty side to her so we decided to keep it very light and gracious as this is how we imagined her personality to be.

In our final session, we looked at a more abstract image that gave no direction of meaning whatsoever

We began to brainstorm ideas; the main ideas that we decided to focus our piece around was an eye and how much an eye sees and all the things they could have witnessed, for example violence or a crime. From this we created a stylised piece of conflict between two groups of people. We used weight bearing and canon to symbolise that we were conflicting. 

If I was to do this piece again, I would change the movement to be more heavy and sharp as our movement was quite flowing which did not give the impression of conflict. I would also have one person isolated from the scene that's taking place to symbolise that they have witnessed it and it has affected them.