Devising techniques

Our stimulus was a piece of text by Orestes.

We started by analysing the piece of text and picked out words that stood out amongst the others/ key words that we could focus our devised piece around; for example, we chose to focus on a small section of the text:

It chokes me, squeezes hard and harder
Cannot think, cannot break its grasp,
Or scream or breathe or utter,
and sound

After we had chosen the part we were going to work with, we began brain storming to see how we can apply the style of physical theatre into our performance. Once we had a few ideas we experimented with various ones to see which ones we thought worked and which ones didnt or needed to be changed slightly in order for them to work. Whilst coming up with multiple ideas we thought about various points to help us such as:

Levels

Juxtaposition

Emotion

Contrast

Another way of devising a piece is thinking where an idea originates. We discussed that an idea can originate from anything and creating deep thoughts about something as ordinary as a pencil and moving away from the stereotypical ideas. For example, a pencil can write thoughts, thoughts that arent always possible to say out loud, a pencil holds so many secrets. We control the pencil, we hold the power over it. What if the pencil controlled us and the roles were reversed? What would happen then?

Once a piece has been devised, we then thought about our character. What would they be feeling? Creating a story around them. If there are any objects or furniture around them how would they respond to that object or use that piece of furniture?