Character Study - Electra

Name: Electra

Age: 18

Family Life 

Electra was sent off to marry a man of a lower status by her mother to allow her mother and her mothers lover to take over Argos, her father has been lost at sea coming back from war so her mother went of with Aegithos. She hasn’t seen her brother since she was younger as her mother sent him away so that she could rule with Aegithos.

Personality

Electra is a woman who is strong and confident, she was born in the wrong century, women in her time were expected to just be seen and not heard and she wants to be heard as she knows her mind, she cares deeply about her family and becomes very attached to her brother.

Context

Before the play Electra has had life fairly badly and this is part of the reason why she's so defensive and more forthright as she is. During the play Electra discovers herself and the power she has over her life and her voice. She also finds a way of manipulating people and getting things out of them she also by doing this creates her own demise. After the play, I'm not quite so sure about what happens to her after all this but from how I know the character she will have let her tongue get her killed.

Relationships

Mother: She kills her mother for killing her father, so you could say it's not a brilliant relationship, her mother also sent her beloved brother away, and her away to “ a shameful degrading marriage”

Father: She never totally knew her father as he went away to war when she was young. She obviously held great affection towards her father because she killed her own mother for killing him.

Orestes: Her relationship with him is slightly complicated, he is her brother, even though she hasn't seen him since she was a child, she is now reunited with him and finds herself strangely attracted to him, this is due to the fact that they are close and are known to each other but in this case she is attracted to him as more than just her brother, and he feels quite similarly this creates the close yet complicated relationship between them.

Tyndareos: She has a very volatile relationship with Tyndareos because she always looked up to him as a great man and when she needed him most he let her down. She now has a much more skeptical view of him as a result they both hate each other. She does confront him in the play and he does see a form of where he went wrong but not much of a way.

Menalaos: Electra and menalaos have a good relationship, they have never wronged each other and he is willing to help her as he sees why she killed her mother to avenge his brother. He also keeps and eye on her and guides her in any way he can.

Helen: Electra very much dislikes Helen, Helen treats her life a bug on a windscreen and thinks she can't do anything or think for herself and Electra can in fact she sees a lot more than Helen thinks she does, Electra just keeps quiet about it. Electra also finds Helen to be lacking somewhat in the quality of personality.

Style

I found becoming Electra and being her in a production that uses both Greek influences in a contemporary play to be quite interesting, easy and difficult all at the same time this was because I felt I still needed to keep the older elements of Electra when bringing her into a contemporary production. She still needed to be somewhat stuck in the old ways such as being quiet and standing back as a woman as she would be expected to be but also to have that new age flair. Lucky for me the old Electra had already begun to explore herself and ideals, standing up to the men in her family and also getting her brother to aid her in the killing of her mother, she in some way learns how to manipulate the men in her life to help her in her endeavours. This mad it a lot easier to try and add the contemporary tones to her character. To aid me in developing Electra in a Contemporary style setting I did research into what life would have been like for Electra in the time of the original text and I found that her life would have been very shadowed and she wouldn't have seen much of the world, she would have been expected to stay at home and do almost nothing. I used internet research to gain a good perspective on what her life would have been like compared to modern times. For the Greek Chorus I didn't use too much research into actual Greek Chorus instead I looked at musicals and their Choruses because they flow and tell the story too only in song and I saw them as a variation especially with the chorus dancing and tableaux's I saw a real similarity and connection, I used this as inspiration.

Characterisation

I saw her posture as good with a slight slouch to show she was well brought up but at the same time I wanted that bit of rebellion to be surrounding her. She has a clear concise voice to match her background she may have airs about her that say otherwise but I wanted her well spoken voice to be a definitive part of her. For her emotions I found this more difficult because I wanted her to be closed off and numb to everything because of what has happened to her. I remedied this by using small hand movements a lot to show what she was feeling such as a clenched fist at her side, I wanted it to be subtle yet powerful at the same time.

Greek Blog 5 (25th - 29th)

This week started with us looking at the first act and working on how we were going to complete it. Firstly we worked through the first act straight and looked at what needed working on and what had yet to still be done. We looked at the scene where Abbi is playing electra with the chorus we worked on our parts as the chorus and how we wanted our separate minions of Tyndareos to be seen, not all the characters of the chorus could be the same so we spent quite a lot of time working on how we were going to have them come out and across. In movement we worked on a scene where as the chorus and newspaper reporters we were using newspapers in the movements in the chorus pieces, we worked as a group to show the words that Abbi was saying and how we as a chorus would react to such words and created a scene in which we were all over the place but at the same time were the interested and nosey journalists that were willing to do anything to get information to relay to the papers. In Voice we worked on sounds and how they come out and sound and to make them much clearer, this comes in with the Greek theatre because of what and how the text is set out and works it's a lot like shakespeare in a way with the difficulty of the language.

On wednesday we worked on the same areas again in more detail taking on what we had already done on the monday and adding what we had come up with over the other day. In the afternoon we looked at another section of the chorus, this part we divided up so that everyone was in groups of twos and were each given a section of the chunk of text to work on, for this part we were all lined up in chairs and used our own ideas in the pairs to enact what our lines were, this idea also came from our previous devised piece which was used in one of the performances. this proved quite the challenge and the group dynamics didn't go well here as there were lots of arguments and people were blaming others for not doing work when they were struggling, this showed that the group was not communicating with each other as they needed to be. This was causing great tension in the whole class and meant that we didn't get much work done in the time we had and that we could have certainly done a lot more in the time than what we managed.

On thursday we mostly looked at the bath scene and worked on how we would stage this as it's quite tricky, using a moving bath that when you try to get in or lean against moves and disturbs the scene and set. Through this I found that the group got quite restless and concentration went down quite a lot, meaning that work wasn't being done as efficiently as it could have been, granted it was the last day of our week and we were tired and looking forward to the weekend we should have still been able to concentrate and work as this is what we will be doing if we choose to pursue this as a career. This was further proved when we revisited the chairs chorus scene at the end of the day and the entire group dynamic was helter skelter, there were people taking control without allowing anyone any ideas this is not a good this because not only does it in still in peoples minds that one person is superior in a group where we are all equals but also that no ideas are being heard when they could make the piece an entire success.

Greek Blog 4 (18th - 22nd)

This week the first thing we did was go through our grading criteria for the Greek project so that we knew what was going to be expected of us. Doing this also gives us an idea of what we want to be included in the performance to get our grades to a very good position, it also means that we are trying very hard to work to the project to get it to the best possible standard that we can. After we looked at the grading criteria for the project we went on moodle as a group to look at some links to videos on the national theatre website giving some information on the way Greek theatre can be set and used it also gave a lot of detail on the background of Greek theatre and how it began in Greece, it also told us about how theatre was used in politics to address many issues and bring some to light, it was a great way for politicians to influence the public. The main reason we were looking into this is because we are doing a project on Greek theatre and these were to give us a few ways to go about creating these presentations in our respective pairs. For Movement we went and watched some monks from Tashi Lhunpo temple in India, they were visiting the college to demonstrate some of their ritual dances and our leader Kirsty decided we could go and watch them and see if we could find influence and ideas from the traditional dances that were being demonstrated to us in the main theatre. In voice we worked on a pop quiz on our vocal anatomy to see how we were doing on our revision and remembered information for the final test on our knowledge of our own voices this proved a lot of fun as a task as we were working in pairs for this and we just had fun trying to remember what we could and learned from each other in the process.

On Tuesday we got straight down to business and went onto mine and Dan's scene together. In this scene Orestes and Electra get a lot closer as Electra is trying to comfort Orestes and tries to get him to go to sleep as he hasn't been able to sleep well since he killed their mother. We used this scene to show the connection between the two characters and the close bond they share even after only having seen each other for the first time in around ten years. After we worked on how we wanted to stage this scene we were led in some exercises by Alex another of our team leaders who got us to work on status. To work on our status we went around the room trying to imitate the sort of status we thought our character had and this turned out to be quite interesting as some did a lot lower status to show their character at a certain part of the play. And then we watched some videos on how to further this study of status between characters, and lastly we worked on the scene after the one we did in the morning which is a scene mostly between Orestes, Menalaos and Tyndareos and showing the status between the characters that was where I found that the morning activities working on status helped a lot and you could quite clearly see the difference in status in the scene.

Overall the weeks work went well and we developed a lot of scenes which helped a lot with our characters and how they are progressing, we have also worked on our status levels and i've found that particularly helpful in how I represent my character on stage.

Greek Blog 3 (11th - 16th)

This week be began by looking at the themes of the play and how they contributed to not only the characters but the play itself and how it eventually ends. To do this we looked at drawing five pictures from scenes in the play that to us were important mine were of:

1. Agamemnon dead in the bath
2. The people of Argos
3. Baby Hermione
4. Clytemnestra's hair
5. Agamemnon's grave

To me these were quite significant, the first one was because in the script it is an incredibly descriptive scene and a horrific one at that, it describes how Electra and Orestes' mother and her lover kill their father in an attempt to gain power over Argos for themselves, the second one I chose because the people of Argos are represented by our chorus who are a big part in the play and explain a lot of the story to the audience, the third was because although baby hermione is not as featured in the play as the other characters she does become the object of attention with the ending when Orestes jumps off the cliff with her in his arms, the fourth one was because of the scene between Electra and Helen when Helen is bating Electra and I chose this from the moment when she picks up a bit of Clytemnestra's hair and turns to Electra and remarks "is this her hair?" and Electra nods "her hair was so much softer than mine but it never shone so well" to me this was a very tense scene and needed to be included in this, the fifth one was because i felt this was almost a symbol of the play itself and was a big yet small part of what goes on in the performance. In Movement we worked on the chorus again, we used the bath that we have been given for the performance from the design department. We also began using what we had done from the week before of using the thought of an emotion with each movement and using that as our movement in the scene where Clytemnestra and her lover kill Agamemnon.

On Wednesday we began with Alex again and did the breathing concentration that she does, I find this very helpful as it allows me to focus and concentrate on what lies ahead on the day. From there we looked at some videos from the national theatre website on greek theatre and how staging is the first thing you should think about in greek theatre and to have an argument within the chorus is both interesting and causes conflict within the performance. Status is also an important part within Greek plays because it shows who is who and where everyone stands within the play, such as the difference between royalty and the gods and the royalty and the chorus, these help to show where the necessary tension within the play lies. During our time with Alex we also worked on using words from the play and creating movements that worked with the words and then saying the words to the actions in different ways, my way was to whisper it which gave the overall feel to it a bit of an eery feeling.

On Thursday we began by starting on certain scenes, I wasn't a part of these scenes so Bradley, Dan and myself went off and read through the scenes that we were in, by doing this we also discussed how we could stage this, most of the staging for the scene that Bradley and myself were in had already been blocked so we knew what we were doing with that and were happy with it. The scene that Dan and I were in we hadn't blocked yet and so we discussed ideas of how we would stage this, in the scene I am talking to Dan and telling him to sleep and talking to both myself and to him, the scene is staged on a bed and then Dan travels around the room talking to Menelaus who comes in and talks to him. For this scene we felt that we would need the entire cast of the scene to create it as it seemed a very much instinct needing piece.

Greek Blog 2 (4th - 8th)

This week brought us back from half term and so from being used to lie in after lie in we had to get back into routine which wasn't necessarily easy. I found that a lot of people were un focused as a result of having time off of college and being out of routine which did make life a lot harder to get down to work, I myself found I was a lot more tired that i usually am as I had possibly slept in a lot over the half term.

On Monday we began the week by looking at the themes of Blood and Light, finding out what sort of themes we all thought could be included in this category, these included

• Forgiveness
• Honour
• Violence & Revenge

From these we looked at what sort of things we could draw from it and which parts of the play they related to. Forgiveness I felt related to the ideal in the play the overall goal of the piece, Honour related to Electra and Orestes killing their mother for killing their father because it was what the gods wanted and would protect the honour of the family. Violence and Revenge relate to the main goings on in the play, the violence for the killing of family members and the revenge for doing so, the description of their mother killing their father with her lover is horrifying and incredibly violent. 

On Wednesday we had Alex as a new team leader for the morning she got us to look at working as a group, as one this was to help us develop ourselves as a chorus. First we led on the floor with a book holding our heads up, from there we concentrated on our breathing and working our diaphragms to get ourselves warmed up. After we were warmed up we did lots of different ways of working as a team to get different emotions across to do this we particularly worked on "The Bath" scene working on our character's that work around the actors as the chorus. We worked around the bath that Agamemnon was being killed in and did our own actions to what was happening as journalists which is what we are considering the chorus to be. 

On Thursday we mostly covered a certain scene which is the one between both Electra and Helen and how Helen is accusing Electra of killing her sister Clytmnestra, she carries on bating Electra in a series of accusations. Whilst this was going on I went off to the cafe with Bradley and we went through our scene between Electra and Tyndareos and made notes on performance on the script discussing what we thought ought to happen between the characters on stage during parts of the scene and including the chorus in this and tossed around ideas with what they could do. 

I had some ideas with the staging of the play, my ideas were to use a thrust staging and move the chairs from the platforms to around the curtains of the stage area leaving exits to behind the curtains in the two corners of the staging area. I then thought we should put the bed at the base of the tiered area and still have some audience on the tiered area looking down at the bed that Orestes lays on, I then felt that the mirror that Helen uses should be near one of the exits in the corners of the staging area to allow Helen to move in, out and around the stage area. I also felt that we should use the main exits to the theatre to be the main ways to get off and on the stage, that way it would be not only more clear to the audience but also lets the characters come off and on in their own way and give them time to bring the character to life with the changing of people as the characters. 

Overall I felt that this week was far more beneficial to both myself and the group as we learned a lot more about what we wanted from the characters and the play itself it also gave a lot of us ideas as to how we wanted to stage the play and how we  wanted the audience to feel about it and it's themes. 

Greek Blog 1 (21st - 25th)

This week began to look at our new project, this project is about Greek theatre and the play that we are studying and performing is Orestes from the Oresteia by Euripides. Over the past weeks before we started the project we had been doing essays on Greek theatre to help us increase our knowledge on not only Greek theatre but the play itself.

In our first real session on the project we did casting for the parts, because the play didn't have enough characters, but also because it is rather long Karen our team leader split the roles of both Orestes and Electra into four separate roles in different parts of the play. This meant that most of us got to receive a good role and even if we weren't cast as a role we were able to be in the chorus and the chorus in Greek theatre plays a much bigger part than the characters do as they narrate and tell the story. To do the casting we went through various parts of the play and tried out a few characters each just to get a feel for what each character was like and weather we would like to play them. Being able to get a feel for different characters has also helped in my understanding of what each character is feeling and gives me a reason for their actions within the play. After roles had been cast I found out that I had been given the role of Electra 3, I did want to play Helen because I could easily see what I would do with her character, but in a way I am glad that I also did not get the role of Helen because Electra 3 challenges my skills as an actor as it is not a role I would normally play. As an actor I also enjoy trying to figure out new roles that are unlike ones that I have never played before, Electra gives me a way to look at someone who is being put in a situation where she has to stand up and really mess with someones emotions and try to get to them through that.

We ended the week on working on a scene between Tyndareos and myself as Electra 3. We used the scene where Electra stands up for herself in front of Tyndareos and tries to get him to see why they killed their mother. To stage this we used two blocks, mind you this was only an experiment as to how we would work the scene, we placed one block on either side of the room and I stood on one and Bradley as Tyndareos stood on the other. Around us we had our other cast mates as the Chorus and Orestes 3 (Dan) and Menelaus (Zach) on the other sides of us two on the box creating a diamond type shape. This scene is a confrontation between Electra and her grandfather, It is where Electra finds her voice to tear down her grandfathers built up walls and his pride. To get the effect that we wanted we used the Chorus to tell us weather they believed what we were saying and weather it was full of enough emotions that went with it. This was a brilliant way to get what we wanted out of the scene and although it meant we would sometimes have to go through one line ten times, but it worked and even I as the person performing it could feel the difference, I could feel Electra's hatred for her grandfather and her longing for justice as she had been promised this by the gods.

This week proved challenging because we were thrown into a new play and Greek theatre is not as easy as contemporary theatre as it has so many differences such as the chorus playing a bigger part than the characters of the story. The nature of the story as well with the gods and the revenge that is exacted in the play is not so commonly seen in contemporary plays or at least not in the same way. I so far am enjoying this challenge of a type of theatre that i have not yet done before and am looking forward to learning more not only about the play itself but also about the type of theatre that it lies within.

Week 3 (Revised)

This week began with panic stations ahoy, realising that we did not have anywhere near enough for the final piece. From this realisation we decided to instead of creating new scenes revise what we had done and add to that.

The scenes we had were the blocks scene, we had gotten from "I am the real Christina" to the falling of Dan off of the blocks, we realised doing the fall from the side was a bad idea because it was blocking us all from being seen by the audience making the action pointless. Instead we changed it to be facing the audience. As a group we decided to have Dan fall from the height of two blocks this proved to be a wrong decision because we weren't able to catch Dan from the height with the weight that he is, instead after the trial and error we decided to have Dan fall from the height of just one block making it much easier for us and it made the transition much smoother. Having dan fall from the height of one block and then for the scene to go into a blackout meant it was quite a dramatic scene as it symbolises Christina succumbing to the real world. In the blocks scene we also made a few tweaks such as the numbers on the invisible phone, we made the rule of doing it three times to keep us all in unison. We also introduced using clicking as it made the scene more tense but also meant we could all keep in time.

We decided to look at how comments can effect people, we decided to have Christina do a monologue about herself and her thoughts on what people think and how she views herself. We in a line all joining hands come around her and join together in a circle with her in the centre. In turns we said both positive and negative comments trying to be Christina's inner thoughts, things such as "you are strong" and "what are you doing here?". After this scene we used the ideas of mirrors, we also decided that the mirrors scene needed to have some music so we decided to use a live piano with myself playing, we used the beginning chords to the nutcracker sugar plum fairy piece, we used varying tempo's of the music speeding the piece up toward the climax of the piece when the group smother Christina with themselves. The mirrors scene came from the idea of Christina confronting herself, we used each of the members of our team to mirror Christina's actions to show how Christina is confronting her inner demons, we used lifts such as the "paper clip" to add to the atmosphere of her fighting the inner demons.

The newest scene that we have in our devised piece is the hospital scene, we came to this by looking at Anna Christina Olson's illness and thought that putting a hospital in the play would bring tension to the piece. In this scene we have Christina's parents sat in a waiting room and are a chair apart as they are separated there is a gap that Christina walks through, Dan who is playing the doctor comes out and explains to the parents that Christina is in a Coma and that she won't wake up, to add to this we added the beep of a life support machine to keep the tense atmosphere of the scene up. We then go into a fight between Christina's mother and father and an idea of the group was that we could use lifts and movement to symbolise the hostile relationship that transpires between them. In the next scene we decided to revise the idea of being on a train but instead put it as waiting for a bus and all of us sat around in our own mannerisms trying again to be a piece of Christina. Christina goes around asking people where she is and they all respond in the mannerism they are taking on, such as Rae is the slightly insane part of her mind and pulls her down and try's to warn her, the sensible part of Christina played by Connor who talks to the audience asking "why doesn't she know where she is" they all also as Christina goes round call themselves Christina as they feel that they are.

The Group as a whole has a mixed dynamic we are all very different but very similar people. A lot of us are very desperate to have our ideas heard and in this some people can seem quite pushy with their ideas, others who have their ideas are too shy to bring their ideas across and would rather just let the others come up with the ideas and sit back and watch. This causes the group to gel a lot less, another reason for this is because a few people in the group can be quite negative about what we do, when positivity is really needed because the negativity brought the group down. The team as a whole got down to buisness when it was really needed but still didn't really get a long, this could have been because we had newcomers to the group who had joined the course late but even so the group should have been able to cope. I felt it was because some people might have thought with more people their ideas would be less heard or that they would have less stage time which isn't the case. We had some difficult questions to ask when it got down to working with eachother because some of the group needed to be told to just get on and get along with their classmates when times were tough. I felt that there were two key decision makers they were Rae and Connor because they wanted to get on with it and so went with the most prominent ideas but didn't necessarily look to all the possible options this was partially because of a lack of time.

This week was a tough week because we knew we needed to work very hard to try and achieve more of our devised piece and because of this we all got quite testy at times and had quite a few arguments, which were all in the end resolved. This made it an interesting week but when we got to difficult times we took inspirations from one of the devising company's and asked difficult questions, these sometimes led to no answers but from taking some of our original ideas we revised those ideas and worked out more scenes.

Week 2 (Revised)

This week the group began by revisiting some of our less developed ideas I felt that this was a good notion because we needed to develop more scenes for our devised piece. Taking the ideas we had accumulated before, we sat down and discussed which scenes we should and could use we set them out on the white board and went from there. These scenes were:

Scene 1

Christina is sat in a chair contemplating over her life and that it was her fault her family died in the fire. Beside her are her inner demons, who as she tries to run from in order to escape her past. We did this scene because we felt it would touch on what was going on inside christina's head and would give the audience an understanding of what is going on too.

Scene 2

In this scene Christina is reviewing a memory of her family eating christmas dinner, she is noting all the small but significant details of the moment, such as who's chair is who's, the arguments that went on. This scene came to light because we wanted a scene of Christina's past to come to light. This was our way of trying to show a contrast of what Christina's life was like compared to how it is now and we wanted the difference to make the audience feel a different way towards Christina.

Scene 3

We have Christina crawling on the floor and struggling to move not only that but we have people becoming moving obstacles that are blocking her path making it even more difficult, this is to symbolise Christina overcoming her struggles. We used this scene to try and put across the struggle that Christina went through and also to use a different style of theatre to bring that over to the audience to get them to sympathise with her and her situation.

Scene 4

Christina is pushed around and held back by her inner demons again, they flip a chair over her and bring her back to where she started. The main part of this scene is the phrase T-R-A-P we use this on the shirts everyone is wearing with everyone having one letter on their shirt. We wanted to use this scene to have an underlying message relayed to the audience of “are we trapped ?”. The idea was to have the audience question their own rights of freedom and are they trapped themselves ?

Scene 5

The train ride- she meets new people, we wanted this to be an insight as to how christina saw new people having been kept from anyone other than her family. We were using ideas such as the chairs and invisible phone key pad, we decided part way through to change the chairs for stage blocks. This idea tried to show how vulnerable Christina is and how inexperienced she is of the real world, we tried to show this in some interesting ways such as with the blocks and the phone key pad.

Sequence

At the end of writing out the scenes we decided to combine some scenes and the sequence we ended up with was - (2-1+4-3-5).

We decided as a group to split into two and each work on separate scenes to speed up the process of making scenes. The scene I worked on was the train scene, we used this as a basis and worked on from there. To update the scene we used blocks instead of chairs and decided not to make it a train but instead a room. We also decided that having the blocks in one row was not making the best use of the stage space, we tried many combinations of the blocks first being the four in a row, we then staggered the blocks two in front two in back alternating, the next was having them in a plus shape but leaving the centre without a block, although this made us look more equal due to height differences it still didn't have the right feel to it, so we put another block on top of the front one. This idea meant that we could use our "I am the real Christina!" idea. We came to these ideas by running through all the ideas that everyone were having even the most stupid. Since we had split into two groups it meant there were few of us to come up with ideas, so we sat in the chairs in line like the train scene and and tried to come up with ideas one by one in a line. We were also sort of becoming part of our set we felt more immersed in the ideas and they came to us reasonably quickly with a few on each side.

To use the "I am the real Christina!" idea we initially used four of us three on the singular blocks and one behind the double stacked blocks, this was to be the hidden Christina, her real self ? We kept the hidden Christina hidden so that she could come up when we felt Christina would object to what was being said about her life. The group and myself felt that the piece needed more movement, to do this we had Christina in the middle move she crawls over the top and jumps down between the two new additions to the piece we then did a hand signal to which we said "I am the real Christina!" we then used another old idea which was the phone key pad and turning our heads to the numbers we decided on and did it as a chorus. We then decided to do a lift but problems arose when we found that Dan falling off the blocks into a group cradle, wasn't as elegant as the rest of the piece.

This was where we ended our week on having found many problems and some solutions, not finding solutions to all our problems or hiccups was a difficult note to end on but it gave us a lot to think about for our next week of devising theatre exploration.

Week 1 (Revised)

This week we began by being given our stimulus, this stimulus was a painting by Andrew Wyeth called Christina's World. We started by writing down any thoughts or ideas that came to us, at this point we had no knowledge of what the painting was actually about or its history. From not being able to know what the past history of the piece was we could make our own assumptions as to what was going on in the painting. The ideas of War, Longing, Helplessness and Loss came to mind. After making my own deductions from the piece we were told all about the painting, finding out that the painting was about a woman called Anna Christina Olson. Anna had polio and subsequently couldn't walk and had to crawl everywhere; the artist used to watch her and was fascinated by her struggle and so painted her. My first responses to the painting were of the greeny yellow colour scheme in the painting, I felt that it gave a spring time illusion to the painting or a new morning arriving with the golden colour of the sun reflecting off of the grass. I also thought that because of the style of the dress on the girl the era was the 1940’s and in the background I could see a metal fence and assumed it might be a POW camp from my thoughts of it being in the 1940’s. After we were told what the paintings history was about I found that my ideas were quite similar to the paintings history such as the time period, the area in which it was set though had me completley wrong I thought from the look it was somewhere within europe probably either England of Germany, when in a matter of fact it was set in Cushing, Maine in America.

Put into groups we sat as a body and discussed all of our ideas bringing what we could to the table. My own personal ideas being thoughts of a woman who was looking toward a lover in one of the windows of the house, other ideas were that it was a concentration camp and she was one of the family of a warden a bit like the boy in the striped pyjamas. I thought this because of the wire fence in the background, I also felt it looked like the beginning scene in beauty and the beast when belle is looking to a bigger and brighter future.

From these ideas we began to work as a group to mix these thoughts into a selection of main ideas that we could begin to use to create our devised piece. First ideas put together were from a mix of us all who thought of Christina being an orphan. Connor thought of her being an orphan because of a tragic fire, I thought that this was a different idea and was a good way to look into another way of seeing what Christina was feeling. From this we all found the idea of Christina being haunted by her inner demons "the fire" and trying to escape from the thought that she was the one to actually kill her family.

We began to stage this idea of Christina escaping from "the fire" we sat Christina in a chair on her own to be alone with her thoughts, on either side of Christina (Imogen) we had the fire holding her back and letting her burn (Connor and Alicia). In the background we had (Rae, Dan, Yaz and Bradley) being the family asking her why she didn't help them and why should she be there instead of them. We began this by having the actors on the stage and looking at Christina struggling, but soon realised that putting the actors backstage and only being able to hear their voices made it seem much more real that their voices are in Christina's mind. We finished with Christina screaming, but realised it was too cliché and was done too often. Instead we ended with just Christina breaking down in silence as we felt it was a more effective way to capture the audience. We decided that next we would work on another idea to keep ourselves working on different concepts and to explore different ways that our devised piece could go. We used an idea of Rae's to put the character back to a good time in her life with her family at Christmas dinner, the twist is that we have the later Christina narrating the story when the characters are frozen. We found this difficult to work with because we weren't quite sure how to go about Christina looking back on her past. We came up with a short scene before the end of our session that day and were pleased with what we had accomplished.

In this first week working as a group, I found that being in a smaller group and working together somewhat challenging. This was because although we know each other reasonably well we still didn't know how each other put their ideas or thoughts across. Although this was challenging and for each of us to find our own voices, when we weren't quite sure how to entirely handle each other made things seem a little impossible, we soon found our own way to hear each other out. Our way of working together was to sit in a circle so that we all felt equal and at ease, this made bringing ideas to the table a lot easier. At times the group would become unfocused being distracted by something that would come up, but as soon as we realised we were detracting from working on our devised piece we got back on track.

In short we took a range of ideas that all of us had come up with from our own imagination and worked as a team to get every ones ideas heard, having looked at the stimulus. We responded by sharing all the ideas we had accumulated and chose a select few to have a go with. Straight away we experimented with these ideas by putting together a piece of work to begin a fragment of our devised theatre.

Evaluation

The Piece we performed was called “The Real Christina” it was a piece that we devised ourselves from a stimulus selected by our tutor. The Piece had good timing for the majority of the performance but on some occasions we would forget where we were supposed to be although we covered it up quite well. The pace of the piece was qutie fast going with it beginning with a quite violent fight scene and in a hospital of all places, changing from scene to scene was much harder that we had expected as moving the blocks from place to place was quite difficult considering the weight of them cause some of us to be unable to carry them off without another person helping and we took a much longer black out that we should have. The style of the piece was contemporary because we used lots of things such as physical theatre to make the performance more interesting but that brought the realism away from it. The subject of the Piece was of struggle and freedom we wanted to explore the two together and find through the piece how they interlinked and to ask the difficult question of are we free ?. I felt we achieved our aim of “The audience to come out with them question their-self and who they really are, are we told to be who we are ? have other people made us what we are ? these are the type of questions i want the audience to walk away and ask them self” because in our reviews we had a lot of people feeling like they were walking away with a lot to think about. The characterisation of each character went well because we were using each person to potray each side of Christina to the audience and I felt we got each of these across. The vocals went well but we could have been far more clear in what we were saying as in the reviews many people found it hard to understand what we were saying at points in the piece. We used a lot of gesture and movement to bring across what we were aiming to. We did this by using a lot of physical theatre to bring the movement over to the audience. The team worked well and before we started we did our special secret handshake for good luck and this helped the team focus for the performance when things were going a little ary we supported eachother and made sure we all had a good time. 

Week 4 (14th - 20th)

This week began our final preparations for our devised piece it was in a nutshell quite stressful and there were many arguments. We started by running through what we already had come up with and counted how many scenes we had and how much time wise of a production we had. We started on the finale which we still had to set, we knew as a group from the beginning we wanted it to finish with us spelling something out on our shirts. From our other scene when Alicia is doing her monologue we had her saying "I am strong, I am powerful, I am independent and I am free" we took the last line as we found it the most haunting of the phrases. On our shirts we had I am free written over all our shirts  so that when we came together that was what we spelled out and after the final monologue by Shelby we turned around to spell "Am I free ?" we did this to ask the audience themselves weather we are free or weather we are trapped by our own minds and by society's ideals.

A lot of this week consisted of arguments mostly about the final adjustments, some of this was because we were all tired and stressed and the rest were because we all had conflicting ideas as to how some of the scenes should end. We found that going from Alicia's monologue straight into the "I am the real Christina" scene was missing something and by trying to figure this out we argued and eventually gave up and ended up having a bit of fun and a much needed rest as we were all tired and a bit over excited. While we were having a bit of fun the boys were playing between the curtains and made their bodies disappear a bit like harry potter and the invisibility cloak and suddenly something clicked and we worked our argument and the disappearing bodies to create a new scene which was the heads scene. The heads scene consisted of everyone in the group except for myself because I was hiding behind the block for the next scene, everyone is between the curtains at different points and as the lights go on everyone appears from the curtains much to the audience's surprise. After the heads appear the heads go into an argument over which one of them is christina un till the sound rises to a climax and they all stop and disappear.

For the final scene we felt that there wasn't much to it and that it needed a boost so we added something new to it. Shelby and Alicia came up with a scene where we all said "what about me " or something like that to question the audience again as to what our position is as to who we are. Rae and myself were in the lighting box and were required to operate and run the lighting box for the other group's performance of BOX which going in we thought would be an easy feat, how wrong we were, first of all we had to figure out how to use the lighting equipment which wasn't too hard, then we had to figure out how to follow the lighting instructions which proved much more difficult and trying to relay that through two people makes that even harder as you both have tow ideas of what should be done. Figuring out when to change the lights during the rehearsal performance was rather difficult because we couldn't quite read the paper that had the cues on it, which meant we had to half guess when to turn the lights. During the full run through Rae and I almost had a full on fight when we couldn't figure out at which point to change the lights because we were slightly panicking about what to do, but as soon as things sorted themselves out we found ourselves quite happy, so happy that we high fived and realised that we had made a noise and silently laughed.

I found that this week really made us focus on our relationships as a group because we were all going through a tough experience as a team and it brought blood sweat and tears to the tables. We all argued and we all had our differences but this week as a whole brought us together like never before because it was our first performance at college and emotions were all running high and everyone wanted to give their all and I felt that everyone did give their all but were all slowly getting worn out and tired but what I admired about our group is that everyone pulled through and didn't give up. So overall this week was tough but we all managed to live up to our own expectations and find new ways of making our performance more creative and more emotional, and believe me it wasn't easy but we did it !

Week 3 (Oct 7th-13th)

This week began with panic stations ahoy, realising that we did not have anywhere near enough for the final piece. From this realisation we decided to instead of creating new scenes revise what we had done and add to that.

The scenes we had were the blocks scene, we had gotten from "I am the real Christina" to the falling of Dan off of the blocks, we realised doing the fall from the side was a bad idea because it was blocking us all from being seen by the audience making the action pointless. Instead we changed it to be facing the audience. As a group we decided to have Dan fall from the height of two blocks this proved to be a wrong decision because we weren't able to catch Dan from the height with the weight that he is, instead after the trial and error we decided to have Dan fall from the height of just one block making it much easier for us and it made the transition much smoother. Having dan fall from the height of one block and then for the scene to go into a blackout meant it was quite a dramatic scene as it symbolises Christina succumbing to the real world. In the blocks scene we also made a few tweaks such as the numbers on the invisible phone, we made the rule of doing it three times to keep us all in unison. We also introduced using clicking as it made the scene more tense but also meant we could all keep in time.

We decided to look at how comments can effect people, we decided to have Christina do a monologue about herself and her thoughts on what people think and how she views herself. We in a line all joining hands come around her and join together in a circle with her in the centre. In turns we said both positive and negative comments trying to be Christina's inner thoughts, things such as "you are strong" and "what are you doing here?". After this scene we used the ideas of mirrors, we also decided that the mirrors scene needed to have some music so we decided to use a live piano with myself playing, we used the beginning chords to the nutcracker sugar plum fairy piece, we used varying tempo's of the music speeding the piece up toward the climax of the piece when the group smother Christina with themselves. The mirrors scene came from the idea of Christina confronting herself, we used each of the members of our team to mirror Christina's actions to show how Christina is confronting her inner demons, we used lifts such as the "paper clip" to add to the atmosphere of her fighting the inner demons.

The newest scene that we have in our devised piece is the hospital scene, in this scene we have Christina's parents sat in a waiting room and are a chair apart as they are separated there is a gap that Christina walks through, Dan who is playing the doctor comes out and explains to the parents that Christina is in a Coma and that she won't wake up, to add to this we added the beep of a life support machine to keep the tense atmosphere of the scene up. We then go into a fight between Christina's mother and father that in which we used lifts and movement to symbolise the hostile relationship that transpires between them. In the next scene we decided to revise the idea of being on a train but instead put it as waiting for a bus and all of us sat around in our own mannerisms trying again to be a piece of Christina. Christina goes around asking people where she is and they all respond in the mannerism they are taking on, such as Rae is the slightly insane part of her mind and pulls her down and try's to warn her, the sensible part of Christina played by Connor who talks to the audience asking "why doesn't she know where she is" they all also as Christina goes round call themselves Christina as they feel that they are.

This week was a tough week because we knew we needed to work very hard to try and achieve more of our devised piece and because of this we all got quite testy at times and had quite a few arguments, which were all in the end resolved. This made it an interesting week but when we got to difficult times we took inspirations from one of the devising company's and asked difficult questions, these sometimes led to no answers but from taking some of our original ideas we revised those ideas and worked out more scenes.

Week 2 (Oct 30th-6th)

This week the group began by revisiting some of our less developed ideas I felt that this was a good notion because we needed to develop more scenes for our devised piece. Taking the ideas we had accumulated before, we sat down and discussed which scenes we should and could use we set them out on the white board and went from there. These scenes were:

Scene 1
Christina is sat in a chair contemplating over her life and that it was her fault her family died in the fire. Beside her are her inner demons, who as she tries to run from in order to escape her past.

Scene 2
In this scene Christina is reviewing a memory of her family eating christmas dinner, she is noting all the small but significant details of the moment, such as who's chair is who's, the arguments that went on.

Scene 3
We have Christina crawling on the floor and struggling to move not only that but we have people becoming moving obstacles that are blocking her path making it even more difficult, this is to symbolise Christina overcoming her struggles.

Scene 4
Christina is pushed around and held back by her inner demons again, they flip a chair over her and bring her back to where she started. The main part of this scene is the phrase T-R-A-P we use this on the shirts everyone is wearing with everyone having one letter on their shirt.

Scene 5
The train ride- she meets new people, we wanted this to be an insight as to how christina saw new people having been kept from anyone other than her family. We were using ideas such as the chairs and invisible phone key pad, we decided part way through to change the chairs for stage blocks.

Sequence
At the end of writing out the scenes we decided to combine some scenes and the sequence we ended up with was - (2-1+4-3-5).

We decided as a group to split into two and each work on separate scenes to speed up the process of making scenes. The scene I worked on was the train scene, we used this as a basis and worked on from there. To update the scene we used blocks instead of chairs and decided not to make it a train  but instead a room. We also decided that having the blocks in one row was not making the best use of the stage space, we tried many combinations of the blocks first being the four in a row, we then staggered the blocks two in front two in back alternating, the next was having them in a plus shape but leaving the centre without a block, although this made us look more equal due to height differences it still didn't have the right feel to it, so we put another block on top of the front one. This idea meant that we could use our "I am the real Christina!" idea.

To use the "I am the real Christina!" idea we initially used four of us three on the singular blocks and one behind the double stacked blocks, this was to be the hidden Christina, her real self ? We kept the hidden Christina hidden so that she could come up when we felt Christina would object to what was being said about her life. The group and myself felt that the piece needed more movement, to do this we had Christina in the middle move she crawls over the top and jumps down between the two new additions to the piece we then did a hand signal to which we said "I am the real Christina!" we then used another old idea which was the phone key pad and turning our heads to the numbers we decided on and did it as a chorus. We then decided to do a lift but problems arose when we found that Dan falling off the blocks into a group cradle, wasn't as elegant as the rest of the piece.

This was where we ended our week on having found many problems and some solutions, not finding solutions to all our problems or hiccups was a difficult note to end on but it gave us a lot to think about for our next week of devising theatre exploration.

Week 1 (Sept 23rd-29th)

This week we began by being given our stimulus, this stimulus was a painting by Andrew Wyeth called Christina's World. We started by writing down any thoughts or ideas that came to us, at this point we had no knowledge of what the painting was actually about or it's history. From not being able to know what the past history of the piece was we could make our own assumptions as to what was going on in the painting, the ideas of War, Longing, Helplessness and Loss came to mind. After making my own deductions from the piece we were told all about the painting finding out that the painting was about a woman called Anna Christina Olson, she had polio and subsequently couldn't walk and had to crawl everywhere, the artist used to watch her and was fascinated by her struggle and so painted her.

Put into groups we sat as a body and discussed all of our ideas bringing what we could to the table. My own personal ideas being thoughts of a woman who was looking toward a lover in one of the windows of the house, other ideas were that it was a concentration camp and she was one of the family of a warden a bit like the boy in the striped pyjamas, i thought this because of the wire fence in the background i also felt it looked like the beginning scene in beauty and the beast when belle is looking to a bigger and brighter future.

From these ideas we began to work as a group to mix these thoughts into a selection of main ideas we could begin to use to create our devised piece. First ideas put together were from a mix of us all who thought of Christina being an orphan, Connor thought of her being an orphan because of a tragic fire,i thought that this was a different idea and was a good way to look into another way of seeing what Christina was feeling, from this we all found the idea of Christina being haunted by her inner demons "the fire" and trying to escape from the thought that she was the one to actually kill her family.

We began to stage this idea of Christina escaping from "the fire" we sat Christina in a chair on her own to be alone with her thoughts, on either side of Christina (Imogen) we had the fire holding her back and letting her burn (Connor and Alicia) in the background we had (Rae, Dan, Yaz and Bradley) being the family asking her why she didn't help them and why should she be there instead of them. We began this by having the actors on the stage and looking at Christina struggling, but soon realised that putting the actors backstage and only being able to hear their voices made it seem much more real that their voices are in Christina's mind. We finished with Christina screaming, but realised it was too cliche and was done too often, instead we ended with just Christina breaking down in silence as we felt it was a more effective way to capture the audience. We decided that next we would work on another idea to keep ourselves working on different concepts and to explore different ways that our devised piece could go. We used an idea of Rae's to put the character back to a good time in her life with her family at christmas dinner, the twist is that we have the later Christina narrating the story when the characters are frozen, we found this difficult to work with because we weren't quite sure how to go about Christina looking back on her past. We came up with a short scene before the end of our session that day and were pleased with what we had accomplished.

In this first week working as a group, i found that being in a smaller group and working together somewhat challenging, because although we know each other reasonably well we still didn't know how each other put their ideas or thoughts across. Although this was challenging and for each of us to find our own voices when we weren't quite sure how to entirely handle each other made things seem a little impossible, we soon found our own way to hear each other out. Our way of working together was to sit in a circle so that we all felt equal and at ease, this made bringing ideas to the table a lot easier. At times the group would become unfocused being distracted by something that would come up, but as soon as we realised we were detracting from working on our devised piece we got back on track.

In short we took a range of ideas that all of us had come up with from our own imagination and worked as a team to get every ones ideas heard, having looked at the stimulus. We responded by sharing all the ideas we had accumulated and chose a select few to have a go with. Straight away we experimented with these ideas by putting together a piece of work to begin a fragment of our devised theatre.