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.
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