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.