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.