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.