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 !