We have now performed our devised piece of
chasing pavements overall the performance was fantastic and my whole group are
happy how it turned out.
Response to Stimuli
When we were given our title for chasing
pavements we started thinking of different ideas that we thought would link to
chasing pavements. We all sat down as a group and began brainstorming ideas
that would link to chasing pavements. One of the ideas I thought about was the
boy buried in pavement, when I did research for this here is some of the
information about it: “Tom’s brother is dead. He was killed by
a broken bottle to the neck this has upset a lot of people but it hasn’t upset
Tom. Or, rather, it has upset him, but in ways he can’t explain. Tom really
didn’t like Luke, but without him… This is a play about grief, and looking at
someone that little bit more closely.” I thought this was a good idea because
it links with chasing pavements and I had the idea of using some of the script.
We also looked at ideas like domestic violence and things that we thought would
make people react. We wanted to make our audience feel what we were feeling so
if the scenes were sad then the audience would feel the same.
Another idea I thought about was technology/trends in the world. I thought we could use this in our piece demonstrating that some people copy the trend and when a product comes out it can get popular so everyone can end up buying it. We all thought of many ideas like different pathways and options and decisions that would allow us to show the ending of the story in two different ways. If something different happened in the story it could change the whole storyline. Some of the other ideas we thought would work for chasing pavements were relationships/love, poverty/suffering, abortion/miscarriage/still born, alcohol abuse, rejection/ageism, domestic/violence, chase/hunt/race, time running out/ time jumps, refugees/religion and running away. These were all of the ideas that we thought could work.
Development
of Ideas
We decided to cut down some of the ideas. We decided
as a group some of the best ideas we could use for our piece. The ideas that we
wanted to develop and try out were domestic violence, children soldiers/war and
the abortion.
The first idea we started working on was abortion. We
all had a chat of how we wanted to start this off. We all agreed that we wanted
to start off by creating a movement piece, this would portray a couple making
love to each other it shows that the couple get pregnant this links with the
relationships.
The next idea we decided to experiment was the
domestic violence. We wanted to start it off like time was running out, to show
it can be too late if you don’t get help from someone. We started off the scene
with a clock sound scape moving into Kat and Rob’s narration telling us how
domestic violence happens and how to prevent it. At the same time Lorna and I
doing a movement piece showing the real side of domestic violence with us doing
the actions and them talking about it.
The last idea we wanted to develop was the child
soldiers/war. We came up with the idea of using natural things and moving into
non naturalistic. I came up with the idea of being children as the
naturalistic, then for the non-naturalistic we became adults in the war. We
decided to include lots of techniques these were slow motion, freeze frames,
abstract and when changing freeze frames into the next part we did a click
noise to show the change. This showed cross cutting between scenes and lots of
different movements with the characters we were playing because we went from adults
into children.
After we explored the ideas we wanted to try all three
of them out. We sat down as a group and had to make a decision on the main idea
we wanted to choose for our whole piece. We all agreed that we wanted to go
down the abortion line. We liked the first idea the best, we also liked the
idea of a relationship, and we thought we could include many techniques for
this.
Collaboration
as a Group
Overall I think we worked fantastic as a team our
collaboration as a whole group was perfect. Everyone got involved as a team and
had there say, so all of us got to include our ideas that we had thought of in
the performance. We always tried everyone’s ideas out and if some of them did
not work we would make changes. We worked hard as a group and got everything
completed, we all shared out tasks fairly. All of us had a fair amount of work
to do and we all got to follow it through in the performance. All our ideas were
included such as movement and everyone had a fair amount of lines. We did not
wasted time in lessons and always set a target of what we wanted to complete
for that lesson. When it was closer to the performance we had a rehearsal
schedule that we followed and completed those tasks each lesson .I think we
should have had this sooner, then we could have made a plan to focus on each
lesson. All of us did individual work outside of school such as researching and
coming up with different staging ideas and anything we wanted to change or add
to our performance.
Developing
Performance through Rehearsal
When developing our performance during rehearsals we
had to make sure we did not waste time sitting around .We always planned what
we wanted to do in the lesson and made sure we achieved it. We all had to work
hard as a team to come up with different ideas that we could include. When
coming up with lines we would all sit down together and go though what we were
all going to say if we were in that scene.
Everyone’s views were taken into account when we planned the scenes to
see if we needed any more improvements to them. This was the same with movement
when we were writing the choreography we would always discuss what moves we
wanted to perform. We made sure when doing run through to make ourselves notes
on anything we had change or if we needed to add anything.
Performance
What went well during the performance?
Overall I think the whole performance was a
success. All of the scene transitions were smooth and everyone remained
professional during the performance. We all remembered our lines and stayed in
character. Everyone had great movements to match their character, to enable the
audience to clearly see they were playing different people. Everyone did the
same with their voice. We all changed our voices depending on whom we were
playing. We wanted the audience to see we were serious at sometimes, but wanted
them to laugh at a couple of things in the dialogue as well. For example in the
game show the audience were shocked at some of the things we were saying and
did not know how to react because they felt uncomfortable. At other times when
Kat and I were having a conversation as friends, we were talking about the
party and how she had sex; the audience did have a few laughs at some of the
comedy jokes we made. The whole
performance made the audience feel different emotions, this is what we wanted
to achieve and make them think about what was going on throughout the whole
performance.
What could you have done better?
I don’t think we made many mistakes in our
performance the only things that could have been better was the sound .We
should have planned more rehearsals to practice the whole performance with
someone not in the group playing the music, because when practicing for our
piece we played the music ourselves, as we knew when we wanted to play and stop
it. Next time I think we would have all of our music and sounds on one phone;
this would stop people getting confused when changing the track. It would
ensure all of the music would be in the right order and we would not need to go
through with anyone when they should play the music.
What would you have done different next time?
I think next time we would make sure we focused
more on the dialogue of the performance, as we felt that it was to movement based.
Some members of my group agree that we should have included more scenes in it
that involved more talking. I think we could have included a short scene from a
script that was based on our topic and questioned some of the topics that we
had discussed. I also think that in the future we need to make more notes on
our work. This would help us to make improvements .We should also ask for
opinions from a variety of people and see what they think of certain scenes and
decide if we need to improve on anything.
Why were certain aspects successful and
others not?
I think the strong aspects for the group was
our game show scene it was really effective and had a good impact on the audience,
because it made them feel and think about what was going on. I think some
aspects could be improved such as more dialogue explaining the narrative. I
think at the end, during the scene were Rob and I pick up the book, we should
have finished with a story telling section to the audience explaining what
happened at the end.
Here is some of the feedback I got from the
audience:
- I could see that a lot of time and effort had been put into the choreography of the movement pieces, paid of well.
- You had an interesting concept for your piece, the game show scene made the audience feel very uncomfortable. This was the aim of the scene.
- Your characterisation of The Terminator was good; you used a good variety of facial expressions and body language to channel the character. However I could have exaggerated the voice of my character more, as it would have been even more disturbing.
- The dialogue between every character should have been longer, as what you had worked wonderfully but it was just a shame that there wasn’t as much dialogue as there was movement.
