Evaluation of Chasing Pavements Devising

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.