(07/11/14)

We started creating the final part of the whole performance today that involves everyone! It starts with us all running into reception like little children.
Then the music changes and we all "melt down", and stand up straight almost immediately after.
We then do very basic school movements, like tightening up our ties, decreasing our skirts/trousers and lifting our heads up. Then we begin marching around the space in straight lines, like we're in the army. In the first rap of the song Jade "breaks loose" and ignores the system, in the second rap, that's when I ignore the system and Jade and I do a movement in the middle of the space together while the girls are on one side of us doing movement and the boys are of the other side doing movement together.

Siou then taught us a movement/dance piece for us to do and repeat twice. After that Sophia gets lifted up into the air by four other people, and the rest of us were following them around swinging our arms to make the infinity sign.
When Sophia is is put down, we all huddle up really close to each other resting our heads on the person's next to us shoulders and we put our arms around each other. We then start a pulse that is in time with the music.
We then start separating from each other one-by-one and go into somewhere in the space doing something that can make us happy.



These are two videos of the movement piece:
http://youtu.be/0KIFpNYJMfE

http://youtu.be/-mBQrJ7nNfc

(04/11/14)

Now we've learnt all of our lines, we've mainly been being doing lots of run-throughs to making little tweaks to our performance to make it as good as possible. 

One of the things I really wanted to change was the positioning of my closet on the stage, because the way it was positioned on stage it was blocking the audience's view of my first section of the poem, so I moved it to the corner of our room so it was facing out for everyone to see. 

We've also been neatening up our movement in the second half of the poem, as it looked quite stiff and messy in places. We worked a lot on the chair bit, because we really wanted it to flow altogether, so we went through that loads so we knew what we were doing and so it looked a lot cleaner.  

(22/10/14)

Today we started working on Jenny's second section of the poem-(the fourth section). At the end of Heta's part of the poem we fall to the floor all in the corners making a triangle shape. When Jenny starts saying her piece we start standing up slowly and doing simple movements that we thought represented feelings of someone getting bullied. When we came up with them we made them bigger and more exaggerated. 
We do these movements all through Jenny's piece until she says "kids can be cruel". 

When Jenny starts talking a circus and freak-shows, I came up with the idea of literally being "freaks" and twisting and bending our bodies in different ways and then by the end of that part we made sure we were all in a line to do some shadow work. then we split off into a diagonal line where we start acting like we were on a tightrop, then we fell into the wall. 

(07/10/14)

We got the key to the old canteen today, so we went straight there and explored it! It's very dusty, dim, dark and cold in there. It has another little room attached to it, with a giant window in the wall so you can see inside of it as well. 
Our room is almost empty excepts a few tables pushed to the side of the room also some chairs at the back of the room. 
This room is perfect to have the audience scattered around everywhere, we came up with the idea of putting markers on the floor, so our audience don't get confused with where to stand. 
Also, because we want to use the audience to move around so we need to know where they're standing to practise our movement. 

We were thinking of themes for our piece. We thought of friendship/giving and taking, from this idea we thought of helping others and showing how it is hard for some people to ask for help. 
We noticed that there were desks and whiteboards which made us think of a classroom, which then led onto us talking about bullying. 
We started talking about bullying because it happens in every school to a lot of students, so a lot of the audience will be able to relate to it. We also spoke about how bullying can have a long lasting effect on a person, such as leading onto depression, suicide and low self-esteem etc. We all thought that bullying and depression was a great theme to do as people can relate to it. 

(01/10/14)

Today we started the day working with canes. We had to hold them 10cm off the ground and walk round the room keeping them that far away from the ground at all times. This exercise was a complicity and spacial awareness exercise, because we had to keep our focus on keeping our canes 10cm off the ground and we had to make sure we don't bump into anyone else in the room. 

We went off in our groups again, exploring more of the college. We already had some ideas of where to perform, such as the long hallway, where painting and decorating was and the old school canteen. 
Heta had the idea of having the audience down one end of the corridor and have one of us run down it in a panic, towards all of them and maybe collapsing in-front of them.
We all liked this idea, however, there were other people planning on performing down the hallway, also the corridor might be a little restricting in size. We also thought, if we did this, it would be at the beginning of our piece, and then we move them to a different site nearby, like the old canteen. 

The old canteen was there when Stanley Deason was still going. after that, it was for brick laying. 
We couldn't go inside as it was locked, however Siou said that she'll get it unlocked for us to go inside and have a proper look. From what we could see, it was gigantic! It would give us a lot of different opportunities to position the audience in a non-conventional way. We thought of having them scattered everywhere, like a forest. 

(26/09/14)

Today we found out what our stimulus is for our new project. It was an apple. Today, we had to sit all around the room, individually, and write down everything we thought an apple represented. 
I said that an apple represents a human, because no apple is a "perfect" apple, like no human is perfect. Also, no apple lives forever, like a human. Apples go from babies, to their most ripe, to old. 
Another thing is that an apple stork is like an umbilical cord holding onto it's mother-(the tree), collecting all of the nutrients from the mother. 


Today, we also learnt about Yoshi Oida, he's a Japanese actor/director who wrote a book called "The Invisible Actor". 
We learnt one of his techniques, "Jo-Ha-Kyn".
"Jo" is the beginning of a scene, "Ha" is the middle of the scene and "Kyn" is the climax of the scene. 
We then improvised a short scene. We put a chair in the middle of the performing space and placed an apple on the arm of the chair. We had to walk on in neutral, clock the apple and leave with the intention of giving the apple to the person you love!

(23/09/14)

We looked at Michael Chekov again, today. We were looking at a few more of his techniques/theories, such as, moulding, floating and flying.
Moulding is a slow/heavy movement, floating is clearly a lighter more angelic movement and flying is really fast and sharp.

To put these movement techniques to the test, we had to write our names using the whole of our body. When we had done this, we then got into pairs and showed each other, then taught each other without using verbal communication. After we had taught our partners, we then had to join another pairs and we had to teach each other our movements. When we all learnt them, we had to turn it into a movement piece to show to the class.

(19/09/14)

Today we watched a few Frantic Assembly videos in class, as we were learning a new exercise called "Chair Duet".
Frantic Assembly are a theatre company who create devised theatre pieces.

After we did that we got into pairs and had to start creating gestures with our partners, while being sat on our chairs. Siou specifically said "No-one make any narratives..", At first I thought it was going to be easy creating movement/gestures without creating a narrative at the same time. I was wrong, I found it really hard because when you do gestures to people or on your own, there's usually a story behind that gesture.

(10/09/14)

We started using canes today. We were creating different shapes and movements with very long bamboo canes. At the beginning of the lesson we had to get a bamboo stick each, put tape over all of the sharp bits and then find a space in the room and start  making different movements and shapes with them. We had to be careful though, as there isn't that much room in the drama studio, and there's quite of lot of us moving about with bamboo sticks. But, it is quite good if you're thinking about spacial awareness.

After doing that for a while, Siou told us to get into pairs and have one bamboo stick between us. We had to have one of us on either end of the bamboo stick, both pushing on either end with our fingers, so that the bamboo stick stays up. We had to move around the drama studio, whist balancing the bamboo sticks between each of our fingers and most importantly, being aware of everyone else around you.

I liked this exercise a lot because it was really surprising how many movements you could create using two people and a bamboo stick.

(09/09/14)

Our first show this year will be a site-responsive piece of theatre. This kind of theatre is where you create a piece of theatre by using the site as stimulus. We did various different exercises to help us start creating our pieces.

Today we did an exercise where we had to walk around the room, and look at everything in there. We had to look at the little details, such as chips in the paint, cracks, cobwebs etc.
We then had to find a spot in the room that we liked, and create different movements based on the space we chose. We had to do our 3 movements over and over again until we were happy with them, and that we had memorised them. We then had to get into partners with someone across the room from us and teach our movements to our partner, without speaking to each other.  

For me, this exercise was quite relaxing and interesting, because I've never made movement based on part of a room before and I thought it was cool how we did that. I thought it was easier showing my partner; Sophie, my movements without talking to her because there wasn't anyone talking over each other.