Assignment
Brief – ‘Ode to Billy Joe’
Thursday 8th
January 2015
The Second
Assignment
Our second
assignment brief, yet our first Devising assignment, having had previous
session exploring the many different types of Devising Physical Theatre and
understanding what it is like to work in a devising process, I was eager to get
underway in this assignment. Beginning
with a brief scenario of how this assignment was to play out (in three
different groups we were to give three different devising pieces towards the
same stimulus) and what we would get out by taking part in the main
performance. Having been told that out
stimulus was to be a song; we went straight into the first stages of the
assignment titled ‘Ode to Billy Joe’.
To begin with we began to take notes of
our first reactions to our stimulus and what we could use, Physical Theatre
elementary wise, to bring a performance piece to life with this song. The link below gives the lyric to the song ‘Ode
to Billy Joe’ by Bobbie Gentry:
In my text
book I gave my initial response to the song, and later we were to be placed
into three groups and we would have to explore the song together in more detail
and explore how we are to perform the devising piece in these three
groups. My initial response listed as
follows:
·
A soothing tune to open the song.
·
The lyric tell the story of a troubled family.
·
The story is located at a farm.
·
Lyrics possibly representing a characters diary
entry.
·
Other characters mentioned being concerned
family members.
·
Lyrics being very detailed in the locations and
other depicted characters.
·
The theme of suicide throughout the story within
the song.
·
Hinting at a love relationship between key
characters.
·
and The possible loss of a child told within the
story.
After hearing
the song twice I did find it difficult to analyse this particular song, but
these note are what I extracted from the song.
But what I got, I feel got the rough nutshell sized summary of the story
behind the song ‘Ode to Billy Joe’.
Therefore we had a brief discussion, to share what we all thought of the
song and what it could potentially mean.
The discussion came to an end and we came into our groups to begin the
plan of action towards future devising sessions.
In my group
our main areas of focus were; the themes within the song, which we could
transfer onto the stage. As well as all
the potential characters within the songs storytelling, and what each of them
could represent on stage. But the main
question that bugged us was who and what is this Billy Joe? The discussions and debates went on for what
seemed as hours upon end, and the spider diagram grew and grew. Until we came to some agreements.
With some help
from our teachers, as we went to great depth into the themes and meanings of
this one song, we managed to find a performance piece to relate to it. Our key relation was with the famous play ‘An
Inspectors Call’, as one key element of that was with the fact that the
Inspector was playing with the characters minds. Could it have been real or falsified to gain
the guilt and understand the moral of responsibility. We agreed we could refer back to this when
creating characters and relating them to this ‘Billy Joe’. But the main points of agreement were:
·
Billy Joe
wasn’t to make a Physical appearance. - We agreed that Billy Joe was to be
link that held our character’s together, as in Billy Joe being a vision of
their imagination that could draw these characters to do wrong in their lives
like suicide or downfall of their lives and mental being. Plus we all agreed it would be affective if
Billy Joe wasn’t performed by one actor, and was performed by everyone on stage
to show that even though it is essentially the same person to each of these
people, all the characters have different interpretations of him. In different vocal formations, different
standing postures, and even different views on the world. We all hoped this would give a good effect
toward our audience as well as potentially show how the human imagination works
in different visions of the same thing.
·
Each of
our characters can represent something that affects society today. – One of
the first questions that bugged us was why did this certain character commit
suicide? We ended up believing that
Billy Joe could have been a character that bullied a certain character to do
something that drove them mad. Like a
homosexual character could have been driven to suicide because they were
battling for their sexuality and Billy Joe was a character that kept bringing
doubt into their minds, leading to their suicide. As linking into the first point of Billy Joe
being a fragment of their imagination, this could be all the more effective in
giving our characters sense of complexity as well as show multiple emotions
that audience members can relate to.
·
The song
should be played at the end of the performance. – A simple yet effective
point made in the planning for the main performance, was to be whether we would
use the song or not. We agreed it would
be a bad idea to use the song to open the performance, just in case any
audience member could predict what we could physically show that represented
the morals behind the song’s lyrics.
Therefore we decided to have the song as the conclusion to the
performance, just to give the audience that realisation as to what they’ve
witnessed and understand how the song is truly the stimulus behind the devising
piece.
There were
many points made in our endless discussion and there were many places we could
take towards the upcoming performance.
Although we didn’t get any practical work done in this session we
certainly gained a great starting point and understood all we needed to know
for when we started practical work for the performance. I personally look extremely forward to the
future devising session and seeing how we develop this to be a great physical
theatre performance.
Here is a
photographic image of our spider diagram exploring in depth ‘Ode to Billy Joe’
by Bobbie Gentry:
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