Devising Assignment Week 3

A Conclusive Business Plan

Monday 19^th, Wednesday 21^st and Thursday 22^nd January 2015

What we’ve so far

     So concluding last week, we had finally established what our characters were to be and how they related with one another.  This left us with a positive response and making us feel eager to see where we could take these characters and how we could present them through different physical theatre styles. 

     Beginning by splitting into three pairs we tried to establish these three pairs/couples and then later work on their love triangles and what physical theatre styles we could use to present them.  Plus we also looked into what type movements established them better visually.  The results we got were:

1)      The Gay Couple – Having fasted paced dynamics in time with music really helped show their love and future the character hope to gain with each other.

2)      The Best Friends – Once again they shared fasted paced dynamic, visually showing their strong, long lasting and good friendship and it was effective in hinting at potential dark future events.

3)      and The Couple having the Affair – We took a more slower pace with our performance, to show the love and knowledge that both characters knew they should be together, but I thought it had the potential to take a faster pace, but for then it proved to be effective.

     I personally found that having a faster pace in each of our movements had a way of relating to the style of ‘Frantic Assembly’ in having a naturalistic flow, yet had a very non-naturalistic look to it.  Plus it was a good starting point in establishing the characters coupled relationships, so our next focus was to show the other relationships within the two love triangles and show scenes in between those key movement segments highlighting the lead characters.

     But as we progressed to the end of the session, one area of focus we didn’t think about beforehand was giving our performance a structure.  While before we pictured having the stage structure as a police interrogation office.  As well as having a main plot device being a murder and all our characters were suspects.  Only that way we could strongly link towards the stimulus (‘Ode to Billy Joe’ by Bobbie Gentry) and establish our own original and unique characters that all have a say on the murder.  

     But we dropped that idea because at first we used interviews to create our characters, plus we didn’t know how to relate them with each other.  Not only that but it seemed to give our performance a flow that was repetitive in showing one interview after another, and that is not what we wanted to present.  Therefore it was our goal to create a new structure to the performance, making it seem more professional and allow us time to further develop the storyline within our performance, have stronger links to the stimulus, and show our characters relationship just a little bit better.

 

What we’ve changed

     In coming up with a plan for our performance’s structure, I inputted two suggestions:

1)      An Office Structure – In some ways I wanted to refer to it as “the office romance” as if suggesting that’s how all these characters met each other.  Plus the structure I visualised had a very organised feel to it, that way we could keep our earlier movements in establishing the characters just transfer them into this office layout space.

 

 



2)     The Night Club – I specifically wanted to call this night club “The Bridge” because that would link directly to “the Tallahatchie Bridge” which is where a possible suicide takes place within the storyline of the stimulus’ lyrics.  Making the key character’s suicides all the more relevant and effective.

 

 

     While I wanted to show both structure layouts if possible, some of my team members suggested the negatives in having a structure like a night club, with the usage of loud music and possible repetitive movement.  Therefore we all agreed to try the office structure but give it a layout that was slightly different to my suggestion.

     The new office layout had another very organised structure to it, yet we had a more horse shoe table layout at the front of the stage, and two desks at the back to suggest authority and tension within this particular office.  Plus it showed the two love triangles separated possibly increasing tensions and hinting at the question of where the performance could go. 

     But for the next step we had to visually establish our characters relationships again.  Except for this exercise we were to use no dialogue and stay within our love triangle so our teacher, who was now an audience member, could fully understand the characters relationship, whether it is love, hate or tension, we had to physically show it.  This was our feedback:

 



     But personally I found the non-spoken dialogue office scene to be really effective and I pictured it to be the perfect introduction to our performance.  Plus it very much reminded me of ‘DV8’s performance of ‘Enter Achilles’, as their performance had little to no dialogue yet we managed to understand the character’s friendships and their struggles throughout the story.  

 

What we’ve accomplished

     For our final session of the week, we did have to make some major changes, as not every member of the group was pleased with the progression of our devising piece we decided to take a new and different approach to our performance.  Returning to the idea of having an interview structure to the stage we instantly created a new formation for our devising project.

     Firstly we established our new characters and their relationship towards a recently murdered victim.  It was then suggested to make the interrogation the opening scene and have the rest of the performance to be a flash back so audiences can see how these came to be in this position and why?

     Secondly we created list of questions that we felt gave a strong intriguing element as our character’s answered, indicating to how they knew the murdered victim and what part they will play in the rest of the performance.  The three questions were:

1)      How are you feeling?

2)      What was your relationship to them?

3)      Did you do it?

     I thought these were excellent teaser questions and I felt it would strongly intrigue our audience, to find out why they are here.

     Finally we wanted to give a very physical theatre vibe to it.  The two particular styles that we wanted to stick to in referencing was ‘Frantic Assembly’ and ‘DV8’, only that way could we keep a naturalistic flow and have exaggerated movement.  These came particularly handy when we improvised movement pieces to the interview and to the following scene.  The use of chairs helped vastly for our movements, as you can see here:

 

 

     Using still image movements we managed to establish our new characters for ourselves and for the future audience.  Plus it gave us an idea of how to keep the structure throughout the performance and how they can be changed and enhanced through elements such as blackouts and exaggerated movements.

     As the session came to an end I for one felt please with what we did and didn’t accomplish for our devising project.  But in the end we created something new that we were all please with and were eager to continue down that road for our main performance.