Week 1 - Devising

This week we have been given some tools to help us get started with our devising pieces. We played quite a few games to help us get active and get our brains working. Deborah also said that we should make sure we stretch before we do anything and don't just walk into the class room and sit down. If we play a game it will get our energy pumping and could help us come up with some idea for our devising piece. Deborah introduced this stalking game to us which was where you pick someone in the room and stalk them without them knowing and then we gradually got closer until we got as close as we possibly could. Then she had us write for 4 minutes about how it made us feel and then we had to start cutting it down to we had 3 words. With these 3 words we made up 3 movements and then 3 sound effects to go with it. Deborah numbered us after and then called us up and made us walk to the performance area using our 3 movements and then freeze on our last movement. She then got 3 of us at a time to do it and move around in the space whilst making the sounds and then we all did it. Whilst doing this we all started to become face to face with each other as we moved around the space and then it started to tell all these different stories.

On Thursday Kirsty gave us our stimulus which was a song that's called 'Ode to Billy Joe'. We all listened to the song first and wrote down our first responses. At first all that came to my mind was that this sounded like a country song and brought cowboys and farmers to my mind. I then began to listen to the lyrics and a heard the date which was '3rd of June' which made me think maybe something actually happened on this day which is why it's in the song.  It also speaks about a boy called Billy Joe who jumped off Tallahatchie bridge and how this girl is being told this by her mother. From the song I could tell that this girl was upset, almost as if she had a relationship with this boy but her family doesn't seem to care so I got the feeling it was a secret relationship.

After we came up with our own responses and listened to the song a few times and looked at the lyrics we went into our devising groups which are three groups of six to see what their responses are and come up with some ideas on what we're going to do. I'm in a group with Phoebe, Kennedy, Joseph, Lewis and Luke. We had quite a few responses which we're mostly all the same and then with that we came up with some ideas. We decided to focus our play more on the relationships between the characters instead of the death of Billy Joe. Our first decision was to have all three of us girls as Bobby and all three boys as Billy Joe and then show the relationship between Billy Joe and Bobby in three ways. The first one was how they were in love, second one was after they had killed someone and the last one was after Billy Joe had died. We decided to make this our prologue scene in order for the audience to see into their relationship and we're going to have Luke as the narrator to explain the different couples. I'm interested to see how this scene goes and how we develop our play even more next week. I think it's going to be very interesting and that it's going to turn out really well.