Week 6 - Devising

During this week we were focusing on the feedback we got back from Kirsty and Deborah so we could have a finished piece by the end of the week. We needed to work on all the scenes we already had from the feedback and add one or two scenes to finish the play off. We started off by sorting out the boys fighting scene and finally taking out the back toll that Lewis and Luke do and changed it to something more suiting and that they could actually do. After we worked on Kennedy's monologue scene and made mine and Phoebe's actions more bigger and expressive. We worked at bit on the break up scene with me and Joe and the running away scene with us, The break up scene needs more emotion and Bobby needs to be more bitter and act as if she don't love him anymore and that she never did so he doesn't get even more hurt when she marry's brother Taylor. The run away scenes needed to go more swiftly. 

We got some feedback from Deborah saying how she still doesn't know a lot about Joe's character who is Billy Joe. We started off by hot seating him as his character, we asked him a range of questions about he's feelings towards Bobby, what we did before he met her and his feelings towards her family. After this Deborah had another look and said that she's still learning nothing new about him. We then came up with another idea about asking him questions after he has commits suicide but we would put the scene during the play before he dies. These questions involved asking him why he gave up, how he felt about Bobby marrying brother Taylor and why he didn't stay and fight for her. Then we took the questions away and left it so we only had the answers to the questions so it leaves a bit of mystery about what's going on. 

Another scene we came up with was a dinner scene which involved the mum, dad, both Bobbies and brother Taylor. We put this scene in the style of berkoff and made it show how the women are basically the men's slaves and how everyone thinks they're a happy family but they're not. We build "We're such a happy family" from being said in a happy way up to where it's said in a way to show how much we hate it and the fact that we're stuck init. None of the women are happy with their lives but the men are and we show this in the scene by the women acting as the table and the men putting their feet up on them.

My group is hopefully going to meet up next week and discuss what songs we're going to use and if we are in what scenes. We also need to sort out a few scene transitions so they flow into each other and then when we go back to college perform in to Kirsty and Deborah so we can get some feedback before our performance so if we need to make some changes we can. 

Week 5 - Devising

I have been thinking a lot about my character this week and her relationship with the rest of the character in the play. I want to be able to show clearly to the audience Bobby's love for Billy Joe and how she is getting forced to marry brother Taylor. I have linked Bobby to Juliet  from Romero and Juliet as she was also in love with someone her family didn't approve of and they were forcing her into a marriage.

We didn't do a lot on are devising this week but when we did we worked on the scene where Bobby breaks up with Billy Joe for his own good.I have to seem bitter and act as if I never did love him and as if it was all just a lie. I found this scene really hard, more because of the emotion I have to put in it. When doing a play I can normally relate it to my own experiences which will help me find the emotion but I've never broke up with a guy after being in a serious relationship with them which makes if difficult. To capture the emotion I think I'm going to have to think of something that upsets me and annoys me and put that all into. I want to make sure the audience believe me so I'm going to grab every single emotion I have at that time and show it in the scene.

I've also done some research on depression and anxiety as when we got the stimulus we said that a boy named Billy Joe commits suicide. It says that most people experience ups and downs in their life, and can feel unhappy, depressed, stressed or anxious during difficult times. This is a normal part of life. Many difficult events and experiences can leave us in low spirits or cause depression: relationship problems,bereavement, sleep problems, stressed at work, bullying, illness, and pain being just a few. But sometimes it's possible to feel down without there being an obvious reason.

Symptoms of depression can include the following:
*continuous low mood or sadness
*feeling hopeless and helpless
*having low self-esteem 
*feeling tearful
*feeling guilt-ridden
*feeling irritable and intolerant of others 
*having no motivation or interest in things
*finding it difficult to make decisions
*not getting any enjoyment out of life
*having suicidal thoughts or thoughts of harming yourself
*feeling anxious or worried

Next week I hope for our group to come up with some more scenes to link the rest of our play and hopefully have our current ones all tidy and that everyone knows what they're doing. We also need to have a few more scenes with speaking in because most of our scenes just have dancing in them. I think me and Phoebe who is the other Bobby should also think about our feelings towards the other characters so when one of us is the other ones thoughts we know what we're going to say. We could also do a monologue to help who ever is doing to thoughts so we have a clear idea.

I have started to think of the costume's we could wear for the play and I think the boys should wear white shirts with black trousers and us girls should wear flowery dresses with black leggings.

Research Portfolios

Frantic Assembly

Frantic Assembly artistic director's are Scott Graham and Steve Hoggoet who met in Swansea as students.They have 5 permanent members of staff. They were formed the company with a desire to do something different, they wanted to create a thrilling, energetic and unforgettable theatre. They were inspired by Volcano Theatre Company. All the director's work as a team and do not discourage each other's ideas as other people's ideas might lead to an even better idea.

They are one of the most exciting companies in the country. Their unique physical style combines movement, design, music and text.  They are an athletic type of theatre and use a lot of naturalism.

There are 10 practitioners who lead workshops and residencies for Frantic Assembly. They have three workshops, Devising and physicality which provides students with the skills to embark on their own devised projects. Othello uncovered with helps them discover the devices and techniques used to create Othello.Then there's Creative residencies which provides participants with a sustained creative experience, through a series of workshops culminating in a performance.

When exercising the director's like to challenge the group and go forward in small steps. They don't like to set anything complex for the first exercise but set very specific tasks. My class tried some of these exercise and I learned that the simplest movement can be very effective and show a lot to the audience. Frantic Assembly like to keep they're performance's beautiful and dynamic. The director's like to keep an open field on what they do and try not to get carried away in the art.

They stayed away from a classical line and it was all steered by gut instinct. They get inspiration from each other and sometimes base their plays on past experiences like fights and real life stories.They give the writer freedom to developing a text in response to they're ideas and conversations, but don not expect the writer to be inspired by what is created in rehearsal room. They believe the partnership with a writer should be completely collaborative. As they develop their rehearsal process they start to take advantage of the generous opportunities to try out ideas.

Frantic Assembly show a lot of dance sequence's and every single one of them show you so much, it allows you to see deeper into the emotion. For example in Stockholm they wanted to show they were a couple by creating something intimate and sexy. They just wanted to show  that they loved to dance and not have a specific style to the dance. What was is important to them is that the dance feels different each time for the characters. They needed to be aware of the tension of the moment, when the context changed so do their reasons for pulling each other tight. The moves express the characters growing passion, anger, jealousy, insecurity, desire and desperation. In early development they set their performers the task of making up some ballroom type material.They then created some lovely and joyful moves that made them look just right.

The imagine of the shows are really important to Frantic Assembly. They take the creation pf the image very personally, that they just have to get it right. To them getting it wrong not only means you are misrepresenting your show and not promoting it properly but it also means that you are going to see it a lot and be constantly reminded of your mistake. 

Greek Theatre

Greek Theatre is unknown at the specific time of practice but we know it started in B.C and has evolved since there to develop some of the famous practitioners we know today. Greek theatre was introduced as a festival which is every year in April to celebrate the God Dionysus who is the God of wine and fertility. Athens would hold great festivals and performances in honor of the god. Within the performances there would be a chorus and three actors who were men.

A chorus was originated by the ancient Greeks and consisted of 12 to 50 people. They were considered the vital role in theatre and their propose was to react to an action. They sang, danced and read lines to express the public’s opinions on cultural, political and military actions. The 3 actors that were all male would used different masks to portray different people and genders, they were also warn for religious reasons. It would be rare to see any females at an amphitheater due to the fact they had few rights in ancient Greece to the point where they weren't even aloud to watch these plays, only the men were. The mask were also used to hide their identity otherwise they would be at risk having mocked the government or very high influential people.

There is only tragedy and comedies that the Greeks performed and from thorough research there would have only been them two and nothing more because of the God Dionysus. Wine, representing liquefying poison and temptation and fertility showing laughter, happiness and peaceful giving.  

Greek tragedy show the suffering of people and human tragedy it's self. We live in a flaw world full of suffering from our actions and that's what they show in their plays. All their actions were big and you saw the tense relationships between the characters. 

Week 4 - Devising

This week consisted of developing our ideas we have by making up more scene to go into our piece to help make the scenes we have so far link. We came up with a proposal scene on Monday which shows how Bobby is forced into this arranged marriage with brother Taylor by her father. At the back of the scene with be happy Bobby and Billy watching over the proposal and when brother Taylor asks her the happy Bobby screams 'NO'.

'Arranged marriage is a type of marital union where the bride and groom are selected by a third party rather than by each other. It was common worldwide until the 18th century.'

We had a bit of feedback from Kirsty on Monday were we discussed about our piece and all the relationships and how it might be too complicated for the audience to understand it all. Then we decided that instead of having Phoebe as Bobby's sister Betty she was also going to be Bobby as well. Which meant we had to tweak some of the scenes we already had.I came up with the idea to have one happy and one sad Bobby, the happy one would always we with Billy-Joe as he makes her happy and the sad one would be with brother Taylor. Phoebe decided to be the sad Bobby and I'm the happy Bobby. Which is why we changed it so Phoebe is getting married and I just have my hand on her shoulder during the wedding scene.  

With this we would have one Bobby on the side saying all of the other Bobby's who would be doing a scenes feelings and real emotions that she's not saying. For example with the dinner scene that we have Bobby sitting down at the table and then the other Bobby behind her reacting to the things the father is saying because the Bobby sitting down isn't brave enough to say them. We had some feedback on this scene about the way the Bobby stood behind the other Bobby should express her feelings. For example I was shouting them but they said the tension was already there so there is no need to shout but maybe just have an angry tone to my voice. 

We have also worked on a dance together to show that we are both Bobby and to help the audience understand that better and when we showed the group on Wednesday they seemed to know without us saying anything. We also came up with a scene for the mother to show her relationship with the father since our play is based on the relationships between each other. We now have a scene with brother Taylor and the father talking about the arranged marriage.

With the scenes we came up with this week we now have a beginning, middle and end to our play. We have linked 6 scenes together which is what we needed to do mainly this week to make our middle of our play. All we have to do now is make a few more scenes up to link to beginning to the middle and the middle to the end and then we have our play. We have also figured out a few songs for some of the scenes but some are yet to be chosen and then we need to think about costumes which we will probably discuss near the end. I think so far our play is going really well as we have a lot of material to work with. Hopefully it will continue to go this way and it isn't long until we have our final piece. 

Week 3- Devising

During this week we had been discussing having a wedding and other ideas that we could do for our play as we don't really have a structure for it yet, just loads of ideas. At first we were going to completely scrap our ideas we had at the moment and just have a wedding. We wrote down all the things that happen at a wedding and cut them out and the picked them out so it's not in order.The we realized we couldn't do them all so we picked the important ones.

Deborah suggested a workshop for us to help us with this wedding idea by putting out 3 rows of chairs with 3 chairs in each row to make a wedding aisle.  Deborah gave us 2 rules to begin with which was, one person must be standing at all times and one person moving chairs at all time. We played around with this for a little and I could feel the awkwardness and it made me feel uncomfortable, as if no one wanted to be there due to everyone moving seats. The next rule was no eye contact so I just kept looking forward as if the ceremony was actually taking place. Then the rule was to make eye contact with someone and you had to stay on the opposite side to the person you had eye contact with then you could swap eye contact with someone else. This had the affect of family feuds, like the two families don't like each other and don't approve of this marriage. The next rule was that you didn't want to sit next to anyone so we were all constantly moving away from each other which made it feel like we all hated each other. Then we had someone walk down the aisle which caused me to actually stand and look down the aisle so it really gave the affect of an actually wedding. Finally the last rule was you had to sit next to someone at a times which definitely brought the feeling at a wedding as there is always people chatting when waiting for the wedding to actually start.

Even though we thought the wedding idea was good we didn't really want to change what we already had as we really liked it but then we said we would still have a wedding scene in it. We went back to our idea and added some scenes. We decided to have a wedding scene at the beginning of our play where at first we're all saying a feeling or emotion in cannon and then repeating it, mine is 'Forced'. Then Lewis asks if brother Taylor and Bobby will take each other and brother Taylor says 'I do' and Bobby says 'I' with now answer and then everyone says ' Do or don't' because not everyone wants the marriage to happen.  

After it goes it to a dance sequence with the girls to show the secrets and lies that me and Kennedy choreographed and then we added the boys into it. Then the boys stand behind us and the girls do another dancing show their hurt and pain in their relationships and their lives.

We don't know the structure of our play, we only really have loads of scenes that need to put in order because the only order we have at the moment is the first and second scene. The first scene is the first scene but it's a flash back because it will also be the last scene but in the last scene Bobby will actually say 'I do'. The scene after that is the dance sequence. We have a lot of scenes that we just need to link together so hopefully we can do that next week and maybe make some new scenes to link them.