The dress run

The Dress rehearsal unfortunatley didn't go as well as expected. The performance felt 'bitty' and it was commented that as performers we looked lonley on stage and that we weren't using the space in the way it shoudl have been for the nature of our show. We also felt down hearted whilst peforming which came through to the audience, as soon as one scene didn't work we began to feel somewhat embarrassed by the rest of our material. When talking through it at the end with our lecturer he told us that we seemed to have lost faith in our material and we immiediety understood what he meant as our material had seemed flat as we had become, in a sense, ashamed of what we had created when there was no need to be, we needed to get our confidence back.

Adding in the lights sound and music I feel changed our piece quite radically, not in terms with content but in terms with the amount of conviction that was suddenly in our acting. They add so much more to the action going on stage and aided the scenes. I feel that adding it in is quite an important part to the devising process as it hightlights things that perhaps don't work within the dynamic of the piece when it used to work well as an individual piece. Everything coming together shows you how far you have come yet I am glad we have thought about lighting, video and sound throughout the process as I feel that we have managed to utalise everything somewhat successfully due to us working alongside technology, instead of adding everything in a rushed panick at then end.

The first run

Today was the first full run through of the show but instead of feeling jubilant at the fact that we had managed to create all this material we actually felt somewhat panicked. We didn't feel our story made sense, we felt the individual stories lacked something, even though we all each had our own interview material and live stage action. However when we showed it as a scratch we learnt that we had worried too much, we discovered that the audience made sense of the story as a whole and made sense of the individual aspects of the characters stories. They found it entertaining and enjoyable. We were pleasently surprised at this reaction and also found their feedback incredibly useful.

I did feel somewhat worried about my story however because I tell the story which is then aided by the mexican band but they became the entire focus of the scene and I found it very hard to bring the audinces attention back to me, their presense was quite over powering on my character. I flagged this up as I felt quite uncomfortable in this scene as I felt no one was listening to my story, therefore we decided that the scene needed to be developed and reworked so that my character still had the status and main focus in the scene.

shadows

The last and final element to be added into a our devising process was that of silhouette. We decided that the character of Roger should always appear as a shadow as to mask his identity until the very end. And even then, the human you see in the last scene of the play was still difficult to see. Using the silhouette was another interesting layer added to the piece and we felt that it helped to complete the show as we had felt, although never really discussed, that there was something missing and shadow figures was the missing piece.

finding the end

Our group has so many ideas that it has been impossible to get a clear meaning from our story. There are so many ideas, yet so many things don't add up, there are gaps and the relationships between the characters aren't clear.

Therefore finding an end to a story, which at the moment is uncomplete, was proving very difficult. I think that this was the real block that our group has had through out the entire devising process, we've always had ideas, and before christmas we were plowing along at record pace creating about 20 minuets worth of material with out all the film we had done. Thus hitting a brick wall at this time in the process was a bit of a shock.

The group was getting somewhat frustrated and I felt that there was some tension in the group at this present time because I felt that we all had different ideas of what we wanted the ending to be and in some sense, what we wanted our show to say. In some cases, a difference of opinion can be exciting and new and interesting ideas can come out of contrast but in this situation we found it a struggle to find something positive. We left the rehearsal feeling that the issue had been unresolved which I personally didn't like as I felt we had left the rehearsal feeling negative about the material, which I don't think was particuallarly good for the group.

other things

Coming back from the Christmas holidays has helped us to look at the show with fresh eyes, however in the first two sessions back we have found ourselves hitting a block with where we want our story to go. We had so many ideas which we wanted to include and was finding it somewhat hard to pare down.

Following the scratch performance we showed before christmas we were told by some of our peers that some of the scenes seemed somewhat offensive and were wanred that we might be crossing a line that we didn't want to cross. I feel here that our ideas were taken in the wrong way as our aim was never to poke fun of disability, I feel that the audience were watching it out of context as we did not have any of the video footage to go with the live action on stage therefore the audience could not see how an individual scene fit in with the rest of the show. We were somewhat put out at first as we were worried that we had offended people but then realised that the audience would not be the same when we performed the final show and the show would be developed enough so that individual moments that might be seen as offensive will be in context with the rest of the story. I also felt that this was quite a positive moment because it showed us that we couldn't please everyone and the group quite liked this idea, how we could create tension within the audience thus making for a more interesting show as it had the potential to start debate.

costume and other things

Today we went to Tina's costume room and told her about our ideas for what we wanted the charcters to wear. We wanted things that would compliment each character and also make for very individual characters as well. We wanted each character to stand out. We also talked about possible ideas for wooden legs and thought about how best it would be to make them, weather we wanted it to be a stick where we could have to tuck our legs behind us or use socks. We came to the decision that instead of a wooden leg we would instead have a miniture tree as our leg, using old wellies and painting them and putting leaves and roots on to them which would then make the end idea of turing into trees make more sense within the show as a whole.