set ideas

we spent last lesson discussing ideas for our set. the discussion included how we where going to set out the performance, most likley end on. We are going to have one prop that signifies where the scenes are set, for example a mirror for maria's scene.

For the character workshop i worked on George, a mid twenties man who is Eric's best freind. i found out that george lives just outside the city in a large house with his girlfreind, who he intends to marry, and his pet golden retreiver named D'or.

Lets start over again

The initial idea we had has been changed. We thought about our first idea but we couldn't see where we where going with it and couldn't improvise a climax that worked. We have decided to use another idea from the stimulus but to keep the same characters. We plan to have three stories told for each character which gives the audience  a background as to how and why they end up the way they are and where they are. Each character is sat in the same room playing cards and we then tell each individual story. The reasons we have come up with for them being in the room are: They need to save a loved one, they are in it for the money.

We are starting to work towards a climax in our play, and have therefore come up with many many ideas that can be the climax. Our first thought was a pregnancy but we feel that this is over used in peices and would be to obvious and would not engage the audience. We are discussing the possibillities of maybe having a death during the play or find out the something even more unexpected....

IDEA!!!

Had a very good idea during our lesson today. after completeing three improvisation scenes, in a pub, a library and in a supermarket we sat down to talk about the ideas we had come up with. The idea is in relation to question 3 because we are exploring the possibillities of changing the structure of our peice. The idea was to have bits of a play within  our play which both run in parallel with each other. This would mean that we would have to explore the way that our characters interacted with each other both in our character's 'real lives' and in their characters. This structure would work well because we would get a better veiw of how the characters constantly react with each other, but the problem with this would be that there may be too much repetition and this would bore the audience. 

Question 4 How did the work of established and recognised theatre practitioners, and/or the work of live theatre, influence the way in which your devised response developed?

A plan we where working on was to have fake blood in our peice, which would be poured onto maria during the performance. After discussing this idea for a while we realised that this was impracticalas there would be a lot of blood everywhereand this would make a mess. I remembered about the time i went to see a play called 'Blue Remembered Hills' and how they delt with the problem of the scene where they kill a squirrel. obviously like in our own peice they where unable to bring a squirrel and kill it on stage so to bypass the problem they painted a squirrel onto the stage floor, it is unoticable until the scene it is required in. I thought we could do something similar by painting a red splodge on stage which won't be noticed until it is needed.

Question 3 How did you and your group explore the possibilities of form, structure and performance style?

We discussed the possiblity of having a linear structure to our play. this would be easy to follow for our audience and would mean that they can concentrate more on what is happening. The audience can then enjoy the performance more. We have discussed the idea of having two plays running at the same time which link together at key points, but this may get complicated

Question 2 How effectively are you personally exploring and developing your role(s)?