Final Rehearsals and Performance Evaluation

Understandingly, as the performance drew closer, we all started to worry about how unprepared we were and how we hadn't run the piece through without interruptions. We started the day off by going through and cleaning up our solo pieces, focusing on how the audience would be moved from piece to piece. We also redefined the end ritual by starting lying on the floor as if we were bacteria about to evolve into a breathing organism. We got a ques from the music and we started to evolve from lying on the floor to animals to being stuck between a human and an animalistic being. We then take the audience into the circle with us, where we discard the aspects of modern day Britain that we don't like. After this is done, we move onto the awakening of the four elements (water, fire, earth and air) where we will infuse the space with our sounds and movements of the embodied elements.  When this transition is finished, Ella then stands on the ladder and recite a poem about nature, marking the end of the piece. We then slink off stage after the poem has been read through twice. I like this ending as it includes the audience and gives our piece an overall meaning and motive which I think the audience will understand. 

Having mentioned my concern earlier, after rehearsing the piece a few times, I felt ready to perform, and when we did the performance, I could feel it working and having an impact upon our audience. 

The fact that the beginning was in promenade was interesting and very effective as it gave a new dynamic and spin on our piece. It included the audience and gave they snapshots of what is happening somewhere in England now. It did come with its complications though such as getting around to our next set and trying to keep the audience together so they could see everything. The solo pieces were very successful in my opinion, even thought they didn't link which could've been confusing for the audience, but in the spirit of Artaud's theory, you are supposed to pose more questions with your work than answering them. I think, overall, our solo pieces managed to shock, scare, confuse and inspire our audience which is what we intended. Personally, I think my solo piece went fantastically, as I think I had to audience hooked by my different staging and freakish, breathy grasped voice. Before the performance I hadn't practiced my piece being tied up, so on the night I slightly improvised with the movement and I think it was that which made it convincing and sinister. Having said that, I may have been a bit too convincing, as my dad came over when I was coughing on the floor to ask if I was okay. Although I was happy I had been so believable, it did break the performance for me slightly and I'm not sure if it ruined the rest of the piece.

Our group piece went well and the soundscape sounded great and very insightful. I kept up my accent which was heard to do when angry, so I am pleased with that. The set, music and costume fitted our piece well and I feel as if the audience believed they were in an old people's home. I was awake in the moment and because of this was able to improvise slightly when the audience didn't sit down when we asked them to. I did predict that they wouldn't, but I think our piece lost some of its purpose due to it, because we weren't able to give that personal insight into our world. I think we created a piece which reflected Britain well and was in the style of Artaud and Brook. 

The final ritual with the whole group looked and felt great. It looked like Darwin's Theory of Evolution being played out before the audience which symbolized Britain's development and how far it has come. I think this starting section shocked the audience and created an eerie atmosphere to continue into the element ritual. The actual ritual itself was a massive success, as we managed to include the audience and as we all believed in what we were doing, we were able to make the piece have some significance and relate to the audience. 

To improve the piece overall, I think we could've rehearsed more and been slightly more prepared to make the transitions slightly slicker and more polished, but overall I think our piece about modern day Britain was very successful. 

England Group Piece

As well as our solo pieces, we are also doing  group piece devised around the theme of England and inspired by the poems. Ella, Shaniqua, Kate and Josh are in my group and we decided to do a piece about old people set in a run down old people's home. We took the line from Going Going about youth to inspire this. 

After a discussion we decided to have broken elderly people, still in shock by the war and confused by modern day Britain. We chose the site by the space, just before you go through the doors to Ms O'Niels classroom, as it is dark and small, so forcing the audience to be close to us. We each have our own character and back ground story, which were inspired by the drawings of Britain we had to do:

I drew the hills and the moon, which inspired my older character. She represents all those who came to Britain because they thought they would have a better life, but over the years has grown to hate England and miss her home, but doesn't want to leave. I named her Dot and gave her a distinctive personality trate: she always has her toffee's and two cigarettes on the go. I decided to make her Irish as I am therefore pushing my voice and stretching my range. Shaniqua's character is similar to mine, but she loves England and misses her dead husband.

Originally, we were going to play out a scene in a communal room, having the audience sitting next to us, before we flipped the sofa over and entered into WW1 trenches, but this was too naturalistic and wasn't insightful enough. So, we thought about it for a little bit and decided on this running order which can be circulated:

1. Sitting in silence on the chairs, Shaniqua walking through the audience asking if anyone had seen Gilbert, her dead husband. The rest of us are muttering to ourselves (me about England and its youth)
2. Start talking to the auidence about things, immersing them in our world, while playing a backing track of a war song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gx5DhKN_zY and us moving our feet to the music, hunched over while Josh rambles about how we need to stop moving
3. This goes into coughing while I talk about the youth and how they have destroyed Britain and how I miss Ireland. I then spill my toffee's and say how I blame England for making me drop them
4. We then tell the audience to sit down next to us and start talking to them
5. Ella starts rattling and shaking her biscuit box, Kate moves her knitting needles faster and the rest of us shake, starting to make a war soundscape
6. We then all breathe heavily and collapse.

Our piece is very immersive and includes various techniques to give the audience a new experience. It includes the themes form Going Going and tests the audience-performer relationship. 

Our costumes are run down like our characters. We decided to make the costumes naturalistic but over exaggerate the stereotypical conceptions of elderly people, by wearing heavily knitted items and head scarfs. 

 Our piece is fairly prop heavy; we need chairs, tissues, cigarettes, blankets and biscuits/toffees. These are all necessary to our piece, as they will make it come to life. Brook believed in the importance of props and knew they made a piece look complete. Our piece will come after Ruby's which is about modern Britain and how industrialized it has become. We are hoping our piece will be a nice contrast to theirs and give the audience a new experience of what England means to us. 

The Ritual

Brook believed that theatre should be based on ''rituals'' as they are an integral part of our lives which we aren't always aware of. They bring us back to our ancestors and bring our the animalistic nature humans have. 

as an introduction to rituals, we split into groups of four or five and were each given a theme in which to create a ritual around. Our theme was ''triumph'' which we took to mean a triumph in battle as that is what we associated the word with. As Khai was the only male in our group, we placed in him the middle as Kate, Shaniqua and I surrounded him chanting and half bowing to him. The feeling of triumph wasn't conveyed when we performed it, but I still feel as if it was accurate and effective use of a ritual to show a triumph. I think our chants were too low pitched, and maybe we should've danced more in order to show our triumph better. The audience got a sense of war and battle so that part worked. I feel that Ruby's group had to best and most effective ritual, as their movements and sounds conveyed fertility well. The pace and sounds gradually progressed and I thought it was a very effective and simple way to show this theme. It could also be repeated nicely which it key in rituals. 

After this I felt as if I had a better understanding of what a ritual looks and feels like to perform. We then began to expand on it and used two large groups of people to create two interlinked rituals. My group started off celebrating something, the atmosphere was energetic and happy. It felt like we were doing a weather dance of some sort. When the second group came in it changed the atmosphere completely as we felt like we were being attacked. I felt like I had to make my noise even louder and jump higher to be heard. This ritual exercise helped me to realise the true core and essence of a ritual and how it can be used to create meaning. Rituals are brilliant ways of creating an atmosphere within a piece and including the audience. I like how different circumstances and emotions can completely change a ritual so quickly and how they can sometimes confuse and distort the audience. 

At the end of our piece, we all come together to perform a massive ritual, ridding of the modern day complications and calling back the spirits of earth, fire, water and fire to bring England back to its natural state. To start we all discussed the various aspects of Britain that we would like to get rid of and added a physical action to that. We would then send that problem into the centre and shout 'gone!'. I chose concrete and did a suffocating action with it. This actions will start of the nature ritual. We will then go into summoning water then fire then earth and then air, adding movements and sound to each. I think this is a good way to end our piece about England, as it includes the audience and brings us all back to the roots of our country. 

Solo Revelations Piece

For this we had to do the continuous writing exercise, letting our train of thought flow onto paper for three minuets. We had lots of stimulus for this and they all had to be a revelation of some sort. We could chose from something being nailed to a tree, shouted in a cave, written in blood, whispered through a wall in a prison cell, spoken to everyone, said in a supermarket, tattooed in a hidden place, shouted from a high tower and spoken at an old persona fire place. I chose whispered through the walls of a prison cell for my stimulus. 

hands, hands, I need hands, spiders, I see spiders,

spiders crawling twisting biting squeezing plotting,

help, I need help, eyes use your eyes,

spies, I hear spies, spies watching mapping, breaking

heaving, grieving, you. I need 

you. 

This doesn't obviously fit with the theme of Britain, but when you look deeper, the spies are the media and how they have distorted and confused so many of us. I used both the theme of Britain and the stimulus as inspiration to write this short, continuous text. 

This piece is a piece depicting someones breakdown. I envision it would lots of coughing and wheezing, a desperate tone to it. At first, I pictured myself being locked in a cage and whispering it to the audience, but after a discussion with the group, Izzie came up with an interesting idea which I would like to carry through. She suggested that I be tied up in a corridor somewhere, like one giant spider myself. I started to think about where I could perform this and what tech requirements I would need. These short solo pieces are going to open the show in a promenade setting, so my place needed to be somewhere accessible. I chose the small out-grove by the toilets. As far as tech requirements, I don't need much. I need string to tie myself up in, a dark area and a small space and luckily I have all of those. 

In my mind, I am in a prison cell which has been over grown with cob webs and eyes. My emotional location is in the middle of a spiders web which I can't escape from. Dark surrounds me and I want to escape. 

I think this will be a strong image as the audience walk down the corridor, and I'm hoping my performance will be as strong. 

Continuous Writing

This is an exercise used by many directors and writers to gain ideas and let your imagination flow. We had to write continuously for five minuets using a line from the poem Going Going as stimulus. 

Poem line used for Stimulus: earth will always respond

Writing for five minuets: with its weather and ever changing circumstances, it tests us or dares us or just plays us? a never ending convocation and who will be the winner? either way both earth and mankind will end up destroying each other, we change the earth's body so much I don't see why it hasn't destroyed us years ago. earth is like a teacher who always questions you and answers everything. it favors others and humiliates the rest. one mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter. earth got rid of unicorns and humans destroyed the magic that the universe holds. the earth takes care of some beautiful people who may not cherish the world. It's secretive and bold but always responds to what we do to it. hunger is ever present in the earths subtext and it is present in my stomach today. i wonder what the earth eats. humans? is that where you go when you die? the earths stomach? 

The highlighted sections are the sentences which Humera liked the most, because after we had to pick out certain phrases from each others writings and turn them into a convocation. This exercise helped me to see how easy it is to write something spontaneous and turn it into a script. I really enjoyed doing this exercise as it's not often you get told to just write whatever comes into your head. 

Alphabet Box Exercise

This exercise incorporated both physical actions and media. It also explores Artaud's idea of movement and the body. He believed our movements should flow, be interesting and unique.We stood in a space in the room and imagined that we were standing in a telephone box, with all the letters in the alphabet around us. A was in the top left hand corner, I in the centre around the middle and Z being in the lower corner to the far right. Once we had established where all the letters were (which took slightly longer time than expected), we had to spell out our names, using only our hands and arms, touching the letters in their positions. We then added more movement to it, incorporating our body into touching the letters. We could use our bodies in anyway we wanted to. For example, I touched the letter E with my elbow, the letter S with my head, the letter M with my knee and the letter E with my tongue. I liked this exercise as it helped me to realise that I could use my body in ways which I hadn't originally thought of. 

When we were fluent in our movement, we then played with the structure by adding pairs, grouping people by gender, singling people out and added music to see how it would add meaning to the exercise. I noticed that the movements had new levels when the music was added on top, and when we divided the genders it became almost like an army camp, with series undertones. Each different change brought a new meaning to the exercise and gave me lots of ideas for devising our piece later on. 

I enjoyed this exercise as the movements were of the moment and imaginative. They came naturally to me and I loved how simple it was to create meaning by just changing the structure and adding music. 

Physical and Vocal Warm Ups 

Every week, before we started to devise, we would do a group vocal and physical warm up to open and awaken our bodies. Both Brook, Artaud and Grotowski believed in doing physical and vocal warm ups before starting to work, as they noted that their actors performed their best work after they had done a full warm up.  

We would do a few sun salutations http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IUyY9Dyr5w and then stretch out our limbs to reduce any possible injuries to ourselves (as the devising we were doing was quite physical) and then lie in semi supine to focus on strengthening our breath and muscularity. After the warm ups, I would always feel prepared and stretched which helped in when devising our group piece and keeping an open mind during the exercises. I think it is very important to do a proper warm up before any rehearsal, as it clears your mind and grounds you in the room.

The vocal warm ups helped my voice to continue developing and open up a wider range. Over the past weeks I have noticed my pitch range has improved massively, as has my breath quality. I think this is due to doing vocal warm ups regularly and stretching my voice.