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.