Tuesday 16th September 2014 - Thursday 18th September 2014

Tuesday 16th September

In today's lesson we started off with warming 

up, beginning with doing facial and vocal warm ups then moving onto physical warm ups.

For facial and vocal warm up we hummed and said tongue twisters and then began to walking around the space and getting into small groups and getting in a line and copying each others movements. 

The warm ups helped us to neutralise our energies and focus on the task ahead. 

We sat in a circle and discussed what would make us watch theatre, what we would want to see.

suggestions -
Sharney said understanding so the audience has clarity and isn't confused and get lost with what is going on in the performance, she wanted to be able to understand what's going on. Interesting, eye catching, relateable and natural.
 Francis said it has to have an air of professionalism and seriousness.  If the audience sees your serious they will be serious too.
Kurtis said that the play has to have climatic but have a comedic side so it's not heavily tense to keep the audiences attention. 

We thought of a stimulus of what we can show to students who are doing GCSE's in school so the age performance would be for 15-16 years.  Sharney suggested 'Still I Rise' by Maya Angelou because she felt that it was a poem that gives a message about social awareness and a right to stand up for yourself.

Afterwards we had to come up with topics to create a devised piece around to be able to appropriately show a GCSE class (ages 15-16). 

We had:

• Individualism

• Mental health

• Bullying

• Peer pressure

Sharron then asked us who chose which subject and we split into groups.  As I didn't pick a subject, and saw that it was just Conor and Kurtis doing Mental Health, I decided to join them not only because of the lack of people but I could relate to that subject in multiple ways.  We came together and discussed an idea around the subject to develop our own piece which we would then present to the rest of the class to evaluate.

Conor had previously done this issue at GCSE level and as we was in a group used it as an advantage to elaborate on the subject. Discussing his idea, Kurtis and I agreed strongly on the idea as we felt that Mental Health has a wide spectrum to explore from normal everyday people living with depression or autism to mentally ill people and it creates not only an awareness of sympathy and understanding to an audience but to empathise with the audience if they can relate that people care and understand and if you need help there is someone who is willing to help.  As actors also presenting the piece it is very informative for us as we can explore the subject, go into depth and develop a further understanding of the subject to relay to an audience. 

Conor gave a suggestion how to set the stimulus, afterwards we acted out inputing how to set the scene, giving ideas to gradually mould it.

For our first scene Conor came up with the idea that a mental patient goes to see her doctor in a mental institution but has an episode that causes her to be restrained and calmed down.  I was the mental patient, Conor was the doctor and Kurtis was the security guard/carer. 

The scene began with me at a table organising the items on the table and getting myself a glass of water as it is a obvious routine that my character does muttering myself "order...everything has to be in order".  Max (Kurtis) comes to get me but I refuse to move and get frustrated at being interrupted and lose my place which causes me to self-harm by hitting myself.  To calm me down Max reassures me that the Doctor will have my rubber glove which comforts me which calms me down and I go with him.  I go to see the Doctor (Conor) who discusses an outburst I have that happens off stage so Conor creates the scene for the audience by explaining the situation which causes me to react and start hitting myself and shouting which causes me to be ushered off stage by Max.

I really enjoyed my character and my scene, I thought there would be difficulty in creating a character with an extreme case of mental health but I really connected with the character and was able to stay in character despite there being giggles while the audience watched.  

Our Feedback was that it was really good and we kept our focus and the intensity of the scene stayed on our hand and not the audiences when they giggled; we didn't play on it.  

Kurtis played his character really well, he wasn't seen for a long period and didn't speak much but he committed to his role really well and in the words of Stanislavsky, there are no small parts, only small actors.  All roles are important and be performed well which Kurtis did.

To improve on the scene, I feel we just need to extend the scene now and develop ideas on how to develop it even further, keeping in mind the age group. 

It was interesting to watch the other groups, in particular the peer pressure group stuck out for me as it was interesting how they developed their stimulus. They didn't focus on just one peer pressure, they did a wide specturm of it and the way they presented it was like an advert. However it was over comedic in the sense that while it was intersting to watch, it did at times forget that it was a serious matter

Watching the Individualism confused me because I was unsure of what was going on and I felt it was dragged out.

Thursday 18th September

In todays lesson we went straight into work and carried on with the work we did on Tuesday. 

We added an extra scene to what we had previously done, we decided to show little playlets of each character branching from the mental patient, showing the intimacy and care between the carer and the mental patient, freezing and transforming into the next scene which was the carer and his wife's marital problem stemming from her jealousy erupting from him bringing home the picture Max and the mental patient created to calm her down, the next scene showed the Doctors life showing that the Doctor had in fact a problem also stemming from the loss of his wife and his emotional attachment and incapability to the patients so would drink which affected his relationship with his kids. 

Feeback was that we had to watch our language and remember the age group we was performing so intead of saying "crazy is the best pussy", I could divert the conversation that the wife is feeling neglected. There were mixed reviews with who I was at the beginning of the scene with Connor. Some people could see that I was the daughter but a mature one, others thought I was the wife again.

So to make it better more thought has to go into the characters so there is a clarity of who is who so the audience doesn't get confused.