Another day at the Mac Theatre. I was pleased we were told that we would be spending the majority of our time in rehearsals here. I like the feel of the place, it motivates me. I'm unsure why? Thinking about it, maybe its because i have been out of this kind of environment for so long, now I'm here i feel grateful to be back doing what i love in these creative surroundings?
We began our day with Amy tutoring us. But instead of her Physical Theatre class as instructed on the timetable, we continued in our project groups on 'RISK'. We started with a group warm up exercise called 'Splat', one which i have played once before but was never any good at for some reason! Hence why I'm not a lover of it! So truth be told, i was one of the first out the game and attempting 10 press ups on the floor!
When formed in our project groups for risk again, this day is really when the ideas started to form within our group. Jade, Mel, Beth, Lauren, Shayne and myself all decided on the topic of 'Drugs' to base our risk piece on. The idea was formed based on our discussions, knowledge, and personal experiences. We also felt that the topic of drugs and its risks was something that was current in society, so would reach out to a wide range of target audience's where many people could relate. We wanted our piece to be 'real', and not confuse people with abstract performance and hidden meanings. Many ideas were being thrown in at this stage. First one being that each one of us as individuals would represent an illegal drug (eg: Beth - Cannabis smoker, Shayne - took Ecstasy pills, Mel - Heroine addict, Me - Coke head, Jade - Crack head, Lauren - took LSD) and show through acting the journey each individual experience whilst on the drug from start to finish. http://listverse.com/2007/09/27/top-10-drugs-and-their-effects But after more discussions with the group we realised we would struggle to portray a 'real' feel to our piece due to the conflict of environments associated with each drug. Because of the each drugs social differences we struggled to build foundations for our piece and became confused as to how we would link these very different social circles together. Some of the group members also felt uncomfortable with acting out scenes of drug use and behaviour, with no real life experience relating to this.
Another of our ideas was souly concentrating on Ecstasy, each of us portraying an effect this drug could potentially make you have or feel. Involving the positive feelings of 'coming up' and negative feelings of 'coming down'. We liked this idea, but changed it slightly after talks that there wasn't enough obvious visual physicality's to communicate to our audience that would suggest we was each acting out individual effects of the drug. Because of this we explored giving our piece a nightclub setting ideally with all of us acting as a group of friends experiencing Ecstasy and its effects together. Its at this point that we decided we wanted our audience to become part of our nightclub scene as the other night club goers, to get that 'real' feel to it. We wanted our audience to feel effected intensely by what was happening around them and too them when involved in our piece. We wanted to create an atmosphere, and to do so we needed them.
We talked about what kind of content and props we wanted in our piece, who our target audience was, and what we wanted to achieve and why? Amy helped us ask ourselves these questions, so that we developed more of an understand of purpose of what we was creating and how it links to our 'Risk' objective. As we had the idea of involving the audience in our club scene, we researched and thought of ways we could make lookalike drugs as props and give them out to our audience to add to the interactive piece we hoped for. http://smnetwork.org/forum/tools-of-the-trade/prop-drugs-on-stage/ This presents another avenue of 'Risk', not only in our piece, but for the audience also. Would they risk trying what we offered them?? (bearing in mind that we decided Smarties, Tictacs and Sherbet powder is what would really be on offer!)
As i mentioned previously, our target audience is vast as we believe many people whatever age have been effected by drugs at some point in their lives. Whether it be with themselves or someone they know. I researched the concept of drugs and Theatre together and discovered a blog written by Phil Fox the founder and artistic director of 'Outside Edge Theatre Company' which i found really interesting - http://www.londontheatreblog.co.uk/drugs-and-theatre-go-together/ He talks about his personal issues overcoming drugs and how theatre helped him with this. Also the realisation that this method is useful on others for the same purpose. This made me realise that our piece's purpose was to help people understand, or empathise with the characters in our piece and maybe somehow take themselves back to a moment when they did or did not take a similar related risk.
We chose a club scene because we wanted our piece to be interactive. As the majority of our audience for this performance will be performing arts students who know how to P.A.R.T.Y......we thought getting them involved in audience participation in our piece would be a doddle! (or would it??) Doubt crept into our heads as to whether our audience would actually play along!?
Another idea we had was perhaps adding some kind of Physical Theatre/Dance into our piece. After looking up 'DV8 - Physical Theatre Company' on You Tube we discovered how powerful movement can be in a piece of theatre. http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=dv8+cost+of+living+youtube&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-gb&client=safari
It's great that you are taking inspiration from specific companies but try to explore the relevance of using physical theatre/dance within YOUR piece. What impact will it have?
ReplyDeleteYou have also pinpointed your target audience and have stated ideas that you wish to explore, just try to establish a clear objective for your piece; stating what you want to achieve and why. Do you want to educate or entertain and how will you achieve this?