(Wk2) 10th October 2012 - 'RISK'

Gutted i missed the first day of the second week due to car trouble! Felt i had let my group down and missed out on alot of progression of our project. So, today i was keen to catch up with any developements my group had created. Straight away, Jade got me up to speed with the stages of our piece. She told me the group had made some slight changes, one being that we was now going to be portraying the risks of a night out with a varity of drugs involved, not just Ecstasy alone. We no also had more structure to the piece and the start of a story line.
Our characters were now as follows:

Jade & Mel - Club owners/Doormen.
Lauren - Club goer/has alot to drink.
Beth - Laurens friend/sensible one.
Shayne - Drug dealer/drug user/scruffy.
Me - Club goer/Cocaine user/takes drugs in club for Shayne.

At this point we decided that each character should have some sort of episode (scene with 2 or more characters in place) within the piece. Reason behind this was due to the intense audience involvement, and them being spread about the performance space (like on a night club dance floor) we needed the episodes to take place in intervals as a strong visual focas point for our audience. Another reason for the episodes was for the audience to gain more of an understanding of the story line and the roles that our characters had to play in the piece. We really didn't want our audience to miss key scenes in our performance due to too much going on at one time, or loud background music. Each character episodes are of great importance because they build an understanding of our 'Risk' message and objectives. So the episode idea will hopefully eradicate this issue.

We discussed venues for our performance. This developed many issues as we felt we needed a venue that would represent a night club like feel, dark with relevent lighting equiptment. All sorts of ideas were put forward, we even considered using a friend of mines actual bar on Broad Street to stage it! But realised after much consideration that although this was our 'ideal' venue, it was not the most convenient. We took in to account the amount of time, money and effort it would take to get the whole of the year 1, year 2 and tutors to the said venue! Our group managed to then sneak some rehearsal time in one of the performance spaces on the 2nd floor of the Mac. This was the room we had our class on our first day at the Mac last week. After assessing the space in more detail, we realised that this would be perfect to perform our piece in, as there was lots of floor space for our audience to stand (like a real night club dance floor) appropriate coloured lighting on the ceiling, and dark drapes over all the windows to give it that dark night club ambiaunce. We had our hearts set on it. But unfortunately, after voicing our requirements to Amy she confirmed that the performance space we had set our hearts on would cost alot of money to hire out for that purpose. Considering we didnt really have a budget to begin with, the concept of staging our piece here was swiftly drifting away! We was told the Hexagon performance space in the Mac was really our only option. The whole group felt really disappointed and disheartened at the news. Personally, i hadnt even seen the Hex for my own eyes to have a negative opinion about staging it there. I initailly went on the feedback and reaction of the others that had seen it to come to my negative opinion of it. Eventually the next day i got to take a look inside the Hex, and to my surprise i personally thought that it was perfect! It was dark with no windows, it had appropriate ceiling lighting, and had a small area to simulate a dance floor space. Although i did worry that because of the amount of seats in the Hex the audience would be tempted to sit down during our performance. This is something we wanted to avoid due to the audience participation and night club feel we hoped to create.
On reflection, i believe we spent too much time and effort being particular about the 'perfect venue' for our piece. Ok so we wanted to portray our club scene to be as real as possible for our audiences sake more than anything. But i think we kind of lost touch of our original purpose, and that was to produce our devised theatre version of 'Risk' - not to perfect a set in a high budget Hollywood film!

After many discussions, ideas, brain storming, disagreemants and conversations that didnt even have anything to do with our 'Risk' piece, we realised we needed to get started with actually rehearsing our scenes! We began rehearsing our first scene which was of the audience queuing outside the entrance doors whilst Mel and Jade stood at the door, stamping hands and asking our audience members for ID and searching them etc (this represented real events when entering an actual nightclub) This is also where myself and Shayne have our first episode together. It consisted of Shayne passing me a bag of 'drugs' and me reasurring him that i would get in with them as i knew the owners of the club (Mel & Jayde). This episode between me and Shayne was achieved with improvisation. We knew we needed to position ourselves in a place where we would be easily seen by the audience in the queue, and project our voices so that they were aware that our performance had started from that moment.
I then enter the 'night club' first skipping the queue as i greet the door supervisors as my mates. At this point Shayne is sent to the back of the queue with the others. This is the first portrayel of 'Risk' in our piece as my character enters the night club with a large amount of drugs on me. I believe this scene is an obvious adaptation of risk taking. Something simple yet effective to give our audience a taste of whats to come and to gain their understanding from the off.

We ran through this scene a few times to perfect it. We had earlier on decided that for each episode we thought it effective if we used music that would possibly relate to what was being portrayed or perhaps linked to the atmosphere of the scene we was attempting to create. Music is a great way of helping people relate to something, it also encourages emotion and builds tension. We wanted the audience to see, hear, feel and react from what we was producing, and go through all the feelings our characters were in each episode. Adding carefully selected music tracks would hopefully achieve this notion. It was decided that the music for the opening queue scene would be - 'Calvin Harris feat Ne-yo; Let go Remix'. This song is an upbeat and current track that we thought would get the audience in the mood for a party!