Devising: Day 17

We were missing two members of our group today, so we thought it was pointless trying to set anything as we didn't have the numbers to do so. Instead, we dedicated the lesson to research and writing. Two of our members started researching certain topics about schooling and once completed, we will try and implement that into our own work. I worked on writing the script for the next scene as, personally, I feel that writing is a particular strength of mine and would like to take responsibility for writing as well as learning more about the art and improving my script writing. One thing I found difficult about the writing was that it's very hard to progress when you don't actually know where the piece is going. We had to think about this. Eventually, after discussing the idea of a 70's school and that of modern day schooling problem, we opted for progressing into a scene about school in the present/future, mainly looking at how generations inherit traits and exploring the ideology that if the current generation causes so many problems in schools, how will future generations behave and effect society as a result?

With that in mind, myself and my script writing partner for the day began to create the beginning of our scene. I wanted to include real facts and articles in our piece to make our boardroom scenes as realistic as possible, whilst trying to cater the script to allow for the characters in our piece to shine through, with aspects of comedy, much like in "Future Conditional."

Below, I found some pictures of children misbehaving in a classroom. I found these rather interesting as they represent the message that we want to get across. That children nowadays and potentially in the future seem to own increasing power over teachers and seem to be able to do what they want. In the pictures they appear out of control and animal like. Which is an aspect that we want to explore and implement into our own piece based on the future of education, the power of pupils compared to the teacher.

Devising: Day 16

Having previously polished our script, we decided that we needed to move on and work on something else. At the end of our script we planned to move into a Victorian school scene, to do this we decided to use our soundscape of an everyday modern school  to fuse as a transition into the Victorian school. The only problem was ... What were going to do?

Having taken a lot of inspiration from Future Conditional, which we saw last month, we searched for interviews with the cast. Below is an interview with Rob Brydon, in which he talks about his role as a teacher. We thought that this may be helpful in getting an idea for how teachers feel or what they feel obliged to do.

As our boardroom scenes were going to be all dialogue based  we wanted to avoid another dialogue scene. We thought about a silent movie style story, projecting a filmed  scene on the screen, but didn't really favour this idea.

As we didn't really know what Victorian schools were like, we researched education in Victorian England. The research follows below.

 

 

By looking at this information, we could gain an understanding of how a Victorian school worked. What punishments were like, what they wrote on, what teachers were like, the setting and so on. From this we began to generate a few ideas of how we wanted to show a punishment.  We did discuss whether we would have to cut our girl out of the scene and make her play the teacher as boys and girls were separated in class, however, as our piece was going to be rather movement based and not particularly realistic, we opted against it and decided that the character proposing the Victorian idea as the teacher.

The main question I asked myself was what we were trying to show. The main point was one of the characters in the meeting trying to convey how a Victorian system would benefit the modern education system. Therefore, we needed to show how the pupils were controlled and how they feared the teacher.

Below is a picture taken from a Victorian classroom, this really emphasises the control and rigid structure of the classroom. Something that we hope to replicate in our own performance. With the teacher at the front almost dictating to the pupils.

Devising: Day 15

With our new and improved script, we performed our piece to our teacher. Whilst he sad that the content was very good, the way we set it out and worded particular phrases were not how a meeting would usually proceed. Working with him, we annotated our scripts, re wording lines, adding some lines in to develop the characters we wanted to show in the scene. Another area that we worked on was the tone and mood generated. Previously, our scene was inaccurate in how we portrayed this meeting scene. However, by asking our teacher about how meetings actually went, and with his guidance, we began to build up an idea of how one would unfold. That they aren't as serious as we were making out, allowing us to make the scene a little more comical as a result. Which is what we were aiming for.

Devising: Day 14

Having previously began writing our script in the last lesson, we decide to run through it. Whilst running through it we ironed out a few mistakes and proof read as we went. We then set the boardroom scene and acted what we had. Afterwards, it was clear that we needed to make changes. We decided to cut out the part where we got one of our members to walk in late. We felt this was unnecessary and to achieve a more comical effect, we should add him in later. However, by doing this, we made the script shorter, leaving us with too little content left to perform with. Hence, I took the task of trying to re write the script. Obviously, I used the base of what we had previously written. However, due to discussion addressing the issue that we needed to go off on a bit of a tangent during the scene, I tried to add in a argument between those for the cane and against the cane. Whilst making the piece entertaining and comical. However, I needed to be careful that I didn't drag the scene on too long, try and do too much with it, but at the same time, setting us up to be able to move into a new scene smoothly.

Underneath is a picture taken from the boardroom/meeting scenes in Future Conditional. As a group, I think we all found these scenes very entertaining and captivating. They seemed to flow very nicely and at times, I forgot that these people were acting. The scenes were done very well, which has inspired the creation of our boardroom scenes. All the characters in the scene below had very different personalities and backgrounds, hence why they all had differing opinions and behavioural traits, like the Eton school boy, or the Scotsman from a deprived background. This was an area that we wanted to use in our piece. We wanted to have differing ages of our characters and backgrounds to  show a difference in opinions btween the characters and how education should change. For example, an older character may be more ruthless and for the reintroduction if the cane, where a younger, perhaps fairer character would see the problems lying with teaching methods.

Devising: Day 13

Today, we were instructed to decide what direction we were going in our piece. As a group, we agreed that sticking with our education theme would be most beneficial. Albeit discussions about whether we need to switch to problems students faced. However we rejected this idea.

With our theme decided I decided it would be better to split the group. I designated areas of research for people. These were 40's and 70's school and recounts of cane punishment. The rest of us worked on script writing using the facts, figures and opinions from articles to help construct dialogue. Although only two pages were written, we feel the dialogue is of good quality and would rather have a good quality if dialogue rather than quantity. Our main focus is to make our piece sophisticated and clever. Which I hope had come across in what we have written. Hopefully, we can combine the research and present time periods realistically and accurately.

In addition, after watching a particular scene from the Blackwatch Gang, we decided that it was a great way in which to move between scenes. It offered something very refreshing and we felt that we could do something similar, moving through the schooling system. I found how the main actor was dressed and manoeuvred around the stage very interesting, representing the flow through the years.

Devising: day 12

We were straight back to the drawing board today. As a group, we recognised that the soundscape we had created a couple of days ago didn't really work and came across as unsophisticated and somewhat GCSE. We listed all the sounds we would hear in a classroom such as coughing, nail filing, ringtones, calling out and tapping. However, the problem with the sounds such as nail filing, tapping and ringtones was that they can't increase in volume and the other sounds would overpower them. I suggested if it may be worthwhile recording our noises and looping them onto a audio recording. This way we would have control over our sounds and would be able to increase the vine effectively, allowing all sounds to be heard and hopefully causing the hectic scene we want.

In terms of dialogue, we were stuck. We didn't want our piece to seem childish and immature, but at the same time, wanted to capture an authentic classroom scene. We decided on a list of words. Each person would only have one line to keep some structure and sophistication  but these lines were tailored to adhere a typical year 10/11 classroom. We said these lines in cannon before repeating our lines faster and faster into a mess of noise. To end we had the teacher slam a cane onto the desk and demanding "books out" to signal a change in the scene, going back into a Victorian style school.

We performed this to the class as you can see below. We think that it's a good basis for an idea. However, I think we need to think if a more creative way of staging it and need a clear point to end the piece as it dragged to a certain extent.

Devising: Day 11

Today, our task was to continue looking at the black watch piece based around the Iraq war. However, we were particularly looking at how the piece was staged and how they managed to change the scene. The clever thing about the piece was that they distracted the audience to a particular point, for example a cast member began singing with two soldiers conducting a movement.This allowed others to manoeuvre props and bring on new props to change the scene without the audience realising or paying much attention. I found this very clever and think it is certainly an aspect we could use in our piece. In addition, the way one particular scene worked back to the modern day from a flashback worked very nicely. Instead of just flicking back to the modern day, the piece took an entirely different direction by firing facts about the Scottish armies history from 1760 onwards. Whilst the main actor talked the other cast members dressed him in the uniforms worn by the men of the Scottish army at the time. This dressing was done in a stylised way, involving some contact improvisation ,making the piece look as if each time period rolled into each in a never ending cycle.

As the piece was staged in traverse, we decided that it would be worthwhile to stage ours that way. We didn't want to have the same proscenium arch stage that is common, we wanted to give it a creative edge and allow the audience to be in the scene with us, something we felt traverse would allow us to do.

It took a while to work out how we were going to give the stage out signature. Originally, as our piece is based around education, we wanted  the audience to sit at school desks before changing to traverse. However, the problem with changing to traverse was that we could no longer sit in the audience that we planned to. We thought about sitting on the front rows of the seating or turning the seating to have a half traverse stage. Ultimately we decided on having the traditional traverse staging, but each audience member would have their own desk. As for where we would place ourselves is still undecided. Below, is an atrocious plan of the stage. The good thing is that we can take the front of the stage off so we could potentially use it as space for those off stage or to keep props in. One benefit of having the stage vertically instead of horizontally across the hall would be that we can have more rooms at the ends, or be walled in the other way as the hall is longer than it is wide.

Devising: Day 10

After experimenting with our idea based around drugs, and finding that it is a difficult subject to do well and remains a mainstream stimulus. We decided to move onto another idea. One that we hope, will be a more sophisticated and mature topic of choice. This topic being education.

We began by discussing ideas. The rest of my group filled me in with the idea they had came up with as I was away the previous lesson. We wrote down what we might include in such a piece. The main idea, showing how education had changed throughout the years in terms of pupil power an how much power teachers have now. For example, 50 years ago teachers would have respect from students, whereas now, students answer back and seem to have too much power.

We thought that some kind of soundscape would be really cool to show a modern day classroom situation. Where the pupils would be unruly, taking over each other about random, irrelevant subjects. The petty squabbles and struggle the teachers go through trying to keep discipline in a classroom.

We thought we could found the soundscape off by quickly changing into a typically historical classroom setting, where the pupils respected and seemed to be scared of the teacher almost. However, these were early ideas and need work before we can show anything.

In terms of staging, we thought that arranging the audience in seats in a classroom layout with us at the front would be a very nice and authentic idea.