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.