Devising: Day 31

We managed to get into the main hall for the first time in a couple of weeks today, which was a great help as it allowed us to set out our stage on the floor and finally use the exam desks that we wanted, hence, we could plan our transitions and set out our scenes from paper to real life. This was fantastic as it made the piece seem like it was no longer in our heads. Transitioning from the end of every other piece back into the meeting scene was fine, all we had to do was arrange our tables in a circle. Originally we joined all the tables together, however, this blocked some of the audience out and made is seem very small in comparison to the rest of the stage, almost as if we were excluding some audience members. This sparked the idea to move into a circle. We also had the idea of rotating where we sat each time, however, for some reason this became far too complicated so we decided to stay in the same places.

The main problem was trying to clear the performing space for movement scenes. The Victorian scene was relatively easy as all we had to do was face two desks out either side and leave one in the middle with another desk shifted a few feet in front of us. The only change we made was that instead of those sitting on the desks facing the audience nearest to them, they would face the side furthest away. This way the audience wouldn't feel intimidated by the performers being so close and we could all see the small book routine that the teacher character leads. For our second movement piece, we needed to clear the desks of the stage but leave the chairs on to shift them to the back of the stage in an arc. This was a little harder to conduct. In the end, we settled for each of us just taking our own desks to the side we were nearest to and the coming back for our chairs, it looked a little messy and is something we need to work on getting the timing right.

The final part of the lesson involved us working on the final part of the script. One of our members suggested that, as the final scene, it needed more substance. Hence, we tried to add to it. The main point in this scene was to have everyone's tempers boil over and for the scene to develop into chaos, whilst remaining rather comical. This part, we improvised and picked out lines we liked to add in. We also added a small argument scene in the middle of the piece to give another group members late entrance more of an impact as we all fall silent and glare at him. We work shopped certain ideas of lines we wanted to say but ultimately came to the conclusion that we were going off on a tangent too much and our scene had peaked a long time before, hence, cut it back down a little to make sure the climax built as we wanted it to. This lesson really helped us in the fact that our ideas were made tangible and made me realise how much we already knew, allowed us to make minor changes according to our surroundings and highlighted areas of work, namely lighting and transitions.

Soundscape (top picture)
Victorian scene (bottom picture)