Showing of Work

I was absent from last weeks lesson, where my class learnt how to waltz. This was for a piece where we waltz with empty jackets which happens straight after the box scenes. We will be using the boys briefly but only to move the boxes and be in the jackets quickly. I caught up with how to waltz and how the sequence worked. After running through it we all went to the new theatre where we would watch the other groups work and show our own. This was so we could see how everyone was progressing and how all the pieces were going to fit into together.

We were the first to perform and I felt like we were all really focused and put our best into it, considering it was just a rough performance. I think once we have all our letters sorted and the jackets boxes the piece will really come into it's own.

I thought the other groups work were also really impressive considering it wasn't finished yet. I could start to see how some of the pieces could interlink. I enjoyed how the soldiers piece contrasted the couples and the women's piece. It offered a lighter look onto the war and soldiers moral. It will add energy to the piece. However, we need the emotional grounding of the couples and women's piece in order to give depth and honesty to the show.

Rehearsal 2

This lesson me and my partner taught the class the opening to our duet. This was a gestural piece representing a wife brushing her husbands jackets. This piece originally used petals but if we use it the final piece we probably won't have them. This piece works well as an opening.

We also all brought in real letters written to wives from husbands in world war 1. We are using these real letters to develop the box sequence. We brought in boxes to use, but the for the final performance we should have all had the same box bought for us, so it looks like an official parcel the army might have sent. With these letters we all cut them up and picked a few lines each from the various letters. We then all sat in a space and took turns to say each line. We then kept this order and started off by opening the boxes and taking out the jackets and smelling them. This is because scent is extremely evocative and when you have a connection with someone or an attraction you know how they smell. Smell can often trigger memories or remind us of certain people or things. After the smelling we put on the jacket and look through all the letters until we find the one that is written to us from our husband not the other way around. We then begin reading it, by saying our lines one by one.

This piece allows us to extend our physicality whilst maintaining a grounded and realistic emotional connection to the characters and relationships we are portraying. It allows us to personalise the movement, and take our time in doing so. It isn't fast paced or gimmicky, it is an honest representation of the pain someone women went through when their husbands or sons died in the war. It also shows how significant some of the little possessions left behind can be.

First rehearsal for final piece

This lesson we decided we got into new classes based on the different subject matters we explored in our solos and duets. This meant we were split into 3 different group types:

• Wives and mothers (role of women in the war)
• Soldiers
• Couples

Within these groups we can develop on these 3 sub groups within the war and develop our duets into group pieces and create new work. I am in the group working on the role of women. To begin we got back into our partners or by ourselves and went through our solo or duets to show again to the class. This was to remind us of what we had already created and what parts of each others pieces we could develop.

We discussed the idea of one of the solos, where she uses a box with an army jacket and letters within it. The piece showed a women looking through a box of possessions sent to her by the army, which belonged to her husband who passed away during the war. We discussed bringing in boxes and making this a group piece. Next lesson we are going to bring in boxes and develop this idea.

Assessment Evaluation

I think our final performance had good emotional connection with our stimulus. Our story was clear and it felt like everyone got the meaning behind what we were doing. The poppies worked well as a way of enhancing our movements. I felt focused throughout and like we really knew what we were doing.

From watching other people's work in our class I feel we could have incorporated more lifts. We had limited contact work which I think could have developed our story more and made our piece a long physically stronger. It felt like we hadn't taken enough risks.

Technically, our music didn't run perfectly. If I was to use two different songs again I would probably try edit them together on CD and have my own CD player to use in assessments in order to avoid technical difficulties getting in the way of our performance.

I also think we could have used our voices more. We only said two sentences throughout the piece. I think those pieces worked but we need to use our voices more to tell the story better. It would have been nice to develop more of a relationship between our two characters, as it felt like we represented the same person. Overall our performance was ok, but there was a few small things we could have done to improve it a lot.

Session 5

We had a rehearsal out of school in order to finish blocking our final piece. In this we developed the same idea with the movement, and created a basis for what could be a successful piece. We decided on music to add to it. We wanted a mixture of emotive music but also music from that era.

The first video is of a song called 'After you've gone'. This a 1918 song which we felt linked nicely to our piece and also helped inspire some of the movement. It is the song that plays first. The second is a acoustic guitar instrumental of 9 crimes originally by Damien Rice. This a modern song which plays nearer the end of our piece. We felt the song was really emotive and helped us to create material instinctively with objectives which comes towards the end of our piece. 

Using the music helps in the beginning with the synchronized movement because it helps with timing. We linked certain movements to the beat and to certain lyrics. This was to ensure the precision of our movements. 

This lesson in class we showed our piece to our teacher. We felt like we knew it really well and ended up rushing it slightly. This is why we went back to link the movements to the music. The feedback we were given told us to think more about women then and how they would act, their role within the home. We then went out and decided to definitely have aprons to hold the poppies but also as costume to start getting us to move like women did then. We also added a new section at the beginning in which we are making food for our husband who is going away before we see him standing there. It is exaggerated movement based on a real task. This section helps set the scene better. We now have the blocks of our performance we just need to make sure we meet up a few times this week to refine it, and warm up before our final assessment. 

Session 4

Our devising process has become very text based. It informs all the movement. We used the idea of having an object help the movement development. We having be playing with the idea of having lots of poppy petals in apron pockets in our piece and we pick them up and crumble them out of our hands to enhance some of the gestural movements. This works well and often seems like the poppies are representing bloodshed and tears in the way they move.

We decided on the narrative, slightly different from the poem, where there is a romantic relationship between a woman and a soldier who has gone away to war and she doesn't know where he is. We explore this idea of post traumatic stress disorder, but in the women. The angst of a woman awake at night missing the man she loves who could be in great danger. We convey this through floor motifs. It worked really well as a starting point to lie on the ground with our eyes shut and physically show we were having a bad dream. This meant we were wriggling on the ground, screaming, hitting the ground. These informed the final movements we created.

As we are a female pair our piece is only representing a female story about world war 1. This is the part of the war me and my partner thought it be interesting to represent. This is because world war 1 was such a pivotal moment in changing the world for women, it is important to know how, why and what those women went through to make the world the place it is today.

Session 3

This lesson we started looking at different stimulus we could use to create our duets or solos. Me and my partner bought in a few things to start off. We had a poem called ' Poppies' by Jane Weir, a book of photography from world war 1, a family heirloom book full of memoirs and a poppy. After talking about how the stimulus made us feel and what inspired us the most to create movement we decided on using the 'poppies' poem. 

 

Using this stimulus we created our opening which is inspired by the beginning of the poem. We decided to have this opening sequence extremely slow and facing the audience. We came up with the sequence as synchronizing gestural movements. We showed this to another member of the class and they said they thought it was effective we just needed to make sure we were totally sure of timings and the movements were exact. We then went on to work out timings and on the precision of the movements.

Session 2

We explored a group movement exercise. It started off with one person in the middle of the room, they would move around the space in straight lines, turning whenever they got to a corner or edge. When someone felt like it they would also join in. Whenever the direction changed the leader changed as well. This became more challenging as more and more people joined in.

After getting the hang of the basic movement exercise we began to change the dynamic of our movement. The leader would control the movement. The idea was to change leader, direction and movement, seamlessly. Almost so an audience member wouldn't be able to tell who was the leader at any given time. Mostly the movements were abstract and play like, with lots of gestural arm movements and over exaggerated walking. This could represent children playing before the war.

We developed this movement on to create a uniformed marching. This worked well as a way of moving on from the child's play movement. It could show a story of children growing up during war. Starting off the naivety and fun and then growing up to fight or to have their brothers and fathers fighting. It shows the child's view of war to the reality of war. This could be a nice exercise to use to develop material to create our final whole year piece.

World war 1 lecture

This lesson we had a lecture on world war 1. This was so we all began to understand our stimulus more as we all have different levels of knowledge and understanding of the subject. I think it's important to have factual basis for everything we are doing around this topic as to give it the respect and dignity it deserves. It is also important it is honest and truthful as opposed to a fabrication based on war in general or the wrong war. During this lecture we took notes:

• world war began on the 28th July 1914 and ended on the 11th November 1918
• 70000000 troops were mobilized 
• 20000000 troops died
• There was many causes
• One cause was an arms race in Europe among Britain, Russia and Germany.
• During the war it was Britain, France and Russia against Germany and Austria
• Being a soldier and fighting for country was seen as a brave and honorable thing to do
• War was also shown to be fun and exciting, because of this many young men would lie about their age to get into the army
• Britain at the time was mostly white and hugely patriotic 
• Women played a very different role in society and were viewed differently
• Middle class women tended to wore lots of big house and long thick dresses and corsets 
• England had a huge empire: Australia, Canada and parts of Africa and Italy
• The majority of the population were working class, very poor and often had no access to clean or hot water 
• Most homes didn't have an indoor toilet
• The life expectancy for a man was 50
• The life expectancy for a woman was 54
• Developments in the economy meant rural farm work was beginning to die out
• Most women didn't work
• Women didn't have the vote
• Women's place was in the home taking care of children and other domestic tasks
• Homosexuality was illegal, you could be imprisoned and be put to forced hard labour as a punishment.
• Foreign travel was rare and only for the middle classes
• The war was started after the Arch Duke Ferdinand and his wife were assasinated by a student
• Britain entered the war on the 4th of August 1914
• In November 1914 Turkey joined the war
• in 1917 the Russian Tzar empire fell and the Russian people were starving
• 1918 came the armistice ( the war was over)
• After the war 4 major imperial powers joined together to create the league of nations (now known as the united nations)
• After the war Germany was blamed for everything
• The treaty of versailles was created which put harsh restrictions on Germany
• It forced Germany to pay a huge debt to the other countries which out Germany into a terrible depression, inflation was huge and nobody had any money
• It also put massive restrictions on Germany's ability to have an army, create weaponry and start another war.
• This humiliation of Germany eventually lead to the rise of fascism and the election of Hitler and of course world war 2. 
• During world war 1 the fighting was basic
• Chemical weapons were invented then banned after
• Many soldiers came home with shell shock, also known as post traumatic stress disorder

Session 1

This session we were introduced to what the stimulus of our final common ground physical theatre performance would be - world war 1. We were also given the task of creating a solo or duet based on some element of this stimulus, like a book or poem, for an assessment at the end of term. This presents a new challenge as we have not yet performed physical  theatre in pairs or on our own before. I have opted to devise and perform a duet with another member of my class.

In class we looked at an exercise where we had to act within a small square space on our own. We were given the situation of being in a broken down lift. I found this quite simple. The main challenge is to not overact a situation and to feel it and react instinctively. I found myself getting panicked at first at the unusual event of a lift breaking down. Then over time I got bored as all I felt I would be doing at that point would be waiting for help. Some of the movements I was doing in the lift initially involved a lot of pacing and button pressing. As it went on and the boredom of the situation kicked in the movements got slower and more tiresome  until I eventually found myself sitting on the floor, and then lying down waiting for time to go by. This exercise was interesting to help you think about the benefits of working with small spaces and the different meanings these spaces can convey.

We developed on from this exercise to being in a situation where we were in a confined space with another person. The setting was a prison cell. We were still working on our own within this confined space. We were told not to necessarily interact with this other but be aware that they are there. This also allowed for more internal acting as opposed to external. I found it hard to not embody a stereotype of a prisoner. I found myself having my guard up quite high and being confined within a small corner within my small square space. I was aware of there being another person in the room however I didn't interact with them. I got the idea that I was scared of them. This exercise was interesting as it allowed us to focus on how a space changes or how we change within a space when someone else is there. Especially confined spaces.

We were then shown a series of objects: A banana peel, a plastic bag, a ball and a feather. We were then told, within our space, to embody this object and how it moves through the air and develops. I chose the banana peel. When it was dropped on the ground it fell quite sharp and direct. When it reached the ground it didn't really move. This wasn't particularly dynamic or interesting in my opinion. I decided to embody the banana peel molding and folding over time. My movements were floor based and slow. They required a lot of effort and involved me slowly crumpling inwards. Using objects to inspire movements can be a useful devising technique. It allows you to automatically find movement qualities which can be applied to different circumstances and stories.