Week 1 Devising

Before we knew our stimulus we had some tips to devising. The top tips were very useful as we have never experienced devising as a project before. 

This picture is what we were given as our top tips. We took these top tips on board to our process if devising. The main top tip that we kept on going was to play games to get ideas. For me this was a great tip as it encourages the group to stay focused and alert on the task. 

This week we were given our stimulus to work with for our final piece. The stimulus was a piece of music.The music was Ode to Billy Joe by Bobby Gentry. When I first listened to it I thought that was a country atmosphere as it had an upbeat feel to the music. If I was to give Ode to Billy Joe a colour I would give it brown because it is a dark story to the song however it is a little bit lighter in the sense of the plot of the piece. After a couple of times listening to the music we all put ourselves into groups of six. The lyrics tell us that Billy Joe has committed suicide as it says "And now you tell me that Billy Joe's jumped of the tallahatchie bridge". Then we started to think of dark stories that might fit to the story.

This picture is the mindmap of ideas that we came up with. The mindmap shows branches of different things that link to the main subject. 

My groups first starting point was to mindmap everyones ideas and thoughts to the song. One of our ideas was to make our performance abstract by linking it to gossip and perhaps rumours around a area. After mindmapping we then started a warm up to help devising our first scene. Also in our mindmap we thought that commedia would link successfully to our ideas. One of our ideas was linking to gossip and keeping a secret. Following this idea we started to 

act a scene to see what our improvising takes us too. The improvisation we came up with was two zannis and one pierot. The improvisation was a great start. As the zannis were energetic and enthusiastic to try to cheer the pierot up. The genre was a black comedy as it can be comedy because of the commedia and dark because at the end of the scene one of the zannis says "im going to jump off a bridge. 

After the scene of improvisation we thought that the story needs to be with couples of people. One couple is the best friends. The second couple is a romantic couple and the third is a male friendship. We thought that different couples will make it more interesting. 

Our target was to think more about the 

storyline of the play as we had one scene.