Week 7 Devising

This week is our last week of the devising process before the performance. This week is the week for refining our work and making our transitions quick ready for the performance.

We then showed our work to the rest of the class to have some feedback of the final product. The other two groups were brilliant. What stood out for me was that the group that has the wedding in has a easy storyline to follow but at the the ending is left of with a cliffhanger of a death. It was great to see the whole product as had only seen bits of the piece. the style of Berkoff works well with the this group as they are all in unison when they are meant to be. it makes it look more interesting especially the head going round after the sound scape. The image that I always keep in my head was the still image at the beginning which is very effective to watch. The dinner scene works well with the clockwork because of the pace that is brought up to a high level to add more tension. The only thing which I didn't like was the lift between the two boys because it can be read as a romance not anger and fighting for the love of Bobby.Something to work on with this group was to make the break up scene between Billy Joe and Bobby is add up to the energy of the performance throughout. the pace through the whole performance such as they are building to a mini climax and then it drops to a less intense feel. For example the mother's monologue was a perfect example of this as everything she says the two characters that play Bobby would make a noise or do a movement to create a climax. this links to the stimulus because at the end of the song there is a big climax at the end which is suicide which happens at the end of Billy Joe. I think that this is a clever link but a simple link because suicide can be triggered in some many different situations. They picked love was also links to the song too because Billy Joe died for love. Also I loved the reference to the song when they say

    ' Today, Billy Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge'
I thought that this was clever as they have referenced the song at the beginning and the end.

The next group was completely different to the first group. They responded to the stimulus to secrecy and privacy which they thought of linking to the stimulus as they have a therapist and there are four patients that suffer with OCD. I liked the first bit with the staging on the diagonal because it is a effective when seeing all of the characters on stage first. They made the physical element naturalistic but so effective such as the waving of the hand to wave goodbye. I thought the characters were very characters because were using physical theatre in there characters because they were all different characters in there physical ways such as the photo being moved in a square worked well because it links to the practitioners of Berkoff as all the movement was clockwork. The same thing with the jacket spinning around and fiddling with the zip. The one thing that they may need to look at is to make the triangle bigger or stage the scene when Frank (the therapist) is having his back to the audience because the sound it projecting to the back of the stage when we want the sound at the front also Frank was blocking Matt (the patient) at the particular part. Apart from that the group piece as a whole is a up to a great standard at the moment. I cant wait to see what happens next because the storyline hasn't come through much as I think as scenes progress the audience will begin understand the plot behind it all.

My group had a great response to the performance because of the emotions of betrayal, loneliness and fear. The opening created a massive response to the audience of fear because it was sudden after a calm atmosphere. As a whole they liked the level of energy at moments like this and the kidnapping because it makes the piece exciting and suspense.The monologues were great but the feedback said that there was too much going on behind the monologues.This needed to slow it down so the audience can focus more on the monologue. The audience also picked up that my character Violet was played younger that 14 years because Violet is more innocent such as the death of the dog. Throughout the piece everyone thought that they I was a sweet character and that they liked me at the start but then they turned to like to like Frankie's characters more because of the Frankie's character being stranded at the end. The ending was needed to be more clockwork when exiting the stage to keep the style of Berkoff.

Our targets for this week is to rehearse the whole piece so many times to get used to it and make it muscle memory and to try it with the lighting. Also we should bare the feedback in mind when rehearsing.