One of our performances was to make a devising piece with
everyone in our group. Devising is making our own piece with anything we want
to do about. We firstly as a group got together and started to decide what type
of performance we could do. Firstly we wanted to decide a genre to do. We all
decided to do a big genre horror. This genre is one of the biggest and
effective genres to do.
After deciding the genre of horror we all set each other to
go away and find a specific area of horror. My idea was based on psychological
horror, religion, and life after death. I believed that these two areas would
make a really good link, this is because religion is a very big aspect in a lot
of people’s lives and religion has different opinions and beliefs to life after
death. I thought that we could look at the two major religions (Muslims and Christians)
and their beliefs about death and spirits. Some people had similar ideas to
mine, with religion and sprits. Someone else’s idea was KKK, they said that
this idea has not been looked into a lot and that we could make a good
performance about the KKK. A lot of us didn’t like this idea because we thought
that we won’t have a lot of ideas that we could develop into a 20 minutes
performance. We all decided that we would use spirts and parts of religion. The
reason why we decided to use this idea was because we all thought that we all
have different ideas to spirts and we could develop everyone ideas in different
scenes. After deciding our main idea for the performance we all said that we
should go away and bring some ideas to how we could develop the horror genre. When
we got back we looked into people’s ideas of the performance. My ideas was to
have a family and the child see’s spirits and experience’s paranormal activities.
Some other ideas were very different, such as looking into the way the earth a
humans were formed, so there’s giants, and aliens, then humans are produces. This
idea was looking into a very different idea of horror. We all decided to use
the idea of family and spirits.
We had some activities such as making small scenes with just
bringing ideas together. One of the small scenes we started with was having a
mum character, a father, child, spirt and two other characters. It was a dream
type of scene. When the mum character has a dream of her son getting taken away
by the dark spirit. She got woken up by the dad character, she rushes into the
room to find her son in his bed sleeping. Even though this small activity of
devising was not a big part at the beginning, we further in the devising we
decided to develop and shape this into a full scene which is a very useful and
good scene. After we started to make small scenes such as the cooking scene,
car scene, and cinema scene. We all decided that these all had the same type of
meaning, of the mum character seeing the spirt and that we need to see more of
other characters. We started to make new scenes such as the party scene, son
see’s spirit, circus scene, café scene, sister and sister shopping, argument
and the neighbour scene. This allowed us to add different characters and make
the performance not just based on two character (mum and spirit).
After adding different scenes, we decided to make order of
the scenes we had already, this make it easier for us to know what we had and
what scenes we would have next. We realised in our devising piece so far that
we needed a climax. So we decided to make the mum character go mental, so we
added the montage and mental asylum scene which would show that she had gone
mental with all the paranormal activities which has been haunting her for
killing her stepbrother when they were younger. When we added these two scenes we
thought that there needs to be a reason to how she ended there. We then decided
to add another scene at the end when the mum character gets possessed by the
John spirit to killing her own daughter, this then leads to the mental asylum,
which would then make sense when she ends up in the mental asylum.
Our progress throughout the devising was all over the place,
meaning that a lot of us were always bringing ideas up and giving opinions but
a lot of these ideas and opinions were not looked upon and used in an active
way. We would not have a lot of time to perform what we had to the teachers and
get feedback because we would always spend a lot of time on talking over the
scenes. I believe that we as a group had a very slow progress. For myself I was
late for some of the lessons or not in some of the lessons which slowed down my
characters progress. However, I still believe that we gave a really good
performance and put together a really good play.
Before the performance on Friday we had a tech run where we
had to make sure the technicians knew where the sound cues where and also what
type of lighting we would use to set the mood of the different scenes.
When we performed on Friday 11th December 2015 we
got given time to practice for 40 minutes to make sure we are sure with the transitions
and the cues of the sound and light. The time we was given to practice and get
ready was productive it gave us time to go through scenes we thought we needed
to look at, which were mainly the scenes where there were the use of chairs, so
we made it clear who would move certain chairs and where we would move them. We
got time to go get costumes depending on the characters. For my character I
used a night robe for the baby sitting scene and the last scene to show that we
are in a house setting.
Overall, I believe that we had a lack of energy whilst we
was performing, I think that this was because the sound cue was at certain
points taking longer than it should. However, I still think that we as a group
kept our characters on time and carried on with the performance. The props were
used at the right time and also we managed to do the performance with another
psychologist because the psychologist character Taio was not there on the performance
day so we had to use someone else as the psychologist. One of the strongest
scenes in my opinion was the last scene this is because it was the highest
climax of the performance which I believe made the performance serious. The scene
I think that didn’t work out as it was meant to was the car scene this was
because the sounding effect took long to come on for the spirits cue to come on
the stage and also when the car screeched when the mum character drove
backwards with the car took long so that scene took longer than it was meant to
take which slowed us down.
I believe that my character was very suitable for myself
because I like to bring across my child side at times. However, I believe that I
could have put in more energy to my character.
