Today we are starting our new project that we will performance at the start of March. The aim for todays lesson is to read through 'Art', as this is a play that we will chose to take influence from. We like the themes of loyalty and friendship in this play.
To begin with, we reread pages 42 and 43 of the script of the play 'ART' to familiarise ourselves with the plot, characters and themes after the Christmas break. We began by splitting into groups of boys and girls. The boys worked on developing the scene where Serge brings up his problem with Mark's girlfriend and Yvan is caught in the middle. We spent 15 minutes experimenting with different ways of directing this scene, and different ways of blocking it. We then performed this short scene to the rest of the class. The feedback we received was that it was a fascinating way of portraying the meaning in the scene. We then applied this scene and the feedback to our own piece, and decided that we would need to emphasise Yvan's uncertainty and his objective: i.e to keep the peace and stop his group breaking up.
While we worked n that scene, the girls were working on exploring a potential scene through improvisation. This was a scene where Mark's girlfriend Paula interacts with his friends. After watching their performance, we decided that this scene wasn't working. We decided to rework the scene, and have each actor playing a different role (with Amelie playing Paula, Emma playing Serge and Silvana playing Yvan). This worked better as each actor fitted each character better, meaning the flow of the scene worked.
A specific issue we addressed for this performance was creating a mature performance that stepped away from teenage issues as this has been a common theme that our group had produced earlier in our school year.
We chose to create a scene that used characters from 'Art'. We all sat around a dinner table while My character and Amelie's character announced that we were getting engaged. We chose to do improvise this scene to develop any conflicting opinions between the characters. Amelie was playing a hippie (similar to Paula) and I was playing her boyfriend (who was slightly controlled by her). Emma was playing an obnoxious dental nurse, Seth was a drug addict, Silvana worked for a charity and Hugo was a young man living off his parents with far-right opinions. We took inspiration from this
The scene began slowly, however towards the end, some interesting ideas came out. These are:
- the homeopathy debate
- the natural medicine Amelie was forcing me to take
- lack of interest from Seth
- the contrasts between characters
Later on in the day, we worked on the physical theatre aspect of the piece. We did a few physical warm-ups, including jogging, followed by the walking exercise from three points in the room which we had to move between in different ways.
We began looking at movement called round by through contact improvisation. This is a series of non-naturalistic movements used to demonstrate a relationship between two characters. Here is an example we took inspiration from.
Link
In this video, the moves between the characters are complicated, therefore the moves we were doing were a lot simpler. We split into groups of 2 and worked on creating a short sequence of movement each. It was a slightly complicated task at first, as it was something new and we were unsure on the movements however at the end, we began to get the hang of it. One sequence that I felt was specifically impactful was between Amelie and Seth, as theirs was slightly more advanced, with different use of proxemics.
After this, we looked at developing monologues. Monologues are a very good starting point for devising theatre as it gives more detail to each character. As we wanted equal contribution from every actor, we set out 7 pieces of paper around the room and we had a set amount of time on each one. To make sure we were able to develop the monologues, there was a specific scenario at the top of each paper. At the end of this exercise, we all sat in a circle and read out each monologue. The only issue with this exercise is that they didn't always make sense, as we were rushed while writing. Overall, there were a series of good ideas that we were prepared to explore.
As we knew we wanted to explore friendships, we decided on the name 'Where loyalties lie' as it would give us a bit more control on the plot, as we knew we had a specific concept to follow.
