Week 2 - (30th September - 6th October)

This week the group began by revisiting some of our less developed ideas, ones that we touched but didn't really know how to carry on and develop more ideas. So we did the solution of trying out different physical aspects i.e. lifts and choreographed dance steps. For example, the movement of our heads, the sharp left, right, centre, and coming together as a group and making individual shapes and seeing how they fit together to make an abstact shape at the end with all of us used.

In the end we came up with 5 basic individual scenes:　
Scene 1 - Fire scene

Christina is sat in a chair surronded by her inner demons, who she tries to run from in order to escape her past. We came up with the idea of her family dying in a fire and she was being haunted by her family members. I came up with the idea of using people in the background to actually speak as the family members and I also came up with the idea of her fighing off her inner demons. We did this by two people pulling her down on the chair, and making her feel the affects of the fire.

Scene 2 - Past Memory
In this scene Christina is reviewing a memory of her family eating christmas dinner, she is noting all the small but significant details of the moment, such as who's chair is who's, the arguments that went on. We started to explore this scene but left it to come to a later date, as we were just coming up with problems and no solutions.

Scene 3 - Obstacles scene

We have Christina crawling on the floor and struggling to move and we also have people becoming moving obstacles that are blocking her path making it even more difficult, this is to symbolise Christina overcoming her struggles. We did this by using three or more people together to create bigger shapes for the person playing Christina to struggle out of. For example, I came up with the idea of two people putting their legs together to make a bridge shape and another person over them using their arms to give the notion of a box and Christina trying to struggle out of that box.

Scene 4 - Trap
Christina is pushed around and held back by her inner demons again, they flip a chair over her and bring her back to where she started. The main part of this scene is the phrase T-R-A-P we use this on our costumes, which would be black shirts with everyone having one letter on their shirt. At the end we were thinking of having a word to form at the end that would involve all eight of us. Like Isolated.

Scene 5 - Train scene

In this scene Christina meets new people, we wanted this to be an insight as to how Christina saw new people having been kept away from everyone other than her family. We were using ideas to do with the chairs, but halfway through the scene we decided to change the chairs for stage blocks. This was also the scene we used the invicible phone keypad, where all the numbers are bigger and we turn our head sharply to look at each number. For example the number 1 was on the top left corner of the room, the number 5 was in the centre of the room and the number 9 was on the bottom right corner of the room. But we scrapt this idea to use on another scene or to come back and add it on to this scene later, as it didn't seem to fit in with the way the scene was going.
　
We decided as a group to split into two groups, 4 in each and work on separate scenes to speed up the process of making more scenes. The scene I worked on was labelled 'The Train Journey' but we later decided that it was too realistic and we were aiming for non-naturalistic. To update the scene we used blocks instead of chairs and decided not to make it a train but instead it being in Christina's mind. For this scene there are four of us and we are all repeating the line "I'm the real Christina". Three of us are standing on blocks to give it a change from always using chairs. Three of us are all Christina but we have different personalities of that one person. I'm the angry one speaking about my past memories, my bad experiences. Another personality was a happy one, telling of their happy memories and the last one was the sad personality, telling of their sad memories. The last Christina was the "real" Christina who was confused on who she was and trying to get out of the blocks surrounding her, metaphorically showing that she's trying to escape her own mind.

The name of our piece at the moment is now called 'Lost in Sanity' which was linked with Christina being trapped and isolated. The themes are isolation and identity and our aim is that 'Lost in sanity explores the notion of identity, isolation and freedom throughout the action of movement and to confront and challenge the perception of the 'self'.