Week 3 - (7th - 13th October)

This week the group began by doing the same thing as last week which was 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 more developed and changed individual scenes. These scenes are:
Scene 1 - TrapChristina is sat in a chair surrounded by her inner demons, who stop her from escaping her own mind. We explored this by having three people on either side of whoever was playing Christina and grabbing her when she tries to escape the chair. We tried doing that in different syles. First going fast to show the franticness of her situation, then slowing it down to make her seem more sluggish and tired, with a heartbeat in the beginning gradually speeding up the more worked up she gets. I thought up the heartbeat idea to always be in the scenes to add dramatic affect. At the end of this scene Chrisitna says a monologue talking about how she's gone numb and can't feel anything anymore.
Scene 2 - Who's the Real Christina?This scene is crucial in our devising piece as it's called 'The Real Christina'. 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 telling of 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.
Scene 3 - Circle sceneWe started this scene with me saying my Christina monologue, talking about how now I'm starting to feel things and the numbness is seeping away, but Christina doesn't want to feel these things. In this scene somebody came up with the idea of forming a circle around Christina (me) and I came up with the idea of looking out to the audience, to make the audience question everything we're saying and making it look more abstact. The group take it in turns to speak their piece and to make that transition from person to person the groups count to three beats and twirl together around the circle to make the next person speaking go in front and face the audience.

Scene 4 - Obstacles scene

In this scene I came up with the idea of working together as a team to make obstacles for Christina (who is still played by me) to climb over, to show her struggle of fighting her own mind. We did this by three people literally being the obstacles. The original idea was for all of us to be the obstacles but we soon realised that it wasn't working, as it looked and felt too messy. The three people who were the obstacles were making the obstacles with all different shapes and sizes with their bodies. We decided to do all the obstacles low, so I had to crawl and drag myself on the floor. We decided this to show more of the characters inner struggle and to show a link to the stimulus; the painting of "Christina's World".
Scene 5 - Mirror Scene
This scene links in with the obstacles scene, as it's still the characters inner struggle. This scene is what the title says it is; it's people mirroring each other by their movements. For example if I lift my hand up and touch my face the person opposite me would do exactly the same thing. The reason we did this was to show the audience that although we're all parts of the character Christina we are all still the same person.

Although we came up with new scenes this week, it was still a tough week; as we changed many of our old scenes to make the piece fit in more together. For example the first scene we ever did was the fire scene and we completely took that idea out as we had to ask ourselves as a group does it go with the piece? So even though we had some disagreements, we always managed to solve them and get scenes done.