Week 4 - (14th - 20th October)

This week was all about perfecting our scenes, and devising our last three ideas. Two of the ideas was the last two end scenes that we all had ideas on but didn't know how to go about creating them. So, we kept on pushing it back until inspiration hit us. And the other idea was our first scene of the whole piece which we actually made and thought of this monday.

The first scene was called the "Hospital" scene. I was the mum and Bradly was the dad, waiting in the hospital for news on our daughter Christina who was in a coma. Although the scene starts off naturalistically it soon becomes a battle of movements between me and Bradly as we have a dance/fight number. There was a couple of lifts, i.e. the paperclip, and a clever technique which looked like Bradly was pulling my hair and dragging me across the floor, but really it was me doing all the kicking and pulling without him having to do any effort. We all came up with this scene as without it the piece wouldn't make sense and it wouldn't feel completed.

We also fixed a couple of problems the day before the performance, such as the phone scene and Dan's lift. We changed it by having only one person clicking instead of three as it confused all of us because they were all going at different speeds. Dan's lift was also a problem as when we catched him the audience couldn't have been able to see, as the angle we placed ourselves was a problem. So to fix this we tried for Dan to go on two blocks instead of one to have the extra height but that didn't work out well as we nearly dropped him. In the end we decided to move the box to be directly in front of the audience so they could see Dan falling head on and more clearly.

Then we decided to develop the bus stop scene. Before we developed it I felt it was too naturalistic so I thought of the idea to talk to the audience instead, make them feel like they were involved as our aim is to make the audience question themselves. So I thought of the idea of asking questions like; "Do you know where I am?" and "Do you know how I can get out of here?" In another scene I did a monolgue talking about time and why everyone cares so much about time; so I linked this scene with that one. We all had different emotions, i.e. happy, sad, worried. To again show different aspects of 'oneself'.

We also came up with a new scene which was accidental as someone was messing around with the curtains and poking their head out, so we thought we couple incorporate that into the scene "Who's the Real Christina?" as we thought it looked effective and interesting to watch. We all stuck our head through a different opening in the curtain and hid our bodies. We thought this could add a little humor before we crawled out and got to the next scene.

Here's us in the theatre with our heads sticking out the curtains:



Finally we devised our last scene. We already had the idea of us having the "AM I FREE?" letters on our shirts back and front. In the beginning we were going to have two words; ISOLATED and I AM FREE on two shirts. But I thought that it would be hard to do that so instead we only opted for one black shirt and the words I AM FREE. I came up with the idea of making the audience question if Christina is really free as in the beginning we were going to finish it as the person speaking as Christina saying "I am free." But then I came up with the idea of Christina saying "Am I free?" And the person playing Christina (who was Shelby at this stage) having a question mark on her top, to show her still feeling confused. At the end of the scene we all whisper "Wake up Christina", making the audiecne feel a sense of eerie and eagerness to find out what happens next.

We finished this week off rehearsing all the scenes and going through the piece over and over again to get everything perfect and in sync to make it look as neat and effective as it could be before we finally had to perform.