Week One - (23rd - 29th September)

This week we where given a stimulus to look at for our devising piece. We sat and took notes of our initial thoughts and ideas about the stimulus, we did this separately so we could later get into groups and explain our ideas and thoughts on the stimulus, which was a painting. At this point we had no knowledge of what the painting was actually about or it's history, and because of this we got to make our own assumptions on what the painting was about or what it represented. At my first look at the painting I thought it looked like the woman in the painting was being chased by someone, as her posture looked like she had tripped and fallen onto her hands and knees and she was looking up at the house across the field as her sanctuary; a safe place. When I looked at her body the first thing I realised was how deathly pale and thin her arms were and the style of her dress; as I identified as from an older era. Because of this I thought maybe she wasn't going to that house for safety maybe she got disowned by her father or husband and was trying to come back. The first thing we learnt about the painting was the title, which was "Christina's World". My initial idea from the name of the painting was that it was her mental world that she had thought of and made up in her head. But then I thought maybe this was her reality and she was trying to escape from that. We later found out that the painting was from 1948, American, Maine, Cushing and that the Painter was called Andrew Wyeth. The Girl in the photo was called Anna Christina Olsen and she was found to have polio which made her unable to walk which was why she was crawling around on the ground, which would explain the drastic state of her arms.

We then discussed in our groups our thoughts and opinions about the painting and we soon realised that none of us thought that this showed happiness and that darkness, abuse and neglect was common factors in our initial thoughts. We later learnt that the Painter, Andrew Wyeth, watched Christina crawl like this everyday, to get inspiration and Christina was aware of this. We took part in a workshop which had three different stages; of looking and staring at someone, so they knew they where being looked at, not knowing they where being looked at and then blatantly staring at a person. After this workshop we were asked how we felt through that. Many people said uncomforable and awkward, but I felt unaffected as I was looking at a point on a far away wall and thinking that as my goal that I had to reach; ignoring everybody else that was there and just focusing on getting to that point. So in Christina's case her house.

As a group we came up with many ideas and started bringing some forwards to try out. One of the ideas we went with was Christina being an orphan, someone thought of her being an orphan because of a tragic fire, from this I thought of the idea of her being tormented by her inner demons, which were really her family members who died in that fire. In this scene I came up with the idea of two people either side of "Christina" trapping her into the chair; making it impossible for her to get out, while the rest of the group was in the background being the voices of the family, talking about the feeling of the fire creeping up onto them. We finished with Christina screaming, but realised it was too cliche and was done too often, so we all came up with new ways to end that scene. One person came up with the idea of a violin being played, another person came up with the sound of nails on a chalk board making the audience wince at the nosie it emits. I came up with the idea of her happily laughing at the end; promoting the audience to stare in shock at her response.

To add more physical theatre into it we did another workshop were one person was Christina and the rest of us were making obstacles around her to see how we could use our bodies to symbolise her being trapped, as we went for the idea of mental illness. We used someone's idea to put Christina back to a good time in her life with her family at christmas dinner, the twist is that we have the later Christina narrating the story when the characters are frozen. Alicia who played the Christina who narrated the story played her as a woman who was suffering from a mental illness looking back at a happy memory from her past watching the younger version of herself (who was played by me). We also added a rule that every time a certain few words where mentioned like fire or family Alicia would scream and react to the word. We also had to make the scene look more abstact so instead of having a table we used our legs to make a star shape, thus using our bodies to become the table.

In the end we took a range of ideas and thoughts that all of us had come up with from our own creativity, having looked at the stimulus and ended up experimenting with many different ideas.