Final SWED

When I first received my stimulus for my devised piece, we began working our way through our
given story and then annotating and looking into further depth and exploring the elements of the story from which we could select potential plot lines. The story followed a warrior that was in search for love, but could only get his woman if he fought 100 men for her. The main focus of the narrative was the theme of love and how one person is in the search for their true love. I started our ideas rolling by suggesting that we steered away from the traditional story of two people falling in love after searching for the right person. I suggested that we looked into very current ways that people find
love, one way that we thought of was on TV shows, like ‘Take me Out’ and ‘Blind date’. We then
began to look into how everything was set up and fake, and looked into what goes on behind TV
shows.





Within the TV world I wanted to look into the characteristics of TV personalities. In our next rehearsal we started to look into plot lines and the journey that we wanted our characters to go through. Before we did more work on our characters, we did a character hot seat this entailed us looking deeper into our characters background, I started by talking about the basic details of my character. I then answered some questions that my group asked me, from this I learnt that my character really lives for his job and only ever think about it. This quick fired questions made me make some strong decisions about my character and his life for an early stage.




After we all had our characters decided we wanted to try and fill in some of the scenes, this
became a challenge at first but once we just started improvising the flow of the scenes, in the style
of our practitioner. This then gave us something to work off of, and then we could file down our
scenes from there. This then gave us something to make our decisions of scene structure and
what we wanted to include. The advantages of doing spontaneous improvisation is that you don't spend to much time thinking about your decisions about why we are giving our characters these traits. I found it helpful that we could make a decision and move on with it, and play with it and see if it could work and then ditch it if it doesn't work.





Once we had made our decisions about our set and the spacing of our play, we looked into old
games shows like ‘Blind Date’ this best fit our play as it utilized all our actors well but the host
figure of Cilla Black had some links to my character being big, cheesy and in your face.




Our next stage in the process was looking into ways of getting it up on its feet, and making it look
more structured. We looked into different styles of using physicality to bring a piece to life, we
took on board some of Frantic’s techniques to do this, such as manipulation and unison
movements. This then gave us a more rounded performance, where we could look into the flow of
the play, and the characters journey. We spent one rehearsal looking into music and how different music would fit with different moods of the flashback scenes. We explored different styles such as fast paced music to set a big mood and bring pace to the piece. Then we looked into slower music that would set a eerie tone to the flashback for contestant number 2.





2


My main research about my character was based around TV stars and big personalities in
presenting. Our play has the same structure as ‘Blind Date’ this is a game show where the
contestants don’t see each other. We followed this format, so I looked into Cilla Black and the way
that she interacts with the contestants on the show. I picked up on the way she introduced the
characters, and how scripted she seemed. She would always say the same thing to everyone when
they came in. My research was manly based around TV jargon and how each the presenter would drop in facts and figures to make everything seem more rounded. I added some lines early on of figures like "views have gone up 12% in the last twelve months". This also backed up the context of our play.





I was asked some questions about my characters life growing up and his relationship with his
family during the hot seating on the spot I came up with him being quite a recluse and then
finding comfort in 50’s radio presenters and looked into how they use their voice to make
something come alive. Looking into their speech patterns highlighted mainly their pace and how
they would speed up and then slow down suddenly on words. From what I had learnt in the hot
seat, and exploring my character, I was able to make some starting ideas of movements for my
character.


We looked in to traditional ways of storytelling, and how that would be set, and they
would either perform in the round, with the audience set around the teller, from this I choose to
set it in traverse. This gave me ways to interact with the audience. This then led to me directing a
lot of my lines and the audience and making it come alive in that way. At the earlier stages of the
process my main priorities were character, and exploring background and how characters would
be around each other, before we looked at the whole narrative.



For my movement I took my inspiration from the TV presenters but also did some work on looking
into the game show theme music and how that made me feel, I kept my movements light but also
bouncy as I moved around the space. My character always tries to keep on his toes and uses quite
flowing movements. This worked well as it was a huge contrast to the off stage persona of my character and to the other character around me. I found it lifted the scenes that were set on the stage as it started with a big entrance.





Over the rehearsal period my character changed in a drastic way, from the start he was still a big personality but he was a bit more tame with it, but as we kept running scene, and particularly during the improvisation stage of the process, he became a lot cheekier, and I started to explore having more banter with the contestants. This then led on to Corny Craig being a focal point of the show, and adding in his own one liners during the show. By the end of the rehearsal process Craig was a big personality and I think this then helped to show the contrast between the onstage Craig and the backstage Craig in his personal time. My character always had two sides two him, one was the onstage Corny and the offstage corny which was a dull character in comparison.





3


We spent most of our third rehearsal talking about our performance style, as our main
practitioner is Mike Leigh we found it easier to stick our style to quite naturalistic movements and
the context of the piece, however we needed to explore how for this we could go as we want to
try some physical scenes, for our character monologues and flashbacks. The scenes before the
physical theatre scenes are quite slow and dull, these naturalistic scene that showed off the dull
day to day life and the difference between reality and in front of the cameras. The physical theatre
scenes break out brought pace and life to the performance, which worked as a contrast to
everything else.



I suggested that we set the audience in a different style at the start, we explored what it would be
like for the audience to start outside of the theatre, then to be escorted in by crew members. This
was working well as they would experience the first daunting surprise of seeing somewhere for
the first time, like you would in a real studio setting. They are then shouted at as the enter in a fast
paced manner, as everything seems to be in a rush to get started. This created an atmosphere that
is already quite dark and negative, as people are pushed out of their comfort zones. This is then
the starting mood of the play, as it shows the characters during their reality. We explored using
mime at the start as we do our stylized movements, like brushing hair and tying shoelaces. This created a slow start and made the mood slow and calm before the big explosion as they enter the performance space with the music.


Once we had our set and our opening scene set with our movements, we discussed our story line
in detail, and what scenes we saw where important to carry through the theme. We wanted to
keep the two worlds very different and didn’t want there to be any connections between reality
and the TV life. We have tried to show this by having a different mood change whenever we
transitions through the scenes, we showed this through our body language and the change in
background music. This also helped to break up the scenes and then the audience would begin to
see a pattern emerging in the structure. We showed links to our practitioners that we are inspired
by, we showed this through our set and how we manipulate it, and work with it. We explored this
in the transitions and thinking of different ways of entering. Trying things like ‘Round by through’
which is a Frantic Assembly technique of manipulation. This created a big impact on the piece, which
really highlighted the contrast to the show as in the scenes before everything was very stationary.


We also indicated links to Kneehigh’s show ‘Rebecca’ where we explored the light and shade of a
performance. In ‘Rebecca’ they had the bright setting inside the manor house, where they used
the lighting to bring life to the set. They then had dark, murky lighting in the surroundings. We
tried to show this through our dull lighting in the off stage scenes, and the vivid lively lighting state
for the TV set.



Our performance style varied from scene to scene where we had imitations of Kneehigh’s style of
setting and lighting state, and Frantic Assemblies fast paces manipulation scenes, like seen in
‘Othello’.  This showed that we had taken some influences from other practioners and used this to broaden the style of our performance Our set was very minimalistic  and our main feature was the door frame, which we tried to utilize in most of our scene and make it a focal point for transitions and flashbacks. This gave us something to work with in each scene and we used it as an energy shift in our piece.



4
At the start of the process we did a lot of work looking Mike Leigh and how his work on character added depth to the story.
We did some starting work on improvised hot seating. This led to us making a lot of decisions
about our character from an early date, such as age, name and professions. But using the Mike
Leigh methods it made us move on with our characters instead of hanging around on the details to
early.



We did some work on character by going around into the public around the college area, in character and we would go around and interact with people with out them knowing that we were in character. We were asked a lot of questions during this task, a lot of them where set around the time period of our piece. This gave us sometime to think about when we were set. And people thought that by the way that we were talking to each other it was clearly set in the modern times, due to our dialect and the words that we were using. As a group we all felt that working on characters before narrative made us think about our characters purpose towards each other, rather than towards the storyline. I often find myself getting too caught up in my own character within the storyline and how he plays a part in each scene.That is why out of all the practitioners that we studied i think best fit my working style.


We also tried to do another of Leigh’s technique where you use life experience and link in people that
we know of to create the character and given them traits. For my character i looked into big
personalities in TV presenters. By looking into these characters I took on board their stage
presence and how they would bring something to life with their voice. Later on in the process,
when we had all made decisions about our characters and the plot line, we started to work on
some more physical scenes and different ways that we could get it up on its feet. We looked at a
Frantic Assembly technique called ‘Round, By, Through’. This worked particularly well for one of
our flashback scenes, their production of ‘Othello’ gave us a lot of inspiration and how they used
manipulation to show the decline of Othello, we took inspiration in showing the ups and downs of
the rocks and roll lifestyle.



We also had some influences from Brecht's theatre, as we never left the performance space, and if we weren't directly involved with the scene we would either sit frozen, or have our backs to the audience to be in a neutral state. This made the piece flow better and didn't have entrances and exits breaking up the scene and slowing down the pace of the piece.


5
As a group our main intention was for the audience to understand the difference between
people’s lives when the cameras are rolling and when they are not. We explored different ways to
show this by the two different energy shifts in the characters when they walk through the door. From our audience feedback we got that the big energy shifts made the audience feel really uncomfortable, particularly in the off screen scenes. The contrasting scenes created meaning more, by making a big deal about the change rather then hovering around it. 


This was particularly a big shift for my character. This was mainly shown when the characters
walked through the door; we would go from a very low status, using closed body language. Then
when we walked through the door we would go to big open bodies and making everything
exaggerated.



Our audience feedback really backed up that this was portrayed well. “The over the top qualities
of the studio worked well in contrast to the ‘downbeat’ reality”. This positive feedback showed
that our contrasting character traits worked well and showed off the difference between onstage
and off stage. In order to make even more of this change, from our first peer feedback we got that
the character of Corny Craig needed to be more of a contrast when he is off stage.


To make our contrast even more clear we spent some time looking at the backstage scenes and mainly the contestant’s relationships with Craig. This worked well in the performance as we only had
conversations if the contestants created them, and Craig would reply in a negative tone. This
comes as a shock to the audience and they can then see big contrast in the two characters.


We wanted our audience to feel shocked and unnerved by the contrast in the two settings, by
having the audience thrown from one drastic to the other, it played around with their emotions
and when they got to see the characters in different lights it made them think about television and
how people are played. Over the time of our devising the question that we wanted our audience
to think about changed as we went along, at first we wanted them to think about how dark tv
personalities are, but this then went on to the contrast between them on stage to off. This is often
the case with bubbly personalities and people become shocked when they see them in the own
surroundings. This was a highlight from our audience feedback, and they really picked up on how
the off stage scenes made them feel “discomfort towards the contestants, due to the hosts vibes”.


As a performer this was a proud moment as we had conveyed the theme that we set out for. The
contrasting themes of the two settings had the most impact on our audience and made them start
to think about our current time.



6
We had lots of lines within our piece that linked to our social context, we quoted lines to do with current celebrities, popular culture at the moment, such as nando's, blogging and the new stalking laws. My lines in particular that I had to link to the social times of our piece, was speaking about other rival games shows. This brought the piece up to date, and gave the audience strong hints on where our piece was set. The audience understood this as through our feedback all of our audience got that our piece was set, in the current day as they all picked up on different bits within the play that indicated that.



The main structure of our show was based around the dating game show, this is also a very up to date concept now, and is a big way that people find love. The added detail of the game show being online also gave it a modern touch rather that the older game shows, this is a very popular thing, and a lot of TV shows are turning to online websites as that's where most of the audience are. The first performance that we did the audience didn't fully get that the show was set online. So in our final performance I made more of the online thing and made that prominent in my opening speech.



A very strong example of cultural context within our piece is the flashback scene that shows contestant number 3 in a club chatting up the women. I think that this scene shows a really example of how most people see men towards women. We were using crude pick-up lines, and prowling towards the female figure in the scene. From our feedback we got a lot of comments about how uncomfortable during this scene as they "Could really relate to how the female would be feeling".



Contestant 2 also had links to the culture of our piece. He was linked into the new laws about stalking. We then made more of this during his flashback scene. We all changed our focus in this scene and I did not break eye focus towards Carmella (the female figure). I think that scene was effective to the audience as well as they all picked up on how we were so drawn into her. This theme was also linked into our social context as the stalker was getting alerts about her through his phone.