Finished Question 1

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.