Our devised piece was based on a 1930s gang in New York. Our
original stimuli was the song Chasing Pavements by Adele. From this song I got
the idea of someone chasing a better life and having a dream of a great life.
This is how we came up with the idea of the gang looking for a better life;
especially one character, Finn, who has to make a choice between a calm and
relaxed life with his new girlfriend or a violent, dangerous yet rewarding life
with the gang.
Although starting off very slow by brainstorming many ideas
and not coming up with much from the stimulus we eventually came up with 3
ideas, one including a relation, one to do with soldiers in a helicopter crash
and one to do with olden time gang. After discussing about each idea we
realised the soldier idea would be too ‘film like’ and the relationship idea
wouldn’t be interesting for our audience. This left us with the 1930s gang
idea, originally we had a pretty dull and boring piece but using everyone’s
ideas together we managed to add in many techniques and extra scenes which made
our performance look good. A main things that went well for my group and I was
that we worked really well together during rehearsals and this was also shown
during the performance as it ran smoothly.
I think what also went well was the techniques we used. This
was a main part of our performance as we used a long list of techniques but we
made sure that we weren’t just using them for the sake of it. For example in
the ‘second ending’ where Finn comes back to the warehouse to get revenge on
Stan (me) and Frank we used a stylistic piece of movement for a fight as we had
already used too much stage combat. To go hand-in-hand with our slow motion
when it was used we done two things to also symbolise to the audience time was
slowing down this was; using strobe lighting and using an effect on the music
called isolater. After our performance many people said this worked well and
was nice rather than just doing the slow motion. We also used cross cutting and
in our performance to frustrate the audience as it showed how close Tess and
Finn were to seeing each other but then are quickly pulled away by the boss and
I.
Another reason why our performance was clear to the audience
and performed well was because of the costume. We researched deeply into seeing
what sort of clothes people in 1930s America would wear, this was key to our
performance as the time period wouldn’t be clear and the audience may not
understand if we were wearing modern day clothes. To top it off we all managed
to retain our American accents all the way through, this was probably the most
important thing to the entire performance as we were all meant to be American,
this helped as every rehearsal we would talk using these accents.
There were a few things about our performance and rehearsal process
that could have gone better. The main thing was to get the performance blocked
quicker so that we would have had longer to polish and do more tech runs and
check things such as how long it would take to change costume back stage.
Costume changes were partly a problem during the final performance as t got to
a part where Tom, Dan and I were improvising as we had to wait for Kyle to do a
costume change as it was set a year later. If we blocked quicker we would have
been able to add in extra dialogue to this scene and it wouldn’t have been a problem
during the performance.
I also think that if we blocked the performance quicker we could
have practised doing the fake blood on Ellie because although we tested it we
never tested it in the 10 second time frame we had during the performance.
Another problem was that the audience didn’t really get to
know Stan (myself) and Frank (Dan) well enough. I think this could have been
changed if we added more to our monologues or if there was a scene together
where we could’ve explained our back story a bit more. Also I got feedback from
the audience saying that they didn’t like when the boss split Frank and I up
during the third ending because it seemed wrong to separate characters that
were so close throughout the performance.
Finally I think that if we had more time then we could have
gone into more detail on other ideas and work shopped things till we all chose
something we liked and agree on as not everyone liked the idea we had at first.
Over the rehearsals this changed and the idea grew on us and we were very
confident in performing it.
Overall this unit went very well and was enjoyable to do and
I think our final devised performance was very good and ran smoothly
throughout.
