16th June 2016

Today we decided to change the ending of our piece so that the psychiatric is left with the man who's put in the asylum for murderer and pleaded insane. A movement piece was created for the seven devils scene which was made for the upper room in the fort, our rehearsal process has benefitted us whilst creating this because we already had an idea of what we wanted to show and how we wanted to portray it. Although we planned on staying away from the "horror maze" idea this scene was originally made early on in rehearsals when we decided we were going to interact with the audience, the fact that we had to change this now as we're not acknowledging them meant we changed from grabbing and scaring the audience to using dance and movement which weren't just choreographed from our own ideas but with the use of influential videos.

Now that we've devised all of our scenes we need to rehearse a few times in the location and then see if there are any problems/changes we have to make. Helping direct and contribute ideas throughout this process has been fun and rewarding.

Risk Assessment

Production: Site Specific

Date: 29/6/16

Company: Revolution Arts- Howard School

Above is the risk assessment made for our site specific performance. This risk assessment was crucial to our performance as our location (Fort Amherst) is hundreds of years old, dark on the inside and could potentially be very dangerous to company members as well as the audience. The table above shows the main dangerous that could take place and how we'll try to prevent them from happening.

7th June 2016

Today we chose to not lie when telling the new psychiatrist about the caves. By this we mean don't talk about information that we found online or what we think we know and use information that's actually true because there were tunnels around Medway that actually became mental asylums. So when the 'doctors' are talking about the information they're going to use real information from the other tunnels around Medway.
I also thought about hints that could be said and for Megs character who think's they're a child could say 'I don't want to play doctors today' or 'Where are the normal doctors?'.
Another idea I gave was to have Carl speak over his soundscape and make it obvious that they're not the real doctors.

I also had an idea to change the scene where the psychiatrist was left alone with a mass murderer and before he tell him about the fake doctors they run in and interrupt it. Today's lesson overall was a success as a lot got done and many scenes were developed but to make it better we could've worked quicker and then shown everyone what we'd done so far.

6th June 2016

We have decided to change parts of the movement piece and use new ways in which we could signify how Carl is going crazy and has a lot going on. We also spent this lesson creating many new scene's and then ordered them. Blow is a list of our scenes.

Once we'd done this we started creating each one and because each character has their own scene each person created ideas on what they could do in their scene. As I'm not performing in this I chose to start creating monologue's for what I'd say to each patient, I plan on recording these as video's and as voice notes because I'm not yet sure on how we're going to show them.

The main decision made today was that the two 'doctors' that are showing round the trainee psychiatrist will actually be patients in the mental asylum and this is only shown by each scene dropping small hints. At the end of the performance there's going to be a final deciding line that sums everything up and makes the audience feel scared and worried as there's no real doctor.

26th May 2016

Today we created a movement piece to the song 'Save Me - Avenged Sevenfold'. It was for the Schizophrenic scene, this scene I created a monologue which I say before the piece started.

My monologue is 'Never look a schizophrenic in the eye, this can trigger paranoia. They have unusual or strange fears such as thinking someone wants to hurt them'. Carl who plays the schizophrenic then repeats 'Never look a schizophrenic in the eye' many times until the music starts, today we didn't get too far into the movement piece but plan to finish them off in the next few lessons.

The problem about the video idea I had was that it'd mean having to set up a projector in each room and not only is this a trip hazard it'd be hard to get enough of them and also trying to find plug sockets as we're underground. In conclusion to this I had the idea that they could just be voice notes and therefore there's less risk of any technical difficulties as sound can easily be played through a speaker via and AUX lead or Bluetooth.

24th May 2016

After spending the day thinking about it we decided that our first idea was way too much like a horror maze and it'd just be like taking our audience round and showing them boring and individual scenes. So today we done some research into types of patients in mental asylums. This is because when we visited the fort the tour guide told us that one of the other forts in the area had been vacated and used as a mental asylum just after the world war.

We chose a type of character for each person in the performance and decided as I'm not acting in the performance I should create miniature video's for each of the patients in the mental hospital and it'd be shown to the audience before they're introduced to each patient. I also had the idea that one of the schizophrenic patients could hear a voice in his head and then lock the audience in a room with the murderer which pleaded insane.

Another great idea we had was that we weren't going to address the audience and instead we'd have a character that is a trainee psychiatrist. This makes the performance less boring as it won't just be 'and this patient is ....' and so on. 

23rd May 2016

After a week of finally trying to decide what we're going to do our performance on we came to the idea of still having no power but to have two separate groups and split the audiences in two. This way each group would have a different audience and then during the tunnels they'd swap over. The idea for this was that the two groups would both be groups that are looking for power but only one group can get it, this making the audience have to decide what group they prefer and it then being.
For the marketing of this performance I had the idea that we could create two different Facebook groups for each of the groups in the tunnels. This would create a conflict between the groups before the performance has even started. 

The deeper meaning of the no power situation was due to us voting in the referendum and we left the EU and due to events happening we were no longer able to trade with any country and ran out of fossil fuels to use.

I personally didn't really like this idea as I thought it seemed quite childish and could end up each group just slagging off the other group to each other. At the start of the second lesson today we put together all of our ideas.

After putting together all of our ideas at nearer to the end of the lesson we decided on doing a tour of the fort to the audience and then having something go wrong which would make them panic. The one problem I had with this is that it'd become too much of a horror maze.

17th May 2016

Once we'd decided on our location of Fort Amherst we all split up into groups of three's and fours so we could all come up with different ideas. After all coming up with different ideas and showing them to each other we spent the rest of the lesson trying to collaborate these ideas together. The problems we faced with this is that each group felt so passionate about what they wanted the performance to be about it led to arguments and disagreements in the group.

The idea that the my group wanted to show was that we were in a post apocalyptic time period and there had been a message spread round the local area that the outside of Fort Amherst was the location of where a rescue bus would be to take the first 30 people that turned up to a safe area. Once my group and I had explained this idea to the other groups they suggested that we could mix this with another groups idea which was quite similar. The other groups idea was that the world had run out of power and there had been a public message displayed by some sort of 'higher calling group' called Jordan. This group had power and were able to produce it and were looking to save some of the final survivors, the way this linked with my groups idea was that we said we could keep the ideas of waiting for help but maybe they only take the most skilled/useful people that've turned up. Next lesson I plan on the group as a whole to create a joint decision for our final devised piece.

Visiting Fort Amherst

Today we visited Fort Amherst which is our chosen location for Site Specific. From coming here to visit I gathered many idea's and thought about how each room/tunnel could be used for our performance. There were many different rooms and even an outside to the underground tunnels which meant we could bring the audience in or out depending on what we wanted to perform. Below are the pictures of some of the places I found most interesting in the fort.

The main problem we'll have about performing here is that the tunnels are hundreds of years old and therefore we'll have to undertake a thorough risk assessment in order for our own safety and the safety of our audience.

12th May 2016

Today we went off into 3 small groups again, to develop new things today we had to come up with brand new ideas which hadn't been used/thought of before. During the small groups I gave the idea that the performance was about a 'ghost tour' and that we should create a performance which was about a tour guide taking the audience round the fort and then when they get to the tunnels there's a radio message from someone else in the fort. After he leaves to respond to the message another person comes out that works there and starts to panic about what's going on because the doors to the tunnels are locked and they can't get out. The rest of the performance would be about the group trying to escape the tunnels and get free of the fort.

After pitching this idea to the other groups we listened to their ideas and tried to connect all of them together. As you can see from the picture below there is a tally of what people thought of each idea contributed and we then had a conversation about what ones could link together.

 To make this lesson better we could've made a short bit of performance to show the other groups how we wanted the performance to look and what style I wanted. Next lesson I plan on making full group decisions and try to start devising our performance.

What we've done so far

So far during site specific the company and I have looked at a few locations and voted on where we wanted to perform. The possible votes of where we could perform were Upnor Castle, a vacant warehouse in an orchard and Fort Amherst. Our overall vote was that we wanted to perform at Fort Amherst and devise some sort of black comedy.

Before we chose locations I looked more into the location of the orchard but couldn't manage to find out who owned it and therefore I don't know how we'd manage to get permission to perform there. One member of our company managed to speak to the owner and groundsmen of Upnor Castle and they said it'd be fine for us to perform there as long as we done it whilst the castle was still open. The problem with this is that we wouldn't be able to perform a black comedy or anything with explicit content as there could be a young audience at the venue. Another big factor about performing at Upnor Castle is that it's very expensive. During this unit I'm choosing not to act but to be involved with the creation of the performance and "stage management", I've already carried out location scouting and I'll soon be uploading a risk assessment when the company and I have made our final choice on where we'll be performing.

About the play

The play Punk rock was written by Simon Stephens and was first premiered in 2009 at the Lyric Hammersmith in London. It's a story of violence in a fee paying private school and includes 6 characters, all of which are crucial to the story line. Starting with my character; Nicholas Chatman, a sporty and confident 18 year old working his way through his A levels so he can get to university he's in a 'secret' relationship with the girl who's recently arrived in the area- Lilly Cahill. Lilly is probably the most 'normal' characters in the play and snubs William when he asks her out. The other character in the play consist of Chadwick Meade, he's at the school on a scholarship and is bullied by the nastiest character which is Bennet Francis. The final two characters are Tanya Gleason and Cissy, Tanya being best friends with Cissy but doesn't like Bennet as he spits at her. Finally Cissy, the smart and high achieving girlfriend of Bennet.

So from when the company and I were first given the script we made a lot of changes and amendments to what we thought about each character and their relationships. Firstly we changed Tanya to Tristan as we only had two girls in the company. This meant changing some parts of the script from 'hers' to 'his' etc. 

The second thing we decided to do was to think about how our characters relate to each other. I came up with the idea that Nicholas and Bennet had the richest families out of all of the characters and that's why Bennet is such a show off and feels above everyone. Whereas Nicholas, although being very rich, is a lot more quiet about it and is a hard working lad that loves his sports. Also Nickolas is the type of character to not get involved in all the drama that goes on in the school and to just get on with his work (as seen in the wasp scene). The company and I also decided that Bennet and Nicholas' fathers work together and are good friends and this is why Nicholas is probably Bennet's closest friend.

Finally the point that the company and I all agreed with and found most likely was that Bennet is a closet gay and that he fancies Chadwick, hence why he's so nasty to him and always tries to take the piss out of him. The reason I personally thought this is because he constantly bullies Chadwick and then when Tristan (Tanya) and Lilly ask Cissy about the sex between her and Bennet she shrugs it off and tries to make them stop talking about it.

Sub text and my character

In the past few lessons the group and I have looked at what each others characters are like and how they are with other people. For this we made spider diagrams for each character and what they think about other characters in the play. Here's the ones we made on the 25th February:

As you can see from the first two, each character has their own colour so that there's no confusion about who thinks what about a certain character. The diagram below is the one made for William which took the most time as he has so much going on in his head it's very hard to tell what he actually thinks of some people.

Creating these helped me personally as I now knew how I'd interact with each person during the play. Not only was it helpful to find out how each person see's you and how you see them but how it then changes what and how you do things. For example before creating these character mind maps I always felt like Chadwick didn't deserve to be at the private school as he was there on a scholarship and therefore he didn't have the money to be able to afford a decent education. But now that I've seen what he thinks of Nicholas (my character) I now feel that me and Chadwick have a close connection as in a way we're both similar characters as we just want an easy life and to get through school without any trouble.

Leading on from this lesson, today we ran through scene's and clapped as our character thought something; we'd then say what we thought out load. This was an exercise used for sub text and helped each person out in the scene as everyone then knew what that person was thinking. It also helped me personally connect to my character as I started thinking like Nicholas Chatman would. Below is the video of this exercise:

22nd February 2016

In today's lesson the group and I worked on scene six which is the most tense scene and is the most important when it comes to positioning. The reason for this is because it's the scene where William takes a gun into school and shoots three of the other students. The reason positioning for William is so important is because he needs to be in control of the situation the entire time. Of course William is in power at all time as he's the one with the gun but to be in control of the situation he needs to be positioned so that he never has his back to any character or they could try to attack/counter his plans. The only character that William doesn't care about being positioned behind him is Chadwick.

The reason William doesn't care about Chadwick escaping is because William has the idea to kill himself after killing the others so in a way he needs someone to explain his story/reasons for killing the others. The reason why William chooses Chadwick to escape and isn't bothered about it is because out of all the students Chadwick is the only one that doesn't target/wind up William. Also Chadwick isn't the type of character to fight back and try to stop William; in a way Chadwick might sinisterly enjoy the looks of fear on the faces of the kids that've bullied him for so long.

In this scene we chose that William should show the audience the gun before he shows us. This is because it'll show why he told Lilly to not go into school tomorrow the night before. Also when we react to it it shows that he's clearly been thinking the situation through for a long time and how he's going to manage it. He knows that his main target is Bennet. That's who he really wants to kill but he's not going to hold back on anyone else that gets in his way. This is shown by 'fight or flight' by this I mean it's a situation where you'll either fight to survive or 'flight' to go along with what's happening and do nothing about it. During William's outbreak we're shown that the only character that fights is me, Nicholas. All the other character sit there scared and panic. I think that this shows a lot about my character. Not only that he thinks he can defuse the situation but because he's the most confident person out of the group.

This lesson helped me gain a deeper understanding into each charcter and what they're really like. To have made this lesson better we could've worked out if we wanted to change lighting for this specific scene. I'd of also liked to have got onto the scene with Dr Harvey as I have some good ideas to contribute for this scene. Next lesson I hope to perfect scene six and move onto the Dr Harvey scene and make a group choice/workshop who'll play Dr Harvey in the final scene.

4th February 2016

During today's lesson the group and I decided on what do early on (as our list of constitutions say we have to plan ahead for each lesson) and we decided to run through the play from the beginning and see how far we could get. We managed to get to the very final scene today but decided to leave the final scene for next lesson as it's a very tense scene and has a lot going on in it. During the rehearsal we decided to make the scene where everyone is going crazy over a wasp very dramatic and over the top. 

Also from getting deeper into the script I've realised that my character, Nicholas Chatman, isn't really phased by the other students at the school and doesn't care about them messing around during their free lessons (in the library/common room). The reason I think this is because a lot of the time during scenes there's something interesting/big going on and he sits there quietly until he's spoken to or until he needs to make an input in the conversation.

To make today's lesson better we could've possibly worked quicker through the script so we could have done the last scene or atleast read through the last scene so that we could've done more research over the weekend into it on how we wanted the scene to look and to be set out. Since making the constitutional list the group and I have worked together a lot better as we all now have guidlines to follow. Next lesson I plan on reading through the final scene, running through it and getting it basically blocked.

2nd February 2016

In today's lesson we learned about constitutions. After speaking about constitutions and learning more about them our company created our own set of constitutional "rules" to follow. Below are the ideas we've all agreed on following.

Once we'd finished deciding on what our constitutions were going to be we got on with running through the first few scenes. During the run through there was a lot of things that we wanted to change after we'd all researched more into our characters. For example we decided that Bennett needs to be more contradicting and rude to Chadwick and that William has to be creepier and more obsessive with Lilly. I decided that my character really needs to be in love with himself and have pride in everything he does. Although sometimes (especially when speaking to Lilly) he gets quite nervous and awkward. When Lilly and I are talking about keeping our relationship secret I've decided I need to be more sorry with what I'm saying. More forgiving and feel like I think I'm upsetting her. We still haven't decided on the private school we're going to base our performance on but it's likely to be one in the South East so that the group and I don't have to waste time work shopping voices and accents. Next lesson we plan to run through the second half of the script and then block how we want it to be staged as it's mostly all set in one place. I plan on working on my voice for next lesson as I'm currently finding it hard to pronounce every letter when I speak.

Character profile and my first impression on Nicholas Chatman

My name is Nicholas Chatman, I'm 18 years old and one of the oldest in my school. I currently live in Hampshire where I attend Princes Mead school sixth form. I've been going to this school since year 7 and I'll soon be attending Oxford or Cambridge university where I want to take on a degree in Psychological and Behavioural Sciences. Once graduating from university I wish to become a sports psychologist.

I'm currently undertaking a lacrosse scholarship at my school and I train everyday. I like to spend the rest of my spare time in the gym or meeting up with the new girl, Lilly. Lilly's recently moved here from Cambridge and herself and I are in a secret relationship. Although I really like Lilly I don't want to make it official as I have a lot to concentrate on in order to pass my exams and do well at lacrosse. Luckily she only lives a 10 minute walk from where I live.



My personal impression on Nicholas

My personal opinion on Nicholas after reading the script is that although he's very confident on his knowledge and always knows what he's talking about he sometimes doesn't seem to be confident around the other students. I say this because there are a lot of times during the script where he'll say something and then leave it a long time until he says another line.

On the other hand I believe Nicholas tries to get himself involved after being quiet for a long time by asking weird questions. For example at the very start of the script he buts in to the conversation with William and another character to ask 'Have you started revision yet?'

The way I'll play Nicholas is that he's confident around a few people but when all the characters are involved he's quite socially awkward. Also he seems as if he thinks he's above everyone at the school apart from Lilly so I'll keep this in mind whilst I speak to the others and tone things differently depending on who I'm talking to.

Research into private schools

As our play Punk Rock is about sixth formers and set in an English private school I looked online for private schools in the south of England that we could set as our school. Whilst researching this I found this website (below) which helped me identify a few schools that'd be suitable to base our performance on.

Although I couldn't find any private schools around the area I live in, the private schools that looked suitable for our performance were all based in Berkshire and Surrey. Next lesson I'll voice this to my group and see what research they've done to come to a mutual decision about what school we use.

26th January 2016

In our first lesson we were put into our groups for our performance. The play I'm in is 'Punk Rock' and the character I'm playing is Nicholas Chatman, a posh teenager who has a secret relationship with the character who's new to the are they live in, Lilly Cahill. We started off the lesson by reading through the script and deciding what each character is like and how we'd play them. After spending all lesson getting through three quarters of the script we'll spend next lesson getting through the full script and then start to think about how we're going to set it all out, for example the staging and how/where we'll perform it.

One problem we'll face about our performance is that it's set in the north of England. To overcome this problem the company and I will change a few location mentioned in the script to places in the south so that we don't have to workshop accents and voices.

Humanity In Crisis Evaluation

On the 14th December 2015 we performed our devised piece 'Humanity In Crisis'. My groups piece was based on Womens Rights and how they've been treated unfairly over hundreds of years. Our performance was shown to year 10's, 11's and 12's in the main school hall and was performed using traverse staging.

During our performance we had many things go well and a few things that we could've changed to improve the final showing of it. What went well during the performance was our dialogue, the reason why this went so well was because in the rehearsal process my group and I worked on creating quality dialogue and how that having good dialogue will have an effect on the audience. This was especially shown in our Soldier scene as long sections of dialogue were exchanged between two characters.

Secondly, the movement went very well. Most of our scenes included movement and therefore we made sure that during the rehearsal process everyone would be spot on with timings and positioning. During the performance every cue was perfect. This meant that no one was left waiting around whilst other people got into position.

A main thing that was a problem during rehearsals but went well during the final performance was the lifts. During rehearsals the group and I had many problems with lifts as one of the members were dropped and got injured. This leads onto things that we could've done better as once this incident had occurred there were trust issues between members of the groups and this meant that for a long time we couldn't practice lifts in our rehearsals. To prevent this from happening next time the group need to decide on one person to count the lifts/timings and then there'll be no problems. Another way of preventing this from happening again could be to put down safety mats when undertaking potentially dangerous lifts.

Linking in with the loss of trust during the rehearsal process this meant that our rehearsal schedule broke down for a while as there was a divide in the group and there was no trust within each other. The problem with having no rehearsal schedule was that we'd go into each lesson not knowing how each person is feeling about each other and also not knowing what we could accomplish each lesson.

To make improvements to our final performance I think that we should've done more full run throughs before performing and done a full tech rehearsal as during the performance the person in charge of changing our powerpoint and sound effects hadn't seen our performance in full and had only been given a sheet with each cue line and what music to play.

Overall our performance went very well and was enjoyable to create. Although the rehearsals were sometimes stressful and challenging we managed to get through it all quite well and put our ideas together to create a really good and effective piece.