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.