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.