This week we all worked on blacking out the drama studio in preparation for our newest drama piece. Then me and Emma worked on getting the sounds sorted for my nightmare (the flying lesson one) We worked on getting the dialogue sorted and recorded with all the right vocabulary and so on. 
Whilst we were getting on with this, Chloe and Meera worked on getting the cardboard plane made, here is their semi-finished plane: 

Here you can begin to see the plane parts being made. The idea behind this is that we would construct the plane around the audience to have them feel as though they are closed into the space and really part of the dream/nightmare. 

This week we also managed to get the spotlight set up and working properly. We performed our Frantic Assembly style piece with the spotlight (check Chloe's blog for the video)
We also used the strobe lights which helped to create a very flashy fragmented look to the piece. 

Fridays lesson I began working on setting up the theatre lanterns with Mr. Jones from ICT. 
These probably won't be used in our current piece because of the size and the wiring that goes into putting these lights up. I would however like to use these lights in another performance some other time as I think they could bring a good design element into our pieces. 

Tuesday 8th December 2014

In this double lesson, Harry and I recorded some sounds and voice recordings for manly Harrys piece. This, as technical stuff usually does, took around 25mins to just get the microphone to work properly! Everything took a lot longer than I thought. I then went to mix all the recordings together but the files were not working with the program. I decided to try at home, and again- nothings working, I am looking for different sound mixing website e.g audacity and mixxx but nothing is working together for example our school laptops are Microsoft (windows 8) and I have a mac at home so the two softwares don't compute with each other. This is extremely frustrating and Im getting pretty nervous as we are doing a full rehearsal soon and I just can't get it too work.      

Chloe and Meera created the 3D plane for Harrys piece:


We also started blacking out the room.

Thursday 11th December 2014:

This hour we spent figuring out the lights, how they worked and what they could do. We then incorporated these different settings into which piece it would fit with most, we tried out our Frantic piece with a blue background:


I would have liked it better if it wasn't a circle but these are the only lights we have available. The strobe lights worked much better with this piece as it looked very fragmented and broken, much like nightmares are like.

Friday 12th December 2014:

Meera brought in her face paint and we tried out things like scratches, bullet wounds (?chloe?) and blood stains that we are going to paint on our audience faces:




9th December 2014
Today me and Meera worked on the set design (creating a plane) while Harry and Emma worked on the sound.
Me and Meera decided to create a plane out of cardboard and to give it a 3D effect so it will surround the audience and make them feel enclosed when they're sitting on the floor and the actors assemble the plane during the performance.
Creating the plane was tricky as the cardboard was hard to shape and stay upright. However, we decided that it didn't have to be perfect as the whole idea of Artauds performances were to reveal what wasn't perfect.




This photo shows the plane when we'd just began making it. The audience will be placed in the middle.







11th December 2014
Today we worked with the lighting and colours. We decided for our Frantic piece we should have blue lighting to symbolise the water that the plane falls into. By having the lighting as a circle it allows us only to appear in the light at certain moments. This could symbolise the flashes that people would see as the plane is crashing. Below is a video demonstrating what we did.



We also set roles for eachother when on the train;

Me; Business Woman
Meera; Stay At Home Mum
Emma; 
Harry; Chav

I have also ordered some masks offline for our performance. 









In our double lesson me and Chloe used the time to create a plane made out of cardboard for Harry's nightmare while Emma and Harry worked on getting the sound recorded. We had already decided that we wanted the plane to be something that enclosed the audience to make them feel slightly claustrophobic, it also needed to be easy to move around. We started by using big pieces of cardboard to create wings and a tail. However the cardboard was hard to use as it was too heavy and didn't do the things we wanted it to. In the end we managed to make it work. We also decided to change the wings from being 2D to being 3D as we felt that it would be more enclosed that way. In the end we decided that it didn't need to be perfect as the idea of it not being perfect fitted more with Artauds style.

On Thursday we all worked on lighting and blacking out the windows so that the room would be darker. We played around with coloured lighting and talked about making certain parts in the piece different colours to create different atmospheres, eg. Having the red light flash on and off when the plane is going down in Harry's nightmare and having a blue light in Chloe's change to red to reflect the change in atmosphere. We also ran through out Frantic assembly with the blue light on, however in the real piece I think we're using strobe lights.

On Friday we continued blacking out the hall and working on our separate jobs. I brought in some face paint to practice doing the face paint in Chloe's dream. It was harder than I expected, however with some practice I think It will be okay. It was good to actually try it out in person.
This week we started by some of the group leading a drama warm up exercise, the ones we did were: 

  1. Messages (very relaxing) 
  2. Emma's really tiring dance thing ("hip, shoulder, air, clap, shoulder, hip, thigh, clap") having to do this on the spot as well as jumping back and forth. 
  3. Pushing back to back with out partner, then going up and down so both of us sat on the floor and then back up again. 
After finishing the warm up games, we moved on to developing the final "scene" in our drama piece. 
This part was based off of Chloe's nightmare which was being around a swimming pool for part of it.
We used this idea of a swimming pool and used a large round blue sheet to act as our pool. One of the four of us would sit each side of this. We then decided that we should bring the audience members around the pool sitting with us. 

We decided to have four stages to talking to the audience, which would alternate. The four stages were: 
  • General Chit Chat 
  • Anger 
  • A Confession 
  • Seducing 
We were put in pairs to just try and improvise these mini scenes on the spot. I found the general chit chat ok but at times I was running out of ideas to say or I would keep repeating myself. I also found I was trying to listen to what the other people were saying and almost trying to copy them. 

At first when doing the anger scene, I was quite timid. I did not want to really make much noise and so wasn't really coming across as very angry. Then when Mr. Fearenehough said it was ok to shout I decided to shout. I feel this came across much better as being angry (sorry Emma) and i feel i may have slightly scared my partner. 

Mr. Fearnehough said when we were doing our confessions, it would be easier if we included a little bit of truth in them and just blow them out of proportion almost. I used the truth of keeping change when a store gives you too much back, I then escalated that into me stealing about 100 euros a week from different shops around Toulouse. 

Seduction .... This was probably the hardest one to do. The hardest thing I found in this was knowing what was too far. For this mini scene I worked with Chloe which at times made it seem slightly awkward. One of the main issues we all faced with this was trying not to laugh, it was hard to try and stay focused when we were doing this scene. 

Now the whole pool thing in the middle begins to get a bit weird. We decided that to create the musky smell that Chloe wanted in her dream, we could wrap the audience in the "pool" (with them all lying down). This is what it would look like (this was with all 4 of us inside): 
I have chosen the role of sound design in my group and over this past week I have been putting sounds together.
http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/video/designing-sound-for-theatre
this

Meeras Dark Corridor  

  • The first record sound we hear the doors opening and closing- symbolising life choices and opportunities in front of you but you can't see them or reach out and take these opportunities.
  •  The next sound is dripping, it echos around the room making the audience unsure of their surroundings and it also sounds really creepy, they dont know whats dripping.
  •  I also have a heartbeat sound mixed with heavy breathing, i want to create something like this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWKFovmuoQs   i like the dripping and the voices in different languages. 

Harrys Plane Crash:


  • I wanted the crash to sound so loud it almost sounds of nothing.
  • A lot of this one is also live sound.
  • We also have the sound of a radio that Harry will then talk over to sound like he is talking to the tower  

Mine:


Chloes By the Pool:

I have a couple songs that sound very fun and pop-y. Because this one starts off as naturalistic.


We started the lesson by doing some warm ups that were taught by other people in our class. We started by the massage warm up which we had done previously. We also did:

  • Pushing backwards together and moving up and down without falling (I taught this) - I thought this warm up game made me focus and also acted as a trust exercise. 
  • "hip, shoulder, air, clap, shoulder, hip, thigh, clap" game, we had to jump up and down while doing these actions. It was really complicated and definitely needed a lot of focus.
We then went on to develop the final nightmare (Chloe's nightmare), we settled on the idea of having everyone take an audience member and sit around the pool separately with their audience member. We then decided that to involve the audience member we would talk to them, but not expect a reply, we came up with 4 different types of conversation and spent the rest of the lesson practising them. They were: 

  1. General conversation 
  2. Anger 
  3. Seduction 
  4. Confession (I suggested this) 
I found doing the Anger and seduction ones the hardest as I just couldn't think of anything to say, I also found it hard to not get distracted by the others who were talking. I found this much easier to do when there was no one in front of me, although I will probably have to work on this because in the real performance there will be someone there. I found the easiest to do was the babbling on general conversation because it didn't involve any thought and I could just say anything and it would be fine.  

 At the very end of the lesson we decided to make the audience members into the corpses by using makeup and maybe costume. We also decided to lie them down on the blue sheet and wrap them up in it, this also created the musky smell as the blue sheet smelt musky. By including the musky smell we are also working on our piece as being total theatre.    

 On Thursday and Friday we took the time to work on our separate elements of the piece, mine is costume and make-up. I started looking up ideas for the corpses makeup in chloes scene. Some ideas I came up with were: 




Obviously we would only focus on the actual wound areas and not anything else. We would also need to make them slightly more simple, but I like the fact that they are all slightly different. For costume I decided that I wanted a clear difference between being in the train (naturalistic) and being in the dream. I decided to have 4 clear different characters on the train. These were: 

  • The schoolgirl/boy listening to music - headphones  and phone/ipod 
  • The housewife - lots of shopping bags 
  • The businessman - briefcase and tie
  • Sports person - sweatband and tennis racket
I wanted to have costumes that were easily changeable, but really fitted with each separate character. After discussing this with the group we also decided that when moving from the train to the dream we would give the costume/props to the audience, this would enforce the idea of specactor and give them the idea that these nightmares could happen to anybody. 

 For the actual dreams I wanted to keep the costume plain and simple. White T-shirts and black leggings/trousers. This would also fit really well with the idea that in a nightmare you usually don't know who you are with or that no one is actually real. Wearing white also means that it's possible to have projections on us.    
We started todays sessions with three warm ups;
  1. Massages
  2. Pushing back to back with a partner and trying to sit down then stand back up without touching the floor
  3. "hip, shoulder, air, clap, shoulder, hip, thigh, clap" in which you had to do this sequence jumping on the spot, jumping side to side, and jumping back and forth.
These activities were led by people in the group which allowed us to practice our teaching/presenting skills.

We then went on to develop my/the final nightmare. 
We decided that we should each take an audience member and sit them down around the pool and then directly speak at them. We played around with the talking by doing it in four different ways;
  1. Blabbering on
  2. Trying to seduce
  3. Anger
  4. Confession
At first I found blabbering on the hardest as I wasn't very good at improvising while there were many other people speaking at the same time as I found myself listening to what they were saying.
However when we went on to practice seduction I found this very awkward as I didn't know to what extent was too much. I may have found it a bit awkward as I was actually carrying out this part with Harry whereas the other pair was two girls. I found that everyone was laughing a lot while doing this as we all found it awkward. 
Mr Fearnehough told us that for the confessions its easier to add an element of truth into the confession, however exaggerate it. For example someone may have stolen a pen they found on a school desk once, but they exaggerate by saying that this lead to bigger thefts and they couldn't stop as it was almost an addiction.
I found the anger one the most easiest... I don't know why but it may be because its easy to express that you're angry by facial expressions, hand gestures, shouting, swearing and long pauses. Long pauses are very effective as when we do this to an audience member it will leave them confused and on edge, trying to figure out what they "supposedly did". 

We then decided that to make our performance total theatre we should include smells. In my nightmare there was a musky smell. We left the smell idea to one side and discussed how we are going to disfigure the audience members face by using makeup and then lay them down in a row on the sheet we used for the pool and then wrap them up. This will give a sense that they have died and are now part of a burial. We found that that sheet had a musty smell so this is definitely what we'll do.

At home I did some further research into masks.
For this scene, when we're burying the audience, I think we should use red doctors masks to represent the paramedics and to clearly portray illness and death.

I also found ideas for masks we could use in Meeras nightmare as she expressed how she didn't know who or what was chasing her. The use of these masks robs the actor of their identity and also leaves the audience thinking what they're representing- a human? a spirit? an object? etc.




I prefer the last mask as it doesn't contain a nose or mouth hole so it doesn't represent a human face. The fact it has no mouth hole will also create a muffled sound when we speak. This highly links to Artaud. The design around the eye draws attention to the eye which will make the audience feel like they're being constantly watched and will make them feel uncomfortable when the actors give direct eye contact to the audience.

This week we started to develop our Artaud piece. We started by using nightmares that we had each experienced and then transferring them into a piece of theatre. 

 The four nightmares we had were: 

  1. Emma's - She is in a plane with her family when the plane drops and all the windows freeze and the plane crashes into the sea, then she swims to an island where her mother can't remember who she is. 
  2. Meera's - she is in a long narrow corridor with an endless amount of doors, she senses there is someone chasing her but is not quite sure who it is and then she falls down a black hole and then wakes up. 
  3. Chloe's - she is with her friends watching a football match then ends up near a swimming pool where everything goes black and then she only sees the colour red of ambulances and paramedics. Then it goes silent and bodies are carted out of a house. 
  4. Mine - Having a flying lesson at night, you can see the lights of the city. Suddenly the plane fails and all the city lights go out, then you see flashes of light and the ground gets ever closer. Then wake up. 
Below are our ideas and initial brainstorms for our piece: 





Surrealism: 
We were each given a piece of surrealist artwork and told to depict what we thought it meant, the term used was "initial brain farts". This means just write anything that comes into your mind when you see this image. 

This is the image that i was given, my initial thoughts were: 
  • Imbalance 
  • Stress
  • Socialized Self 
  • No emotions 
  • Family life being overpowering 
  • Fantasies 
  • Things becoming to too much to handle 
  • Things piling up on top of you 
  • Above Reality 
  • City life 
  • Misery 
  • Raising a child 
In class we decided that this image was designed to represent the struggles associated with city life. And how raising a child can almost be too much to handle. 


ACID TEST: 

Apologies for this image being the wrong way round (you will have to thank apple for that).





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