1. HOW IS THE INITIAL MATERIAL BEING RESEARCHED AND DEVELOPED AT SIGNIFICANT STAGES DURING THE PROCESS OF CREATING DRAMA?

1. HOW IS THE INITIAL MATERIAL BEING RESEARCHED AND DEVELOPED AT SIGNIFICANT STAGES DURING THE PROCESS OF CREATING DRAMA?

15.09.12
Our initial idea was inspired by a trip our class took to New York in Easter, we were told to make notes on characters we came across during the trip. We also made a lot of notes when we visited ground zero, where the world trade centres were torn down in 2001. We took down names of people who passed away in the attack. All of us then made workshops out of the trip to New York. We each had to have a stimulus for the workshop such as a diary we'd written in when there or a wristband we'd been given to get into an event. We each chose very different styles of objects such as sweet packets and a ticket to get into ground zero. the workshop that stood out to all of us and generated the best ideas was Hazel and Elizabeth's and Pia's. Hazel and Elizabeth's workshop was based on secrets. Their idea was based on what the terrorists were thinking when they were getting on the plane and before and the fact the passengers had no idea in their involvement or what the hijackers were thinking which changed the actions and decisions.
Elizabeth's and Hazels workshop had an exercise where we all had a secret on a piece of paper and had to try and reveal to the other person without saying it then the other person had to try and guess the secret. The group then decided that based on all the workshops we had done, basing the devised piece on secrets would be a good theme.
During Pia's workshop she had a couple of exercises that created the idea of caricatures. She gave us exercises that created bold and big characters which generated hilarious scenes with good characters. This in improvisation then led to great bold characters we could create, such as in a game she created where we had to pretend to pick up a hitchhiker.
After coming to this decision we all sat down as a group and brainstormed on what we thought would be best to make a devised piece about.

29.09.12
We thought as we were going along with the theme of secrets and came to the decision of a possible robbery, this idea consisted of us all playing bold characters we developed through hot seating and improvisation, characters included a pregnant young girl, an old woman trying to be a cougar, a young control freak, a dopey girl and a detective. As this idea progressed we all felt uncomfortable with our roles and the first two scenes we had created. We tried to work with what we had and improve the characters with hot seating and improving the physicality of the characters by walking around the room and leading from different parts of our bodies that we thought our character would lead from and also a Brechtian technique where we stepped in and out of character to help us get to grips with the way our character moved.

08.10.12

After a lot of work on the first idea of the robbery we decided to do some spontaneous improvisations to give us a fresh mind and some new ideas not relating to our play to give us some new ideas. However when we were improvising new ideas we realised our enthusiasm in new ideas was better than our original idea and we felt the comical side to our small sketches was better than the first idea. We came up with ideas such as revealing a bodily dysfunction, revealing homosexuality and many more ideas that we thought were better than our robbery idea.
So we all had a group discussion and decided the best part about our improvisations were that they were short and funny so we thought of doing a farce piece and make it a sequence of sketches.

10.12.12
when thinking of charcters for a scene including all of us at a christmas dinner we thought it would be apporpirate to look at the BBC One programme called Outnumbered as its a pogramme with a family who are quite disfunctional and always have spats, they are the kind of family who would trypically have a disaterous christmas dinner. We then looked at scenes between the main character and her sister who always ague and hate each other for inspiration.

2. HOW EFFECTIVELY ARE YOU PERSONALLY EXPLORING AND DEVELOPING YOUR ROLE(S)?

2. HOW EFFECTIVELY ARE YOU
PERSONALLY EXPLORING AND
DEVELOPING YOUR ROLE(S)?

29.10.12
When starting the unit and having the idea of the robbery devised piece we created characters by spontaneous improvisation. I played a creepy detective so as research into my character I watched the 'Spice Girls Movie' as the detective/ press was something I thought I could base my character, however I thought my character needed a feistier edge to him so i watched 'Life on Mars' a police detective show set in the early 70s. One of the characters 'Gene Hunt' had characteristics such as the edge to his voice; his frostiness and short tempered rudeness are all characteristics I would like to apply to my character. To get used to the movement of our characters we used a Brechtian technique of stepping in and out of character to get used to the physicality of our chosen characters, this helped us find the difference between the way we moved and stood to our characters.
However after changing the play we felt it would be good to create different characters. The group did this by using spontaneous improvisation, we started an exercise by two people standing blankly on stage whilst someone had to mould them into a shape, then the two people on stage had to start a scene from the positions they were in. When coming up with an idea to devise one of the scenes on someone having an infection i researched possible embarrassing infections one might have, i came up with infected tattoos and/or piercings, mould growing on someone or a bad smell they don't notice on them.

12.11.12
I have recently been watching a lot of British comedy sketch shows such as 'Little Britain', 'The Office', 'School Of Comedy', 'The Catherine Tate Show' and a few others. These are all shows that have the same comic humour that we want to create and most have caricatures that we could base our characters on. The fact that most of them only include 3-5 minute sketches forces them to make stand out characters to make the sketches stand out and force everything to be over the top and farcical.

26.11.12
We started the lesson with a warm up. We set up a bus stop and each one of us had to walk into the empty chair next to a person already waiting at 'the bus stop'. Neither of the two know what character the other will be but you have to improvise a scene together spontaneously. The aim of this game was to generate characters and think of possible story lines to include in our devised piece.
Wanting to focus on the scene between Hazel and Taylor we started with hot seating Hazels character 'Tracey'. As a group we decided her character would be good if she was posh and naive. We all asked her questions about her personal life and her relationship with her new friend at school Stacey who Taylor plays. However, when hot seating Hazel she felt uncomfortable in the role and felt stuck with what lines to come up with so i suggested we looked at a clip from 'Made In Chelsea' to get a better understanding of the character she was trying to play and what accent and mannerisms she should have. The clip we had a look at was 2 girls in an interview which then led me to coming up with a decision to have both Hazel and Taylor being hot seated at the same time to make her feel more comfortable and work on the characters relationship with each other. Although this idea was working for Taylor and her coming up with ideas for her character Hazel still felt stuck with coming up with lines spontaneously so Pia suggested the rest of us who were over looking the hot seating and asking questions should each take it in turns to play Hazels character to give her possible ideas to use and see what our take on the character we had in mind would be like. Pia, Elizabeth and I each came up with a very different take on the character which i think helped Hazel with confidence in the role and that even though we had all spoken about the same character the interpretation of it could be completely different.

10.12.12
I've tried to improve my character in the scene with me playing Jeffrey by watching The Catherine Tate Show and Friday Night Dinner. Catherine Tate plays a grandma who's physicality i would like to replicate, she moves very hunched and slowly, taking little steps with her arms out and bent to the side hanging in the air a lot, i think these are the things that stereotype old people and straight away people recognise and assosiate with old people. This is also something that is important as its a piece using short scenes the audience has to recognise and understand who the characters is very quickly.
The other programme i looked at (Friday Night Dinner) had a character called 'Jim' in it. He was a very creepy character who acted like a well aged man yet he was in his 40s. I wanted to add in his element of ceepyness to the character i was playing 'Jeffrey'. I added the way he nervously talked to my character. I also added in the nervous way his eyes moved from side to side awkwardly to make him seem awkward and quite a closed off  character, which i also thought made the character seem older, making it easier for the audience to establish the character.

3. HOW DID YOU AND YOUR GROUP EXPLORE THE POSSIBILITIES OF FORM, STRUCTURE AND PERFORMANCE STYLE?

3. HOW DID YOU AND YOUR GROUP EXPLORE THE POSSIBILITIES OF FORM, STRUCTURE AND PERFORMANCE STYLE?

5.10.12
When we started devising a piece we originally came up with idea to create a continuous play with 5 characters all connected by a robbery they had committed and their plan as a gang to commit another crime. Rehearsals for the continuous piece were going well until we decided the piece didn't suit our type casts and we were very awkward with acting the scenes with each other as well as coming up with lines, it was incredibly difficult during spontaneous improvisations to come up with lines and bounce off each others characters as we all realised our characters were very random and normally wouldn't be put in a group together. We devised the piece going from the first scene working our way up to the last, we got to the second scene before we then thought of changing the play.

17.10.12
The play took a turn when we thought it would be a good idea to do some new random spontaneous improvisations to generate some ideas and get us excited about our play again. This is when we came up with some brilliant ideas with a running theme of secrets such as an infection revelation, an awkward date, hiding animals. hiding dead bodies, a plastic surgery stint and other ideas that we were really excited about. This was when we had a class discussion and thought as a team that for the first time we were confident with ideas and had fun creating them so from there we thought we should create a farcical production which means that we could all change characters, have different story lines and be excited about generating ideas.

1.12.12
We are currently working on a farce piece that is made up of 4 scenes. We've been working on the order of the scenes a little and when creating a scene keeping in mind the order that the scene could run. For example when working on the ending of 'the office scene' between the characters 'Margo, Jeofrey and Karen we considered the fact that all the other endings we had worked on had been wuite expected, as in you knew who ever was holding the secret was going to get caught and told off for it, so we thought we'd keep a similar ending but change it slightly and make it more unexpected by adding in a slight twist in the ending that the audeince wouldn't expect, we then thought as there is a twist that this could be the last scene as it would shock the audience more.

4. HOW DID THE WORK OF ESTABLISHED AND RECOGNISED THEATRE PRACTITIONERS, AND/OR THE WORK OF LIVE THEATRE, INFLUENCE THE WAY IN WHICH YOUR DEVISED RESPONSE DEVELOPED?

4. HOW DID THE WORK OF ESTABLISHED AND RECOGNISED THEATRE PRACTITIONERS, AND/OR THE WORK OF LIVE THEATRE, INFLUENCE THE WAY IN WHICH YOUR DEVISED RESPONSE DEVELOPED?

27.10.12
When working on scenes that we spontaneously improvised to generate a comical 'farce' production we used a lot of influence from work we had done in the other units. We had previously learnt about Max Stafford Clark's rehearsal techniques. I thought it would be good to apply his use of 'transitive verbs' to our devised piece as when creating a scene we had to think about the lines carefully and what would make the audience laugh if it was a comedy and why they would be saying it, it couldn't just be random, so applying the transitive verbs to our scrip was very helpful as we were able to think carefully about what we were saying it and why we were and what effect that person was trying to have on the person/ people they were saying the line to.
In rehearsals we were also inspired by Brecht's rehearsal techniques such as stepping in and out of character in the continuous play 'robbery' idea we came up with.
However, when we started devising the farcical performance the rehearsal technique of stepping in and out of character this helped us a lot as we were having to play many different characters one after the other so stepping into the physicality of what our character was positioned as was very helpful to get into the mindset of the different character quickly.

29.10.12
We were inspired by a play called 'cant pay wont pay' that we performed last year which inspired characters from the first continuous piece we had tried to create as well as the farcical production we were devising as we had to constantly think of new characters and the play had a few interesting ones we thought we interesting to base our ones on. The whole play 'cant pay wont pay' was also based on secrets which helped with the theme that we wanted to continue with, 'secrets'.

12.11.12
Our class went to see a farce performance called 'One Man, Two Govenors' to get some inspiration for possible scenarios and characters. We enjoyed the production greatly and thought most of the lines were comical genius. The use of inudndoes we thought was something to deffinately include a lot more of in our facrcial piece.