Risk Assesment

This is the risk assessment for our production of 13

Site Specific

Today is our performance day, we have been rehearsing in the tunnels throughout the morning and one of the biggest problems we have encountered is space, due to the fact we visited our location once we were able to get good motivation on the style of the piece however the one visit meant we forgot how small some of the tunnel space was and therefore over estimated how much space we could use for two of our movement pieces. We spent some time ensuring the movement pieces would be just as effective with the reduced space as well as being safe for the actors to perform in.

Another thing we didn't take into account was the acoustics of the tunnels. During a performance if you're not on stage you'd usually discuss with the other performances how its going or what's next in the play but the sound travelled so well in the tunnels this wasn't possible even if we whispered, another thing that we have to be conscious of is footsteps, even though everyone is wearing soft soled shoes the sound is still being carried a long way through the tunnel system.

Bringing our piece into the tunnels gives the play the whole overall atmosphere that makes the play what it is, we were concerened that some of our scenes might not have a good atmosphere but Fort Amherst was the perfect location for atmosphere and size we need to have this play as effective as we need it to be.

Site Specific

This week we have been frantically cleaning all of our scenes. One of the main focuses for the past few weeks have been costumes. I wanted all the patients to wear hospital gowns as I thought this would give a clear representation that we are in a medical facility as well as having quite a creepy atmosphere, I thought it would look better if everyone wore the same costume as well giving a uniform look and a lack of personality. Later on we decided it would be better if everyone wore pale pyjamas, this was decided because we knew the tunnels at fort Amherst would be cold and the hospital gowns wouldn't offer a lot of warmth.

As well as costumes we have worked on perfecting the Electric Chair scene, we changed it from an electric chair to electro convulsion therapy as this suggests we are using a medical therapy to correct the patient instead of torture. We rescript the scene ensuring we took some of the comedy elements out and improved the facts and some of the vocabulary we use before and after the ECT

Research

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a procedure, done under general anesthetic, in which small electric currents are passed through the brain, intentionally triggering a brief seizure. ECT seems to cause changes in brain chemistry that can quickly reverse symptoms of certain mental illnesses. One of the main mental illnesses ECT is focused on is depression.

ECT is effective for 50% of people with treatment-resistant major depressive disorder. Follow-up treatment is still poorly studied but and average of half the patients who respond to ECT relapse within 12 months. Aside from effects in the brain, the general physical risks of ECT are similar to those of brief general anaesthesia. Immediately following treatment, the most common adverse effects are confusion and memory loss. ECT is considered one of the least harmful treatment options available for severely depressed pregnant women.

A usual course of ECT involves multiple administrations, typically given two or three times per week until the patient is no longer suffering symptoms. ECT is administered under anesthetic with a muscle relaxant.Electroconvulsive therapy can differ in its application in three ways: electrode placement, frequency of treatments, and the electrical waveform of the stimulus. These three forms of application have significant differences in both adverse side effects and symptom remission. Placement can be bilateral, in which the electric current is passed across the whole brain, or unilateral, in which the current is passed across one hemisphere of the brain. Bilateral placement seems to have greater efficacy than unilateral, but also carries greater risk of memory loss. Unilateral is thought to cause fewer cognitive effects than bilateral but is considered less effective if the dose administered is close to the seizure threshold.In the USA most patients receive bilateral ECT.In the UK almost all patients receive bilateral ECT. After treatment, drug therapy is usually continued, and some patients receive maintenance ECT.

Whether psychiatric medications are terminated prior to treatment or maintained, varies. However, drugs that are known to cause toxicity in combination with ECT, such as lithium, are discontinued, and benzodiazepines, which increase seizure thresholds,are either discontinued, a benzodiazepine antagonist is administered at each ECT session, or the ECT treatment is adjusted accordingly.

The electrodes deliver an electrical stimulus. The stimulus levels recommended for ECT are in excess of an individual's seizure threshold: about one and a half times seizure threshold for bilateral ECT and up to 12 times for unilateral ECT. Below these levels treatment may not be effective in spite of a seizure, while doses massively above threshold level, especially with bilateral ECT, expose patients to the risk of more severe cognitive impairment without additional therapeutic gains. Seizure threshold is determined by trial and error ("dose titration"). Some psychiatrists use dose titration, some still use "fixed dose" (that is, all patients are given the same dose) and others compromise by roughly estimating a patient's threshold according to age and sex.Older men tend to have higher thresholds than younger women, but it is not a hard and fast rule, and other factors, for example drugs, affect seizure threshold.

Site Specific

Over the past week we have been focusing on individual scenes, we worked on the opening, I wrote a script for the opening but didn't realise there had already ben one written, either we will choose one to use or we will combine the strengths of each one and go with that. With my version I had the Doctor and Nurse having a slight squabble, this would show the audience some slight tension about the situation, it also shows that the Doctor has a short temper and perhaps the audience will be a bit suspicious of his character and then connect better with the nurse. 


The other script we worked on was the scene where we use the electric chair on the character that is silent due to PTSD/ Shell Shock. We describe to the psychiatrist the electric chair and what it does, the psychiatrist asks some pressing questions frustrating the doctor, again this shows the audience that he might not be the best doctor and doesn't have the patients safety in his interest. During the use of the electric chair the Doctor and Nurse make the decision to up the voltage to an unsafe height, after this has stopped and there is no change in the patient the Doctor quickly moves on to the next patient ignoring the failed attempts with the electric chair giving a corrupt and neglecting atmosphere to the doctor and nurse.


With these scenes we wanted to bring through that the Doctor doesn't like the psychiatrist being in his mental asylum and therefore is rushing him through the tour of the patients and perhaps mishandling some of them along the way.

Site Specific

In the past week we have worked on more scenes for our site specific piece. We decided a name for the piece and as on now it stands at 13. We came up with this name because its an odd number which is unlucky and there used to be 13 of us in the class, however there aren't 13 of us in the performance.

Other than naming our piece we created a plan on what scenes we wanted to create and what order we are going to put them in, this took a whole lesson and even though we haven't developed a lot of these ideas it was helpful to have all these concepts on paper so we can quickly and easily create scenes without spending too long on getting a concept and then developing it.

As you can see some of the scenes don't require every performer to participate this means we can create more than one scene per lesson, this helps us getting closer to finishing our piece before our deadline, it also helps to speed up our creation time by having fewer people work on a scene means less people to argue or disagree with ideas. 

One of the main concepts we came up with was the ending. The whole piece is based around me and Freya, the Doctor and Nurse showing around a psychiatrist, we had the idea that at the end Meg (who is playing a girl who thinks she's six years old) manages to slip in front of the audience on the walk back to the entrance of the tunnel. Meg will be behind the double doors that let the audience out of the main tunnel, hopefully this will scare the audience and creep them out.
To finish the piece Meg will say "We're not playing doctors and nurses anymore" after this Freya and I will change into more patient like forms and hopefully scare the audience and make them realise we weren't what we said we were.

Another thing we have put into this piece is a running theme, this sort of theme is almost in every scene with a new patient they will say something that suggests to the audience that we aren't doctors, hopefully it will be subtle enough for the audience not to work it out straight away but towards the end we hope they have grasped the concept. One way we will carry this out is with Ashley's character, Ashley is playing someone with special needs and he might mention something to Freya and I about what his doctor has said, interrupting him I would say I am his doctor. This should make alarm bells ring for the audience and this is one of the less subtle suggestions that we aren't medical professionals, however some of the audience may not realise and just think the charatcers are saying this because theyre mental patients.

Site Specific

For the past couple of lessons we have been trying to come up with a solid idea we can perform, this has proven to be very difficult as we came up with an idea we liked but then we all ended up nit picking the negatives and sort of changed the idea so much that it just fell apart.

We went to visit Fort Amherst for a whole lesson to walk around and get a feel for our location. We all found this really helpful however it didn’t inspire any ideas that we hoped it would. We discovered from the guide showing us around the tunnels that another fort similar to Fort Amherst was once a mental asylum, this sparked us to bring up our mental hospital idea again.

Me and Ashley came up with the idea that there could perhaps be more than the doctor working there, maybe there are a few cleaners and other staff that are dodgy and kill a patient by injecting them with too much medication, this would then get blamed on the doctor and it could be sort of a murder mystery sort of thing, this then prompted the idea that there could be a psychiatrist that’s visiting the mental asylum, the doctor would be showing the psychiatrist around and showing him the patients and their different traits and mental disorders, we still had the idea that the doctor is sort of dodgy and perhaps abusive . Next lesson we explained to the class the second idea about the psychiatrist, the class really liked this idea so started to think more on the storyline to develop the idea further.

We came up with a few characters that we wanted to have, so far we have


Doctor

Nurse

Psychiatrist

Then we have all the patients, we didn’t want to go with the classic bipolar disorder which is quite cliché and as we have decided to set it in the past we have gone with people being put in the asylum because of things such as unmarried mother, someone who thinks they’re the second coming, someone with basic special needs like dyslexia. We have included other disorders like schizophrenia, a girl that thinks she’s 6 years old even though she is 21.