The Future of Schools 2

This is our second version of the future schools scene. We were told after showing people both pieces that our original idea was better and more interesting, this created a problem for our group as the main reason we changed it was I wouldn't be able to do the more heavy physical theatre/ stage combat things after my operation.

What I think we can do now is look at both videos and pick out what we like and try and mix them together creating a much stronger and more interesting piece that has a clear message, but is also safe for me to perform.
I like the first part to this one when the teacher is thrown to the ground, I think this is something we should use when merging them.

The Future of Schools

This is our first version of how we wanted our piece on future schools to look

Inspiration

These photos are what inspired our Victorian/ old style school, what we took from this picture was the desks directly behind each other, if we could we would raise the line behind but we wouldn't have time to do so in our performance, we also have everyone at their own individual table, this is to show that the children are not to speak to each other. One thing I noticed about the picture of all the students is none of them look scared or unhappy and neither does the teacher, I think even though Victorian schools are portrayed to be a place of misery and punishment we could perhaps show a different side to what people are used to seeing and go down the route of all the kids looking happy and willing to learn, this would perhaps create a better contrast to the school setting in the future and show how respect for teachers has deteriorated.

Another thing I find interesting is the different price of sending a child to school depending on what they write on, this could be something we show by having a class system of more wealthy children sitting at the front with paper and books and the worse off children sitting at the back with slate.

Attention to detail will be key on this scene as everyone's hair and uniform will have to be spick and span as this is one of the classroom rules.

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Inspiration

We got our inspiration for our meeting scenes from Future Conditional, a play that was on during September. This was a good play for us to watch for the subject we have chosen to do our devised piece on as a lot of the scenes were based in class rooms or teachers in meeting rooms, what we loved was how well the meeting scenes flowed and felt totally real and this is something we really wanted to bring to our piece, we wanted to make the audience feel as though they are actually watching a real meeting between teachers. To do this we have all created our own character and tried to range their age, the age gaps all become apparent when trying to form a decision as the older ones have stronger harsher views.

These two pictures are a good way of giving us ideas on how to set out the meeting scenes as well, we could perhaps have a table with lots of stuff on like papers, laptops and so on just like one of the photos or we could have food and drinks, having these objectives would bring a more realistic setting to our piece and also perhaps give us something to work with prop wise whilst we are on stage.

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Devising

Today we worked out that last lessons movement piece needed to be worked on, one reason was I am having an operation close to our performance date meaning I wont be able to do a lot of the physical movement side of things in our performance and another reason was the piece was okay but it was random and didn't really make sense or have anything exciting about it. Today we perfected this piece by changing the main movement but having the same idea behind it, last week it was more natural stage combat were as our improved version is more to do with physical theatre were we are manipulating the teacher physically but this is representing the mental manipulation we predict that will happen in the future.

Devising

So far this week we have been working on what direction to take our piece next, we already have a few small scenes which we feel are good and link well with our piece but we are worried we will be making our piece boring by having it heavily dialogue based, today we worked on a scene representing what future schools will be like if education and discipline stays the same, the scene is a movement piece where we manipulate the teacher and eventually get out of control to show how little power the teachers have and how he has no control over the class, eventually fights break out and when he restrains someone he then gets turned into the bad guy because he touched a pupil, this shows that the students blow everything out of proportion and make things worse.