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.

Final Idea Brainstorm

This week not only have we been developing as many ideas as we could we have also been focused on choosing an idea to perform, Today we sat down as a whole class and wrote down all the ideas we had come up with so far. We were trying to narrow it down but with a class of 13 and everyone having such big opinions on what to do was a little stressful, especially as this is our final performance and we want to make it perfect.

As you can see here we have a range of ideas listed by the titles we all acknowledge them by, we then went round to each individual so they could have their say on what they think the best idea would be/ what their favourite ideas were. Because we want to create such a big piece in such a small amount of time we are all keen on combining some of the ideas however it becomes a problem when not everyone agrees on the ideas we are combining. I personally would like to combine numbers 1 and 6, however number 6 would need some heavy rethinking for it to work with number 1. However on further thinking I do like the idea of combining 1 and 5, 5 unfortunately didn't have any votes so I doubt the rest of the class would be keen on this idea but it could tie in with the disturbance of the tour. The disturbance could easily be about how Fort Amherst is haunted and if this is an idea we go with then we could include idea 4 as well. I think almost the whole class was keen on using idea 1 as the opening to the piece as its such a good opening to have as it can lead anywhere storyline wise.

Next lesson we plan on going to Fort Amherst to get a feel for the location itself and this will hopefully help the class decide on an overall piece to perform once we see our location. We will also be able to note down what different rooms inside and out we can use and what sections of the tunnel we will be able to use, if we take photos of these areas this will help us at a later date when creating the piece as we can see where our promenade piece is going and what the different rooms can be.  

Site Specific

This week we have been heavily working on coming up with more possible ideas. Due to the lack of ideas we had last week this week we wanted to come up with as many ideas as possible that could either work together with other ideas or just work as a stand alone idea. We split into three groups both lessons to come up with ideas each, each group got given a photo and we had to devise a short scene/ come up with an idea just from the picture, as always with this sort of task it took us a while to figure out what we could do as our picture was pretty vague in what we could do with it.

We first tired to figure out whether it would be better to have the audience on the bridge looking down on the action or the audience on the ground looking up, we then came to the conclusion that if they were to be looking up we wouldn't be able to use the whole depth of the bridge as they wouldn't be able to see us. We then started flowing some ideas around the group to figure out what sort of piece/ idea we could think of, eventually we came up with a drug deal sort of arrangement that then quickly changed into some sort of meeting place for four people that thought they were meeting just one person here. Our piece was set in the future when pollution was so bad that solar energy was no longer a feasible option due to thick smog clouds, as well as this fossil fuels had totally run out and wind farms were illegal. This prompted the idea that these four people are after the most wanted thing on the planet which is the only source of energy left, we wanted it to be a more scientific energy source like a battery that we would collect more than one throughout the piece. These four people had been brought here by someone called Jordan which they had never met and he was sending them messages anyway he could however these messages were not very normal, we wanted a dead body to fall off the bridge in front of the four confused people with a message and map on it. We figured this was our starting point for what could have been a large action packed piece but also with some good mysterious qualities.

I really liked this idea of setting it in the future as we could create a completely new world that would have no right or wring as its our own original futuristic world, however this idea is in danger of becoming too difficult to have a good storyline that's easy for a promenade style piece to engage all the audience with, another problem with this idea is that it could easily turn into something that would require a very big budget to pull off the full potential of the piece.  

Next lesson we got given this photo which was even more difficult to think of an idea for, after a long time of talking about the picture we came up with what would be a sort of naturalistic with a twist to it piece, it would start off with just a regular tour sort of situation where we are taking the audience through the tunnels and talking about the general history of Fort Amherst. On one of the tour guides radio would be a message come through about a disturbance further along the tunnel, this would prompt the tour guide to go and look leaving another guide in charge, after some shouting and loud noises hopefully the audience would be getting worried at this point and the guide with the audience would ask for a repot back, after a few times asking and no answer the guide urgently moves the audience along back to the entrance of the tunnel to escape, however once they get to the entrance the doors are locked, this then will hopefully create some panic within the audience and the rest of the piece is about getting out of the tunnel system.

I feel this piece could have a lot of potential as we have only really created an opening scene and the story line after this tunnel could really be anything we wanted it to be. However my big concern with this idea is that it could end up turning into a horror maze when we are constantly scaring the audience and I'd rather it be a more intellectual piece where the audience is heavily immerged in a storyline.

Site Specific

Today we decided that with our short time frame it would be a good idea to choose our location where we want to perform our piece. We narrowed it down to 4 main choices which were

Upchurch Orchard
Upnor Castle 
Chatham Dockyard
Fort Amherst

The whole class took part in a vote deciding where we would like to perform, Fort Amherst got the majority which meant this was our main location to perfom in, we then also had in second place Dockyard as our back up location.

We were then split into groups to devise another scene based around Fort Amherst, last time we were given the picture of the tunnel system inside for Amherst. However this time we were given an outside location on the Fort Amherst which is one of the benefits of performing at Fort Amherst is we have a range of places to perform including inside and outside.

As we were in the same group that brainstormed the idea of the mental asylum, we continued on with this idea. Due to the fact we created a movement/ physical theatre piece last time based around the same idea we wanted to create a more dialogue involved scene. We came up with a short piece based on the mental patients free time. This linked to the picture of being outside, as the scene would take place when the patients get their small amount of time in the sun and fresh air.

We tried to think of what makes the patients unstable, I had researched a wide range of mental disorders prior to this lesson and we chose a few from this, we found it very difficult to find mental disorders that were scary enough for an audience but normal enough for the patients to talk or form some sort of dialogue. The mental disorders we used were: Autophagia, Alien Hand Syndrome, OCD and schizophrenia. In the scene, we wold have someone playing the doctor leading the audience around, introducing them to the patients. One by one, we were introduced, interacting with each other and making our traits obvious, whilst breaking the Forth wall with the audience and getting in amongst them. The next part involved the doctor ringing the bell, and all the patients running into a circle, as if we knew what the bell signified, play time. This shows how, like dogs we were controlled by the sound of the bell. We got the audience to gather in a circle with us, getting up close and personal, before switching who played the doctor in an attempt to confuse the audience before leading them out.

My main concern after doing this scene is how we would construct a whole piece around this idea without making each scene too silimar, I'm not sure that we could include a wide range of techniques to ensure we get good grades and the piece could end up turning into a horror maze instead of a well constructed performance.

Seven Devils

Today we developed our mental illness idea where the mentally ill are drawn to Fort Amherst, using this location as our stimulus it was our task to create a short scene/ piece around this.

We used the song 'Seven Devils' by Florence and the Machine, this song has a very creepy and almost scary atmosphere which we felt would work extremely well in the tunnel systems of Fort Amherst as the acoustics of the tunnels should create a very creepy echo. This inspired us to create a more movement based piece around the music and the stimulus of mentally ill patients. Because the song is called seven devils I thought it would be a good idea to have seven patients sat on chairs spread sporadically across the tunnel/ room, these patients would all be sitting perfectly still whilst a doctor brought the audience into this section of the tunnel/ room, the doctor would allocate audience members to the patients and have a bit of dialogue explaining what the audience are not allowed to do and what they have to look out for, one of the main parts of the dialogue states that the patients have been surgically immobilised, hopefully this would mean the audience wouldn't expect us to move but during a dramatic drop in the music every patient jolts their body extremely violently in a different way, for example I was continually reaching out to grab someone whilst twitching me head and legs throughout, this added with all the other patients moving very violently at the same time should horrify the audience.

When we showed this piece to the other group they were all genuinely terrified and they half knew what to expect from occur group which meant if they were scared a real audience would be terrified. After this we then had the idea that the original doctor was the sat down by a patient and told to take their medication, the patient doing this would then tell the audience that they are the doctor and move the audience into the next part of the tunnel system creating confusion as to who the real doctor is. We then thought it would be even better if this continually happened after every scene meaning that the doctor changes each time, hopefully by the end we would then scare the audience by saying we are all the doctors but when in reality we're not and there never has been a doctor there.

I felt this piece went extremely well for just a 50 minute time frame to work on it, we spent around 15 minutes deliberating ideas and talking about what we could do and how it would then link into a story line.

Site Specific

Today, we started working on our next unit, site specific. The first thing we did was brainstorm different locations we could think of in smaller groups. We are restricted to our local area because we want as many people to come watch the piece as possible, where as if its in a remote location or a far away destination people may not be likely to come and watch. 

Next lesson we narrowed it down to a couple of locations where we would like to perform and start to think of some ideas of what we could perform. The whole group liked the idea of Fort Amherst in Chatham, not only for it's atmospheric tunnels, but the fact that it gives us the option to perform inside and outside so light isn't a restriction. It is also a very large space so its almost made for a promenade performance, however a few limitations we may face are how big the tunnels are, it could be very difficult to squeeze a class of 13 and an audience in part of the tunnel systems making the performance rather difficult and possibly dangerous, to combat this we would have to try and make our scenes smaller with less people in them and maybe do a few performances each night for a couple of nights so our audience isn't too big.

Our location is our stimulus for this piece so we began to think of what kind of performance we could create. As finding a scripted piece to fit 13 people into would be near impossible. We came up with the idea that fort Amherst is being used as a mental department where, somehow the mentally ill are being drawn to something within the fort. We thought using a camcorder film would also add to the eeriness of the piece, before bringing the video to life in an interactive performance that involves the audience, breaking the forth wall.

Mental Disorder Research

Bipolar disorder

Bipolar disorder is a mental health problem that mainly affects your mood. If you have bipolar disorder, you are likely to have times where you experience:

Manic or hypomanic episodes (feeling high)

Depressive episodes (feeling low)

Potentially some psychotic symptoms during manic or depressed episodes

Everyone has variations in their mood, but in bipolar disorder these changes can be very distressing and have a big impact on your life. You may feel that your high and low moods are extreme, and that swings in your mood are overwhelming.

Claustrophobia

An extreme or irrational fear of confined places

Body dysmorphic disorder

Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is an anxiety disorder that causes a person to have a distorted view of how they look and to spend a lot of time worrying about their appearance.

Cotard delusion

Cotard's syndrome and walking corpse syndrome is a rare mental illness, in which an afflicted person holds the delusion that they are dead,

Delirium tremens

Is a rapid onset of confusion usually caused by withdrawal from alcohol. When it occurs, it is often three days into the withdrawal symptoms and lasts for two to three days. People may also see or hear things other people do not. Physical effects may include shaking, shivering, irregular heart rate, and sweating. Occasionally, a very high body temperature or seizures may result in death.

Autophagia

The majority of individuals affected by this disorder will often feel a sense of tension or arousal before committing the act, and then experience pleasure, gratification or relief at the time of committing the act. Once the act has been completed, the individual may or may not feel regret, self-reproach, or guilt.
Autophagia occurs when one is compelled to inflict pain upon oneself by biting and/or devouring portions of one's body. It is sometimes seen with schizophrenia.

Excoriation disorder

Excoriation, is a disorder characterized by the repeated urge to pick at one's own skin, often to the extent that damage is caused.

Exhibitionism

A mental condition characterized by the compulsion to display one's genitals in public.

Fregoli delusion

The Fregoli delusion, or the delusion of doubles, is a rare disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that different people are in fact a single person who changes appearance or is in disguise

Kleptomania

A recurrent urge to steal, typically without regard for need or profit

Persecutory delusions

Persecutory delusions are a set of delusional conditions in which the affected person believes they are being persecuted. Specifically, they have been defined as containing two central elements: The individual thinks that harm is occurring, or is going to occur.

Panic disorder

Panic disorder is an anxiety disorder characterized by recurring panic attacks, causing a series of intense episodes of extreme anxiety during panic attacks. It may also include significant behavioral changes, and ongoing worries about having other attacks

OCD

Obsessive–compulsive disorder is a mental disorder where people feel the need to check things repeatedly, perform certain routines repeatedly called rituals, or have certain thoughts repeatedly. People are unable to control either the thoughts or the activities. Common activities include hand washing, counting of things, and checking to see if a door is locked. Some may have difficulty throwing things out. These activities occur to such a degree that the person's daily life is negatively affected.

Tardive dyskinesia

Tardive dyskinesia is a difficult-to-treat and often incurable disorder resulting in involuntary, repetitive body movements

Trichotillomania

Trichotillomania is an obsessive compulsive disorder characterized by the compulsive urge to pull out one's hair, leading to hair loss and balding, distress, and social or functional impairment.

Gender Dysphoria

The condition of feeling one's emotional and psychological identity as male or female to be opposite to one's biological sex.

Boanthropy

Boanthropy is a psychological disorder in which a human believes himself or herself to be a cow

Alien hand syndrome

Alien hand syndrome is a rare  disorder that causes hand movement without the person being aware of what is happening or having control over the action. The afflicted person may sometimes reach for objects and manipulate them without wanting to do so, even to the point of having to use the controllable hand to restrain the alien hand.

Writing in Role

Dr Harvey

Today I spoke with William, he is strange young man. He seems to be rather confused as to why he is here; William has lots of plans for the future which is rather admirable however he doesn’t seem to have high priorities for getting better, William did mention getting his head fixed but that was after he was married and had children which gives me a large cause for concern. On the other hand I am glad William knows he needs to seek help to cure his mental issues, this is the first step in getting better. I’m not sure William feels any remorse towards killing three of his peers at school; this is my biggest cause for concern towards William because if I saw some remorse I would feel confident he’s not a threat to any councillors or nurses that would aid him with his recovery, but for now I can only assume he is still capable of killing or harming others around his, this is why I have decided to continue speaking to him through the intercom and behind the glass in the room next door, this is for my own safety and also I feel it helps William opening up to me as he can’t see any of my facial expressions or get annoyed if he sees me write notes. I will continue working with William over the next two weeks in hope of seeing some improvement in behaviour, if I don’t see any improvement I will then pass William onto the mental health specialist department.

Punk Rock

We decided that it would be a good idea for me to play the part of Dr Harvey. This was because I am able to put on loads of different accents, I decided to put on a soft relaxing Irish accent because I thought this would suit the part well and it would be something you would hear in a mental hospital to keep the patients calm. We decided we couldn't have any of us on stage as we were all the students previously and didn't have time to change costume. This meant we had a voice over setup backstage so my voice was amplified with a microphone into the auditorium, this made it sound like it was an intercom set up and we thought it still worked, we had to change the script slightly as some of the lines only worked for the actor to be in the room with William however we changed it well and it worked so well the audience didn't realise that it was me talking, in fact they thought it was a pre-recorded voice.  

Writing in Role

Bennett

Today at school we had this new girl show up who looked like a total slut, I bet her parents have hardly any money, she may as well have told us she was on a scholarship she was that much of a mess. William is such a creep, he wouldn’t leave Lilly alone and whenever someone would come and talk to her or say hello he would get all annoyed and try and get between them, it was so embarrassing I almost felt sorry for Lilly. Chadwick was trying to show off in front of Lilly which was so cringe worthy, all me and Cissy could do was roast him until the only option he had was to leave the room before he started crying, I even force fed him a winegum just to shut him up! Nicky was trying to show off in front of Lilly  as well the twat, he tried to pretend he liked the band she was into which William the creep then ruined but that was funny because it was so awkward and Nick looked like a retard.

Sub-Text

In this lesson we spent a good deal of time looking through the scene and just thinking about our character's subtext, we then just dove right into it and started performing the scene and every time we wanted to say what the character was really thinking even if it wasn't on their line we would clap out and say what the subtext is, I feel this exercise really helped all of us get the characters emotions and thoughts through clearly and helped us to understand what and why they would think or feel like this.

Character Profile

For the past two weeks we have been working on the scene where William comes into school with a gun and shoots three of us. This is probably the most difficult scene and the things we were struggling with the most is making the scene look believable. We spent a long time working on when each character gets shot, my character gets shot twice and we wanted to make it look dramatic as it was the first scene but we didn't want to make it look fake. Because we incorporated the piano into our set and that's the set I'm closest too at the time we decided it would be a good idea for me to get shot once and then fall onto the piano and hold on to support myself and then I get shot again which kills me, I think it would be a good idea to fall behind the piano as it almost hides my body but you can still see me, I feel this would be slightly more dramatic than just having me out in the open in front of the piano.


We also worked on making sure that we would have the right angles of death after being shot, we will try and make sure that Tom stands in the same place when shooting us so when he does shoot us and we fall we fall in the correct way and direction that we were shot. This is essential when he shoots the character Cissy as he is standing  behind her, Tom needs to make sure he does it the same way we rehearsed it  every time otherwise Meg won't fall the same way he shoots her.


Along side working on this scene we worked on understanding our characters better and the relationships they have with each other, this was extremely use full as we analysed the script and got to know our characters in more detail and help us understand some of their behaviour.

Set Design

In todays lesson we discussed our performance space. Our piece is set in a sixth form library, we don't change location at all so we knew that we could have a lot more permanent set that would stay throughout the whole performance. Our original plan was to have two to three tables set around, two of the tables would have chairs around them so all the students could study and then another table would just be at the back next to some bookcases. 

It wasn't until today when we got into the hall, which is wear we will be performing Punk Rock that we changed our mind on the staging and set, we still have three tables and bookcases but I had the idea of incorporating the stage with our set, I wanted to have one of the tables up on the stage with some chairs around it to create different levels in the library, I feel this creates a bigger performance space but also gives the atmosphere that this library or school is posh and has a lot of money. An advantage to using the stage as well as the ground space is we have a lot more entrance and exists. Before we had the idea of having a few entrances and exits through gaps in the audience but now I prefer the idea of not going through the audience as well, it keeps the audience separate from our piece as I don't feel the audience needs to feel part of the piece for Punk Rock. I also wanted to use the grand piano we have in the hall as part of the set, the grand piano would give the library a more impressive and rich feel as these students go to a private school. 

This is a rough plan I drew to show where our set will be placed and where our entrances and exits are, Unfortunately I didn't have room to include the piano in this sketch. The audience would be facing the stage and we are yet to decide what style seating we want. 

   

Punk Rock

Today we started from the beginning again and worked our way through the script adding in all the corrections we made last lesson, today we also got to some new scenes we hadn't done before, we tried our best and just dove into the scene following the stage directions and trying to block the scene whilst going on, we then got to scene four, this scene required way more work so we stopped and got the feel for the scene and then went back and set it. This scene is about a wasp and how everyone kinda freaks out, we wanted it to be really funny and over dramatic and this worked well because it just starts with Tanya reacting to a wasp, we have rewritten Tanya to be a boy and we now call him Tristen, we wanted this part to be comical so we kept a lot of the feminine lines and decided to make the character overly camp, in the scene Tristen starts off by shrieking and falling to the floor very dramatically, we feel this was appropriate as it fits his character yet the situation isn't really that serious which is what makes it funny.                   

Punk Rock

After reading through the script a couple times as a class today was the first time we properly set the first scenes. we know we are in sixth form and we in a library, we have set tables and chairs out to make it seem likes its a learning environment but we don't want to make it look like a sixth form common room. Today we weren't just focusing on what we were saying we really focused on how each character was moving, how they were speaking and how everyone was reacting to other characters, Lilly is being almost harassed by William in the opening scene and we wanted to make it clear that she was only speaking to him to be polite, we did this by having her tone of voice very monotone and uninterested and we tried to make sure she didn't make eye contact at all so it was clear she was more focused on her work than William. Later on when Bennett and Cissy come in Lilly quickly moves over to our table to get away from William, this is to show that Williams character is perhaps left out by everyone and isn't really liked.

So far I feel we are all really enjoying working on Punk Rock and we have all chipped in ideas on how we are performing each section and what is good about this is we don't really have a director, we wanted to make sure everyone had an equal say so by everyone putting ideas in we can create something a lot more interesting and entertaining compared to just one persons opinion.

Punk Rock

We started work on our next unit which is contemporary theatre and my group are doing the play Punk Rock, I got given the character Bennett Francis. Bennett Francis is 17 years old, quite attractive and athletic, class bully. Tests his natural strength by showing quite extreme cruelty to other students. Relentless in his taunting and keen in his criticisms. It would take a lot to survive his onslaught. He would not make a good grown-up or a good partner or father. Naturally mean and quite scary. I am really excited about playing the part of Bennett because even though his character is extremely vile to others I can relate to some of his more sarcastic lines so I will try to bring more of this through instead of raw aggression to give the character my own spin. my first impressions of the character Bennett were the exact same as the description I found of him.

The play Punk Rock is set in a sixth form and we have been given the task to find a school that the characters can attend instead of the one that's written in the play, I found one sixth forms that sounded rather pretentious and I feel the characters would suit going to these two schools.

Chelsea Independent College (517-523 Fulham Rd, London SW6 1HD)

I chose this one as the school itself is high achieving with 90% getting A*s and many of their students have been accepted into the top 20 universities in the country.
This sixth form also has outstanding and good marks in all areas on their Ofsted report which was last taken in 2011.