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.