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.