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.