Week 4 Perspectives, Space, Symbolism

Perspective 

Today's rehearsal taught me that our space has an important ability to present interesting and stimulating perspectives for the audience. The inside of it enabled us to experiment with such ideas, and the cozy indent where we have decided to place the audience gives them the maximum ability to do so, it also gives them the fullest way of experiencing our performance, and we explored this through trials of moving ourselves personally around to discover the best possible place. 

Another important element of perspective in our piece is the idea of sound perspective, the fact that our space is placed under some stairs allows our sound to travel through material, it gives us the higher ground element to disperse between many areas as well as the walls and echoey fabric of the walls inside the site. This may cause the audience to have varying experiences with sound, due to their varying positioning and what mentally echoes personally with them.

Space

Exploring the spacing inside our site as a place that is quite compact and small, means that the control that we must have as well as the placement of our varying characters is penultimately important for this performance and in rehearsal we explored the scenes and freely changed the spacing  to give the audience the best visual experience. The placement of our audience close together minimises the space between them and causes their discomfort to reflect that of the main character, them living through his "7 Second" life and travelling with him on this journey should undergo a similar experience to them as well, so that they become much more active rather than passive in their viewing of the piece.

Scenes

Our development of the scenes means that we disjointed the chronology of it all. This is shown my our initial structure that we had decided in the previous week, but felt the need to change and adapt and develop as we reflected back on the space we had present. We found rehearsal in that space constantly allowed us to do that effectively as different aspects triggered our imagination and enabled us to work directly from the stimulus rather than create from our mind. The recordings also added a layer of depth to the performance and gave the character more to work from as we listened to the recordings of general life that would occur in your seven second life and fed it into the piece.

Importance of Seven seconds 

It became immediately evident that we wanted to incorporate the importance of the number 7 that we had received from our research into the 7 Second Theory and so we wanted that to run parallel in our piece. This is done throughout the scenes of childhood into adulthood and is a reoccurring subtle theme throughout, which incorporates the research we have done previously.

Utilising the MT people walking past 

In rehearsal we found the constant throng of students quite adaptable for our piece as it added to the perspective mentioned earlier and easily represents a part of the characters life. This makes our space even more crucial to our piece as the atmospheric elements of chatting and footsteps etc. become a constant part of our site that should be involved rather than controlled and got rid of throughout our performance, it adds an element of changeability and reflects what unconventional theatre is made for and how it causes the actor to work even harder to remain on top of it all.

Symbolism of the doorway

In discussion with our group we found the symbolic meaning of the doorway created narrative for our piece and personally I found the interesting proscenium arch-esque appearance incredibly reminiscent of any kind of doorway/portal or cupboard that you can discover in most places and adds to the kind of relationship of the piece with an audience member, as it is although unique as a site, can be easily transferred into the audiences experience and memories of any aspect of their life. As well as it also being an window into the soul of our protagonist which we have moulded into a multirole so that both actors get an equal amount of exploration and living within the space as it also represents different time periods of their life as different people.

Rehearsal and Devising Week 3

The exploration of theatricality in our piece is done through our developmental devising process. We have split our performance into 7 main sections, due to the use of the information that you are given a flash back that works over seven seconds that fast forwards over your life. We separated lives chronologically and interviewed each other and members of the public to discover what particularly they remember from different stages of there life, be it insignificant and significant.

Memories such as:

• Ice cream flavours
• Arguments
• Fears
• Reoccurring nightmares
• Friends
• Play dates
• Films 
• Music
• Moments of heated panic
• Separation from family 
• Foods 
• Rooms
• Christmas

As well as many other insignificant and significant memories, we chose to separate life into 7 chronological sections and from this diagram below of what we had sectioned off in the lesson to structure our devised piece, and to confirm particular moments that we are going to start.

We are now able to merge and mix up the order, in the lesson I grew to realise that we can do this in theatre because it is such a freeing art form that has boundless limits and no set rules enabling us to create whatever we want without the constrictions of rules, laws and methods that are found predominantly in the outside world.

We also discussed the idea of the use of multi media to develop our piece and add layers to it. The idea is to record conversations that are significant or insignificant, regular or irregular and replay them whilst they are attached to the sides of the wall within our space. This means that different audience members will experience and remember different things that may particularly stick with them as it rings through there ears. It also makes our piece much more in-depth as each seven second that passes you get more of his life running through the piece and as we have asked the public at random this is more of a representation of society as a whole.

We want to make our piece as diverse as possible and exploring the space we have created meaning through our space with possible memories that  may occur of ring true from the site that we have chosen. We want to use an element of physical theatre to display a relationship between his daughter and the dying father and would like to explore it through the use of physical theatre. I also believe that this relationship gives the performance an element of warmth and heart and introduces a theme of love and protection into the piece as a man that is experiencing a lot of deterioration and destruction within himself.

I believe that as a group we are now at a place where we can feel more assured in our decisions as although it sounds contradicting our structure has given us more freedom to produce as we have given ourselves objectives and criteria's that we need to meet.

Site Development Week 1 & 2

When initially devising in our space we decided to remove all the objects that cluttered and caused safety hazards and began to explore the empty space, exploring the perspective that this space could offer for us. We didn't just explore the space but the factors around the space such as the sounds that can be heard from outside and around the space and how clear those were, I did this through sitting in the space for 5 mins silently observing the sounds with my eyes closed in  order to heighten my other senses and allow me to find the heart of the atmosphere.

Here are some words that sprang to mind:

• dust
• decay
• children
• footsteps
• enclosed
• suffocated
• corporate
• whine
• moan
• mental
• closed
• open
• paradox
• crisp
• nobbled
• stone
• reverberate

 Also the use of light that we have explored in our Theatre Workshop lessons from studying Artaud, this taught us the importance of light, there being a green light in the enclosed space we decided that this creates dark and sinister atmosphere in the room and that we could possibly explore the meaning behind green lights and so I researched further. It automatically clicked the association between a Green Light and the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel "Great Gatsby" that I have been studying in English Literature.

"To Gatsby, the green light represents his dream" 
http://thegreatgatsbysandm.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/green-light.html

The idea of a dream like state enticed me and my peer Felix offered the idea of exploring Artaud's 18 Seconds, the idea that a display of something from a mans head will take 18 seconds for him to see but for it to be reprojected it will take an hour or two. We listened to this clip in our space and the ideas formed for many of us to use this space as a display of someones mind and the audience being able to see the person who's mind it is attached to the walls by wires and the things that occur outside of the walls would be what he is seeing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YShtXbIbrW0

We also liked the idea of shadow and silhouette that this room produced and used the objects that were found inside the room as a barricade to prevent the light getting in, it gave it a moody and jealous feel and we began to find connotations of jealousy and a dungeon like quality to it also. I found the space incredibly malleable in both sessions and that it as a simple space had interesting and diverse features, but it still had an intricacy and clean feel also. Choosing this space was useful because it meant that we could increasingly test and develop ideas and I felt less attached with them as I went along, because of our groups ability to contribute and change as we continued to discuss further possibilities and directions we could take with this piece.