08.10.2014

Before getting on with devising our pieces, Siou decided to run some exercises with us to practice our focus and complicity. We started off with an exercise that is quite similar to us, where you throw a ball to a particular person, so form an order. The game gets harder as more balls are added and either places are switched or rewind order. Then, we started to walk around the space, still keeping up the same order. This game really required for us to focus, but also to be a ware of our space around us to be able to throw the ball to the right person.
   The next exercise was called 'flocking'. In it the whole group gather together, like a flock of fish or birds, and follow the leader, trying to stay in unison. As the direction of the flock is changed, the leader changes and the changes should go as natural as possible. This took a while to get, since people get stopping or not keeping up with the flock, but as we added vowel sound to it, changing the vowel as the leader changes. Complicity was an important factor in this exercise, but also the leader-follower dynamic. It was important that someone was always there to take the place of the leader, but also to be willing to follow.

Bird-eye view of the audience placement plan for our performance. X's represent the audience members and the red circles mark most of performance space.

   After this we were able to go back to our sites and continue our work. We focus on looking at how the audience would be in the space, so that once we start getting more into the movement and devise it, we will know exactly how much space we have to use and where we have the possibility to travel. We planned this by putting chair around the space, tweaking the placements and seeing how much we can move in that space. We thought that it would be good to have a small 'stage' in the middle of the people, so that we can bring focus on certain parts, especially when doing movement all of us three together. We also thought about whether or not to have the audience sit on chairs. On other hand, without chairs the audience standing would  form a sort of a forest, but then Chloe and Jenny pointed out an important factor; what if there is elderly in our audience? They might not be able to stand trough the entire performance, especially if they have already stood trough many other pieces. We could have everyone sit, but then the idea of a human forest wouldn't work as well. We also thought about only having some chairs in the middle, and have rest of the people stand, but again, we are not sure how this would look. I guess, we need either ask for the whole class to come along sometime and just try out different options and see which one looks the best. Of course, I later thought that since our theme runs around depression and possibly bullying, the chairs might make a school-environment feeling for the audience.
   We've also really started to look into some poems we could possibly use in our piece, and we are hoping to choose the final one on Friday, so that we can finish our rehearsal schedule. The first poem we have been looking at is To This Day by Shane Koyczan.   It is one of my favourite poem of all time, since it really talks to me, I feel like it is a poem about my feelings in a way. It is poem addressing the life long effect bullying has on people, it is not just kids being mean, but kids possibly changing the course of someones entire life. We like this poem, since it has deep understandable meaning to it, and we thought that we could very well create movement to this poem, and show our own interpretation of it. Still, we feel that it might me too mainstream and perhaps even too easy, for the audience to understand. We want to challenge the audience, but is the site set-up enough?
   Second poem we are looking at is Dream-Land by Edgar Allan Poe. This really is almost a contrast to the other poem; it is harder to understand and its meaning isn't as clear. This could give us a free creative playground, really have the focus of the piece to be in our movement rather than the poem, but also it is a little out of our decided theme. We have been talking about asking for help, depression and bullying and this poem doesn't directly connect to anything. This Poe's poem is about a journey to a dark land, a land that you might not actually want to travel to. I connected this to be a metaphor for suicide and death, something that is connected to depression quite heavily. But, it might be too much of a stretch for the audience or the piece itself.