Week Two

W2

During this week, we have begun to piece together our vision for what we want our devised performance to be like.

Performance Proposal

The people in my group are Zafra, Amelia, Rio, Aaron, Esme, Max, Ruby, Poppy, Charlie, Mia and Natasha and our performance space will be in The Space, which is on the ground floor of the school.

 (Picture to be updated soon)

The theme we have decided to work on is Indian Street children. Our group had a wide fascination with the idea of child trafficking, which is a very significant problem with homelessness in India and this eventually stemmed onto the idea to explore the lives of being a homeless child in India and what comes with it. I have been watching Slumdog Millionaire, which has helped deepen my understanding of this theme and I have used it as a creative stimulus for my thoughts and ideas.

We will be transforming The Space into an Indian street, using sound, lighting and objects in order to give the audience 10 minutes in which they can explore their imagination.  The Space is a very large room and this gives us many opportunities to incorporate as many ideas of Indian streetlife in. However, one difficulty could possibly be that it may be difficult to utilise all the space because it's so wide, therefore there could potentially be some empty spaces. To sort out this problem, I think our group should concentrate largely on objects and materials.

The Space's lighting facilities gives us the opportunity to use lighting to communicate a mood or theme. For example, our group will be using very dim lighting to bring our street to life and the fact that the room is dark might suggest a more sinister or negative mood. As well as this, if the room was lit up then the audience would know what was coming but with the room being dark, they are more intrigued and therefore engaged with what is going on and what is coming next.  The lighting will go slowly from bright to almost pitch black. This shows the time scale of morning-night and helps communicate to the audience that the day is going by. 

We will also be using music and sound effects in our 10 minute piece. The jarring, constant and loud background noises of vehicles and traffic will be playing from the moment the audience arrive and will continue until they've exited the room. This helps communicate the noises that homeless children (especially in India, a very polluted, populated country) hear day to day and the fact that it's playing for such a long time is used to aggravate the audience slightly, just like it would aggravate a person living in these conditions. This is effective because it helps the audience empathise with the situation. We are also going to be using voice recordings that will play in the performance from poetry about homelessness that has really engaged with us about homelessness. Instead of just having acting and objects, it's also interesting to introduce multimedia like poems to show a deeper understanding of the situation.

In this space, the audience have freedom to wander around, where they will encounter various 'scenes' that our group will create. For example, in one corner, there will be a few people who represent a 'community' of street children, who stick together through hardship. Ruby will be juggling and dancing as busking is ways in which many streetchildren, particularly in India, cope and gain attention. Busking is also how themes like child trafficking come in, where children who put themselves out there on the street are noticed and taken. She could be placed in the middle of the room, to show how she is the 'centre of attention' compared to the other homeless children. I think that representing this theme is hugely important in our piece.  Drug use in homelessness is another really important and vital theme in our performance. To make this more immersive, it could be interesting if people offered the audience drugs. The idea of Child Trafficking will be incorporated as when the audience are exiting the room, Esme will be attempting to sell children to the audience.

Objects such as plastic bags, string and cardboard will be essential in this piece as they are mediums that our audience can touch and they will be basic props in which we can set up our shelters and use creatively to show  the life of a homeless child. For example, string will be used to set up washing lines across the room that the audience will have to walk through or under to reach the other side of the room, using their sense of touching to build a more immersive experience. We will also have handwritten poetry, stories, drawings and any art we can find stuck on the wall in the Space as the audience enter. The stories and art will depict stories of homeless people in India and we will also be making rag dolls which will have stories written on them. To bring the theme of India to life, we will also be having numerous newspaper adverts and objects that link the piece to India around the room to make it more clear for the audience. I think that the more objects there are, the more immersive and interesting this piece will be. A list of the objects and equipment we are using is down below. 


  Immersive Theatre

A company I admire for their immersive plays is the National Theatre. Recently, I attended one of their plays Pomona, which was set in a small, circular room. We were sat in a circle around the stage and from the moment we entered, there was already action on the stage and things to look at. It wasn't like we were just waiting for the story to begin and the lights to switch off, from the moment we entered there were things to see and it was like we had just walked into that world already. I believe that this is an example of immersive theatre because it connected with me and reality had disconnected with me. I think our piece relates to this because as soon as the audience enter, they will also be transformed into that world of Indian street culture and their reality won't exist for a period of 10 minutes and this play really did that for me.


Equipment & Props List

Plastic bags: India is a country which has a lot of brands and factories, many of which will use or produce plastic bags. This will end up on the street and on the sidewalks, in which Indian street children will use as shelter or something to store their belongings in. We can incorporate this idea easily by bringing this prop in.
 String
Teabags (loose tea) & glue: to represent the drugs.
Adverts: to represent the numerous brands, factories and sweat shops that develop in India.
Written stories and artwork: to display on the walls.
Dirty sheets and rags
Oranges
Stage makeup (stage mud) 
Battered old clothes: to hang on the washing line.
Old sheets: perhaps we could use this as extra shelter or an extra layer for sleeping at night.
Empty water bottles: juggling.
Indian folk music
Chalk: to draw images and text on the walls or on cardboard that perhaps depict a street child's internal monologue. These are things that the audience can look at as well.
Voice recordings
Speakers

 Discussion 

In our 3 hour Thursday lesson, we also spent some time joining together as a whole group (Mr Rennison 's and Mr Hughes' group). In this time, we shared our ideas and took other people's feedback on how we could make our performance more 'immersive'. I think this activity was extremely helpful, especially for our group and it sparked more ideas for different ways to devise our play. 

The focus of the devising is to make it 'immersive' for the audience. This is when an audience is part of the action in a play, no matter how small their role may be. They may be able to freely roam the space that the performance takes part in and touch or feel things or they might be taken from different rooms to feel different parts of the experience. An example of a really effective piece of immersive theatre that I have seen is Sweeney Todd by the Tooting Arts club. It took place in a small, local pie shop. The fourth wall between the audience and the actors was broken and they danced on the tables we perched on, sat with us and it was almost as if we were in the scene with them. I was so intrigued and connected with the performance and even though I wasn't directly touching or interacting with objects in the scene, I believe this play was just as immersive because it really connected with me and gave me a sense of wonder because I felt so part of the scene. The point of this discussion was to help adapt each others ideas and offer advice to make their performance ideas more immersive.

Group 1: Guanatanamo Bay camp -

An idea I really liked from the Guanatanamo Bay group was the fact that before the audience have even arrived in their room, they will be blasting extremely loud music (a patriotic American song) and when the audience arrive, the room will be silent. This idea is really effective because not only does it incorporate ideas of patriotism and adds layers of a multimedia play, I think that the fact that the room goes silent when the audience arrives adds a really sense of wonder and suspense. It's almost scary or freaky and it immerses the audience because they begin to think and ask questions or may even think that something strange will happen/is happening because of the silence.  To make this idea even more interesting, once the room goes silent, the group could slowly introduce a voiceover of a voice recording. Mr Rennison recommends a voice recording that is found in the book Guantanamo Boy. This incorporates multi media and introduces the theme of Guantanamo Bay or camps in general as soon as the audience enter.  

Secondly, the group had begun to think of lighting and how that can impact that audience. They are going to use flashing, alternating spotlights in a dark, blacked out room put on various people getting tortured in the camp. This is in order to 'mess with the audience's minds' and 'confuse them'. Although this is a good idea, to take it to the next level and immerse the audience more, maybe they could be put the audience in spotlights and alternate them on them as well. This is more effective because instead of watching people getting 'tortured', if the audience feel the torture and the direct confusion and irritating, agonising motion of lights on them, it can make the performance a lot more effective and memorable. It can really make the audience think.

Group 2: North Korea labour camp -

This group had a vision that they were going to create a 'live action maze' in the room. In doing this, they are taking the audience around the room and as they reach certain areas, certain scenes will begin to emerge. A possible issue with this is that audience members don't really have an opportunity to feel, touch or explore the scenes that they encounter because they're being herded around and it might lose the immersive feel as they're losing freedom. However, I think this idea is still very strong because it is very creative and gives the audience an insight into North Korean camps. There is a lot of opportunity to showcase their research and interesting things that can make the audience think therefore they need to develop how exactly they are going to direct their audience around while giving them the freedom to explore.

This section of the play may not be distinctive as a North Korea labour camp if they don't show elements of it in the objects around the room or the 'scenes' that take place. For example, they could repeat famous speeches said by Kim Jong Un, the North Korean dictator as part of an act of discipline in the camp or sing the North Korean national anthem song. This is where an audience can get involved and can get treated like a prisoner too: they could be forced to sing the songs too.

Group 3: Camp America -

A really important theme this group wanted to mainly portray was the idea that although Camp America is often seen as 'happy' and the ideas of Florida gives connotations of 'Disneyworld' and 'dreams coming true', there are always cracks in the surface. Different characters that attend the camp signify different issues common in the age group (14-16 years old) such as depression, self harm, eating disorders, LGBT, racism etc. I really like this idea because I think that it's a really creative insight and it makes you really think out of the box. Audience members can really use this experience as an experience where they can challenge common stereotypes therefore I think that this group have really thought outside of the box.