Planning: For the first section of this lesson, we tried to complete the sin section. The two sins we had left to complete were Greed and Envy. We began by writing down connotations of these two words - the point of doing this was to give us inspiration for what we can do, as well as keeping us focussed to the meaning of the sin. For greed we came up with the following: money, stealing from those less fortunate, desperation and willing to do what it takes. For envy we came up with the following: jealousy, relationships, wanting what you can't get and ugliness.
Greed: For Greed, we decided to keep the section that James and I had already made (this section involved reaching towards each other's pockets to show stealing and a round movement to create tension and to represent how being greedy can completely change you). James and I finish this section with him downstage and me upstage (having just ran forwards and backwards to represent desperation to improve and get what we want). James runs into Rob and they do a duet section and I run into Rhiannon and do a duet with her. We made sure we finished with one group downstage and another group upstage to ensure that this worked with our traverse staging - so all audience members would have something interesting to look at. The duet section I did with Rhiannon started off fairly naturalistic but then became very abstract. We began with me bragging to her about how much money I had. We then do a very short lead-and-follow section where she follows wherever I move my money to. I then drop money on the floor and she follows the trail on her knees as if she were a dog. This is to represent how greed can change who we are and even bring out a completely different side to us (animal instincts).
Envy: This Greed section will lead smoothly on to Envy as we shall begin our Envy section in the positions we ended our Greed section in. My character has been greedy by training my dog to do whatever I want it to do; for the envy section, I will look across and see what James and Rob have accomplished and then will compete with them by constantly trying to show-off and better the tricks my dog can perform. The two duets will keep trying to over-through the other and eventually just ruin each other, and Charlie comes in and betters the lot of us. This is what we are planning for the Envy section, but have not physically tried out this idea. As we have spent a lot of lessons on the sins, we shall work out this in our own time.
Recorded Narration: As we have recorded the narration for Lust, we then considered recording the other sections. By recording the other sections, we would be able to focus on the physical theatre itself and also, each time we then rehearsed, the timing would be consistent as we wouldn't be altering the pace in our lines.
Faustus wake up: We had to decide if we were going to end our play - would we have Faustus shutting his laptop and panting heavily as if he had frightened himself with what he had researched, or if we were going to have him waking up from a coma. We decided to go for the latter of the two ideas as we could involve everyone and make an interesting physical theatre section. We decided that in a blackout, Faustus would move to and lie down on a bed centre stage (three stage blocks). We then had to decide how we would show Faustus starting to recover. We discussed the National Theatre's production of "People, Places & Things" and how they showed the main characters road to recovery and also how they showed her break down. We all liked how they had seven actresses who all looked identical to the main character on stage at once (wearing the same costume and hair styled the same way) doing different movements to show time passing. We would have like to have done this, but we couldn't due to us all not looking the same! We then came up with the idea of us all playing a doctor doing different things (like taking his blood pressure, giving him an injection, plumping his pillows, etc.) to show time passing. We initially thought of Faustus' hospital bed being on wheels and we would keep turning him round and working on him individually. The circular movement would have shown the passing of time quite clearly. However, we then realised that this would take up a lot of space in our traverse staging. We then realised that we could all move around Faustus and do a similar thing but decided against it as we wanted to make this section more chaotic to fit Artaud's conventions. We wanted to make this very abstract, so we took realistic things a doctor would do, but performed them in an abstract style. For example, Rhiannon and I are both working on his arms (her giving him an injection, and me checking his blood pressure) so we lift the opposite arm up to the one we are working on, and swap places by cartwheeling over the bed or rolling on the floor around the top of the bed. Moreover, when I check his blood pressure, each time I pump the machine, he lifts his arm up higher - this is very abstract and portrays the idea that things aren't right and foreshadows that he shall not recover thoroughly.
Signs: At the very end of this lesson, we began to discuss signs to do with necromancy. Therefore I have looked up "necromancy signs" on Google images, and the most common image that came up was of a star in a circle. We will be using images to project in our piece so we will continue to discuss images next lesson to decide which ones we shall use.
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