Devising (4) - Another scene?

The past two lessons have been mainly discussion based, but we have really progressed. We began the first of these lessons by discussing whether we wanted our classroom scene to be physical theatre or be a scripted scene. We are concerned that if we make it scripted it would be really cheesy, therefore (if we do go for making this particular setting a scripted scene) we would have our teacher a voice over, rather than physically there - as we want to make our whole piece abstract. We have agreed that the more abstract we make our piece, the less cliché it is likely to be.

We later moved on to asking the following questions. As a group, we have now worked out how we develop our ideas most - we have a discussion based approach that spawns from one question. Below are the questions posed in one discussion:

• Why is he so brainy?
• Why is the snapchat thing / social media thing happening?
• Could it be to do with his actual phone - rather than him himself?
• Is the software on his phone affecting his brain?
• Is he actually normal and the phone is to blame?
• Where did he get the phone from? Given it? Stolen it? Found it?

These questions developed to us thinking of a potential scene. We thought we could have a physical theatre scene showing Ollie being "influenced" and affected by the phone. The rest of us could represent / embody software. If we included this scene - we would have three potential scenes: 1) Ollie walking in and being followed by Lewis, 2) the classroom scene where we all move in then out, 3) physical theatre scene about the software.

A Motif:   We have discussed our first scene. We would like to use this as our motif. Ollie would do the same thing each time, but other people could come from different directions and do different things to or by Ollie. Ollie wouldn't necessarily start walking from off stage each time - he could start his walk from centre stage, for example. This would fit with our ideal of a non-linear structure. 

In the second lesson, we discussed our earlier idea of it being the phone that affects him. We debated whether a potential interrogation scene (After one of the motif parts) would then make sense, as it would have just been a case of getting rid of the phone. However, I still like the idea of it being the phone that affects him, but maybe not as over-the-top as we initially discussed - if we had him becoming obsessed with it and spending so much time being exposed to it that it affects him in some way, we could potentially have a moral of our story. Another thing that we shall think about before next lesson is what affect do we want our piece to have on our audience. We want an abstract style, but do we want to leave them confused (by us not answering all questions) or thinking (about the moral) or just generally entertained (by giving them a entertaining performance)?