Workshop (9) - Blood & Prologue

Blood ideas:   To show the throats being split we discussed a few ideas we will try out. We firstly discussed using fake blood. We mentioned having the characters, who have their throats split, wear a blood pack by their collar - Sweeney would apply enough pressure to the pack that it would burst - but we decided against it as the amount of pressure required to burst the blood pack might still hurt the actor. We then discussed that we could put blood on the blade and then draw it across the neck, however, this would just come up with a line across the neck and wouldn't look like blood. Another idea we had was to go more abstract with it - we thought about the character having a red piece of fabric under the collar that would be pulled out when the throat would get slit. Another way we could show this is through the use of light - we could have a flash of red light... These are the ideas we came up with, but we shall come to this when we get there.

Prologue Ideas:

1. We could all stand in random places, some in the audience and some on the stage, and sing. There could be solo lines and duet parts, as well as lines of unison. 
2. The Prologue could be his funeral and foreshadow what is to come. We could all walk in as a procession - either walking in from behind the audience to on stage, or from underneath the stage to on stage.
3. We discussed having a lift where Sweeney gets carried on in a coffin.
4. All of us wear black old fashioned outfits as if at the funeral, then we could reveal Sweeney.
5. To save carrying in a coffin and to make it more simplistic, we thought that we could have the coffin on stage to begin - the coffin could be made of three stage blocks in line with each other. Rob could start lying down on this coffin. 
6. We discussed having a red cloth over the top of Robert to hide him on the coffin. We mentioned this cloth being attached by string to the lighting rig - as the cloth is really light, we would then be able to swing the sheet up and off of Sweeney. However, we decided against this as it would be too much for just the opening scene - we also wouldn't know what to do with it afterwards. We then mentioned in being pulled off and taken down the steps, under the stage.

Two main ideas: 

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai7hi4ARS1s   -   We liked the idea of having a funeral and foreshadowing the event. We tried having us all walk down the aisle of the audience from behind them to the front. The head movements were to represent the dangerous setting of London. The hand movements symbolise Sweeney's blades. 
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npIUcxc5duA   -   We wanted to incorporate the idea of us all entering from different directions to disorientate the audience. We kept the coffin idea as we wanted it to foreshadow what would happen - this is also why we put James at the front, as he was the character that killed Sweeney. We have decided to go with this idea, rather than the first one, as it is more meaningful, looks more interesting and unexpected. It is also a better use of space. We would then have a chaotic part, instead of running off, we could all manoeuvre the stage blocks to form our next setting. The staging for this number is shown in Lewis's diagram (above).
3. In both versions, we cut out the middle of the song as we didn't feel it was necessary and we didn't like it because it was too screechy. We also didn't want our show to be too long, so we skipped to Rob's solo part.

Boat discussion:   
The first song (after the Prologue) is sung by the character Anthony (Tom) and Sweeney (Rob). During this song, they are supposed to be on a boat. Therefore, we had a discussion on how we could create this boat and will all come up with ideas for next lesson. At the moment we are debating between using stage blocks for the boat and a creating a sail, or just use a few people and material.