Devising (24) - Ollie's scene

Today we worked on Ollie's scene and making it into a whole scene, rather than four motifs. Due to a lack of time, we wanted to keep as much as we could of our motifs - however, we didn't want to end up trying to link something to a stimulus, rather than come up with something from the stimulus. We wanted to have something that linked to the idea of ghosts, as so far we've linked more to the idea of being haunted and stories. We wanted to include three of our four motifs - we decided to scrap our colour motif, as we thought this was weak and didn't aid our story in any way. We kept the other three, but needed a story for these and an event to happen before them to lead into them.

We thought that Ollie's character could become possessed, and thus go through the 'rigorous tests' (i.e. our motifs). We needed to come up with a public place for this incident to happen in, where we could all be involved. The three places / situations we came up with were a theatre tour, a train station and a shopping centre. We disregarded the shopping centre idea as we felt this was too similar to the shop setting in the first third of Rob's scene - we wanted there to be as little links as possible between our four scenes, as they are supposed to be four separate stories (hence our four books at the front of our stage space). We then decided against the theatre idea as we didn't like the idea of having a guided tour, as this had the potential to be very cheesy. Therefore we went with our train station idea. We took inspiration from seeing "People, Places and Things" last year, in how they played their message at the beginning, and then played it again but distorted. We liked this as it was disorientating and unusual. Therefore, we decided we could have the typical notice "please mind the gap between the train and the platform" played a couple of times and getting more distorted on each.

We workshopped some movements for the beginning of this scene. We all come on at different times very naturalistically, but then after the sound effects, we become more abstract. We eventually settled on the four of us doing similar movements, very regimented and orderly - as if we were all under a spell or trance. The three of us would manage to snap out of it eventually, but Ollie would be possessed and not snap out of it. He falls backwards, and is caught by Lewis, after stumbling a bit. We initially thought that someone could have fallen on the tracks and died, and their ghost possessed Ollie. We then realised that this would be hard to show, so decided that the place is just haunted. We didn't want to focus too much on the logistics of it, and instead just wanted to present the idea of being possessed.

However, to make our motifs and the change between each clear, we added some narration. Lewis narrated the first, Rob the second, and me the third. Lewis and Rob's narration started with the same line. They both stated what test number it was, before explaining what the test entailed and the purpose for it. However, my narration was different due to it being the final motif: "Emergency operation. Due to a near fatal incident in Test 72, patient has been rushed to emergency wing. Surgery began 11:15. Patient deceased 11:17."

Next lesson, we shall run our entire piece with all of our props.