In this lesson we continued developing our short scene based on the idea of "Burying your brother in the pavement". We began by briefing Robert on what he missed in the previous lesson. We then continued developing the rest of the piece. The ideas we incorporated into this piece were childhood innocence/naivety and war. We included the techniques of freeze frames, naturalistic acting, abstract drama and stop-start motion (with clicking). We wanted to make our transitions between acting as children and our war freeze frames (or abstract war scenes) as smooth as possible, therefore we decided to make them link:
Children playing a game of tag/it ---> Freeze frame of soldiers in battle
Children eating packed lunch, talking about a papercut ---> Freeze frame of injured soldier
Children playing eye spy and spotting a plane ---> Abstract representation of a fighter jet
Children playing tag/it ---> Abstract drama of chaos of bomb exploding
As well as having a member of our group click to stop and start the piece, we decided to add a school bell sound to begin and end our piece. This bell would signify the beginning and end of the children's lunch time and would also give our piece a cyclical structure.
After performing this piece we sat down as a group and discussed what we have done in the previous lessons and our current thoughts and feelings. We decided to write down what techniques we included in each of the three different ideas we explored:
- TEENAGE NAIVETY / SEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS: Movement / dance based
- DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: Facts; sound scape; narration; movement / dance based
- INNOCENCE / WAR: Freeze frames; non-naturalistic; abstract; stop-start motion
The techniques we liked the most and wish to include in our final piece are freeze frames, abstract theatre, sound scapes, dance and motifs. We did like the stop-start motion but we feel it would be more effective if we changed the click to a clap or a different louder sound so that it was obvious what we were doing. We then discussed what themes we would like to use for our piece; these themes were teenage naivety (with sexual relationships), alcohol abuse, abortions and domestic violence. We liked our third piece the most so we shall use the techniques from it but we decided against acting as children as we have all done a contemporary play where we had to be children and Robert and I have performed Fantastic Mr Fox for children as well as being child soldiers in our Brechtian Refugee piece for double. Therefore, instead of exploring childhood innocence, we shall explore the naivety and ignorance of teenagers.
