F(l)ight - (1) (Stimulus)

Today we began our physical theatre unit. Our stimulus is "F(l)ight"... or fight in flight.
Below are the list of our initial ideas (in no particular order):

1. Betrayal. Back-stabbing.
2. Options. Split. Two people representing the same person. Parallel universe.
3. Personal (moral) journey.
4. Coward. Decisions.
5. Being cornered. Adrenalin.
6. Soldiers and refugees.
7. Fight on an aeroplane. Hijack. Terrorism.
8. Animalistic. Chase and hunt. Predators and prey. Survival of the fittest.
9. Instinct.

After writing down our initial ideas, we discussed our favourites. We liked the idea of number two the best as it is very open and we could do a lot with it. We then discussed this idea in more depth. As there are two girls in our class, we thought we should use this and have us two represent the same person. We then questioned what this section could be about.

We thought relationships would be a nice idea as we could involve everyone in the story (Rhiannon and I being the same person, two of the guys being our partners, two guys being the best friend and the other guy being the driving force for change). We thought that we needed something hard hitting for our piece to be effective so we decided on domestic violence - one side would show the woman leaving the man, whilst the other side would show her staying. When we continued discussing this, we then realised that the woman leaving the dangerous relationship would actually be "flight", suggesting flight is a positive thing whilst fight is negative - although this isn't always the case. Instead of the woman leaving the man, we could have one side showing the woman being assaulted and the other side showing the man being assaulted. We could then explore how people react to the same scenario but with the genders switched over. This idea reminded me of a social experiment video that I watched a while back. I found this very interesting but worrying that people can't recognise violence when the gender stereotypes are reversed. I think this is quite shocking and hard-hitting and we could present this in an interesting way in our physical theatre unit.