Devising (5) - Further discussions

To begin this lesson we clarified the following:

• That no one knows why he is so brainy - the audience can decide for themselves - we shall let the audience think
• Object or person? - it is the person that is unusual and not the technology, as otherwise they could just destroy the phone and software
• The classroom scene shall not continue naturalistic dialogue, as this would become very cheesy and cliché. Instead we shall have a voice over of the teacher and use a soundscape for this scene
• We shall have a non-linear structure - made up of multiple flashbacks and flash-forwards! We shall also have a motif running throughout.  

We had previously discussed that we would like our piece to be in the style of Artaud so we came up with some techniques that we would like to include to achieve this style: non-linear structure, soundscapes / loud noises, use of contrasting lights, lots of movement and emphasis on spoken text. As Artaud liked to use a lot of movement we had planned to do a lot of physical theatre - however, he also liked spoken text, so we began to discuss where and how we could incorporate dialogue:

• Parent-teacher meeting
• Parents at home talking to child
• SEN teacher conversations
• In a common room

Our idea of a common room scene formed into a whole new conversation, where we discussed what we could do for this. We thought we could make it a physical theatre scene inspired by "Frantic Assembly". We thought we could use ideas from our version of a scene from "Curious Incident" for the Applying Acting Styles unit - this involved lots of movement around the centre character and involving them, but Ollie would walk through it all as if he doesn't really notice / care about his surroundings.

As we didn't want to waste time trying to think of a song to use there and then, we moved on to our motif and developed different versions of it. We had our original motif of Ollie walking from SL to SR, with Lewis then coming in and following him with a clipboard. Our second motif would be Ollie and Lewis walking from SR to SL, whilst Rob walked in from SL towards them both. Our third motif would be Ollie walking in from SL and me walking in from USR and ending with me putting my hand on his shoulder. We wanted our motifs to be quite unusual and leave the audience unsure on what is happening - we want to make them think.

Although we went off topic today and ended up moving back to our motif idea, we did manage to create our motifs and come up with some basic ideas to what we could do next.