In this second entry for the first week on this assignment, I will be listing down what me and my group had done in the first session of devising. I'll also be listing pictures of our spider-gram sheet from the session before we had begun to do the practical work.
The First Devising Session:
Before beginning the devising process, I needed my group of 5 other actors. I had managed to form a group including Me, Sophie Nickerson, Jake Colley, Brandon Timson, Frankie Howard and Milo Welch. It is with this group of people that I'll be working with to devise a practical Physical Theatre performance to create original work.
The first thing we did once deciding the group was to plan on mainly what we all wanted to do for this assignment in a collaborative way. We were given a sheet of paper to use to include our ideas upon.
This is an image of the final outcome of what we had managed to create in the first session on this assignment:
The lack of information included on this sheet is overcompensated by the amount of practical, improvised work we had done in this session.
The first thing that me and the group wanted to discuss was what kind of style of performance we wanted our devising process to go around. As you can see on the sheet with the spider-gram, we had decided to go with the style of Commedia dell'Arte whilst also using the stock characters that were brought with it.
It was until after this point that we all had a bit of difficulty on deciding what kind of story we had wanted for this performance. I had presented my responses to the group, as did they, but we all had positives and negatives which we all couldn't comprehend.
To counteract not doing anything because we couldn't decide, Me and Sophie had brought the rest of the group onto their feet to perform some physical exercises to get our heads in gear. Doing these exercises was to also bring forth ideas since we'd be more pumped and focused. The exercise we had done was what I call 'Army Jumps'. For this exercise, we all had to jump looking in one direction to then turn clockwise after 16 jumps which would then progressively go down to 8, 4, 2, 1, and then for the finale we all do one big spin. We had done this exercise before earlier this week in another lesson, and because it seemed to work for that session, we had used it here as well. I feel that this shows how much of a good team we have formed together as later on I mention that we had gained a whole bunch of ideas to use for our performance due to doing this exercise by evidently working together as a team to make sure we were all doing it in unison.
Now that we were all a little more energized and focused, we were ready to start doing some improvisation since the art behind Commedia is that all of the work is unscripted, which makes it perfect when choosing to devise a performance, especially when it's to do with Physical Theatre. I had looked upon the spider-gram once more to fill my mind with some ideas to build upon. Since the song 'Ode To Billy Joe' speaks a lot about the Tallahatchie Bridge, I had thought we could use this as a starting point for our setting in this story we were about to create. At the same time as me doing this, both Sophie and Jake were already improvising as their Commedia Stock Characters, with Jake being Pierrot and Sophie being a Zanni. I then jumped into the scene as a Harlequin and we tried to build on some ideas whilst performing.
What seemed to look like a fun-filled improvisation session had miraculously turned into a series of brilliant, mind-struck ideas as to what the story of 'Ode To Billy Joe' could be. All of these ideas had come to me, to which I had shared to the group.
The first idea I had shared was that instead of having one character called Billy Joe, as mentioned in the song, we use two different characters called Billy and Joe. These two characters were to be either a Zanni and/or a Harlequin, like Me and Sophie had done in our improvisation session. It was until this point I had another idea which was that we could have a character using several stock character stereotypes to create an entirely new character so that we're not restricted on doing certain things that they may not do.
Me and the group had started to go along with these ideas until I had a third idea, which had much to do with the story that we could set this performance around. This is the point were I bring the idea of using the Tallahatchie Bridge as our main setting into play. The moral of the story is that both Billy and Joe go up on the Tallahatchie Bridge to then encounter a miserable, middle-aged man (Jake/Pierrot). Billy and Joe then start to mess around with this man to cheer him up a little bit. They both then start to mention that they have a secret which they want to tell the miserable man, but, for some strange reason, they can't seem to remember the secret, which then causes them both to go a little crazy by spinning around waving their arms everywhere. After doing this multiple times, they then remember the secret: to jump off the Tallahatchie Bridge! To which they then do so, which leaves the miserable man confused as to what happened. The man then walks off the Tallahatchie Bridge to spread the news that Billy and Joe had jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.
If it doesn't seem obvious already, the story for this stimulus can be considered to be a little far fetched and comedic, but the fact that it is will surprise the audience as others could potentially see it as a dark, horror filled story. This is what we had intended to do since the start, so we had decided to build upon this story with the traditional Commedia style.
After a short break, we had all returned to planning what to do next. During the break I had thought more about the story which we could do for this devised performance. This is when I draw some inspiration from the classic BBC Mystery Drama 'Jonathan Creek'. I had wanted there to be a mystery revolved around the Tallahatchie Bridge such as why Billy and Joe jumped off it in the first place. This then brought on another idea in my mind: what if going on the Tallahatchie Bridge brings forth suicidal thoughts? This would explain why there was a miserable man on there in the first place, maybe he was thinking about jumping off himself only to be stopped by Billy and Joe. Perhaps during the process of cheering up the miserable man, both Billy and Joe had forgotten their original secret, and because being on the bridge is rumored to bring suicidal thoughts, this had happened to them both at the same time which made them jump off the bridge to their supposed death. The miserable man spreading the news of this happening to the local town-folk then starts a full on investigation to try and find out where Billy and Joe went and to also confirm if they had died or not.
I then had a forth, final idea before the session for this week was to end. I had thought about a 'Jonathan Creek' episode that I'd watched recently which had used a radio broadcast flashback, which was near 100 years before present day, to give an introduction of sorts to the mystery contained within the episode. I had brought along the same idea to the group: what if we were to use the same introduction with the old radio broadcast but for the Tallahatchie Bridge detailing information about it's mystery of why people have been jumping off of it to their deaths?
This is when the session for this week had unfortunately ended, but we all had something which we could actually build upon for when it comes to next weeks session. We had all planned that any time in-between sessions was to focus on researching about certain topics to do with our plans for this performance. These topics range from things like:
- Research into Commedia dell'Arte
- What real life people think about when they have the intention to commit suicide
- Research into Physical Theatre
- Bridges in real life that bring suicidal thoughts
- Trying to find anything that may be similar to our story
- Researching about the song 'Ode To Billy Joe', perhaps why it was created and discovering the real story behind its creation
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