'Ode To Billy Joe' By Bobbie Gentry - Week 2 Entry 4: Manifesto/Devising Session 2

Scenario/Introduction:

In a separate lesson from our devised Physical Theatre sessions, the whole class has been allowed more time to work on their devised piece since there isn't much time for this project and three hours each week to work on it isn't going to be enough either.

In this fourth Blog entry for week 2 on this assignment, I will be listing my Physical Theatre Company's Manifesto that me and my group had come up with. This Manifesto was to contain 3 professional rules that the company must follow for each devising session. My group had these 3 professional rules, but we also came up with a bonus 4th rule which we all thought was also important to go along with what we had.

Later on in the lesson, my group had done some more work on our devised piece.

My Physical Theatre Company Manifesto:

Rule 1: For each session, someone, if not everyone, must bring in an idea/object to experiment with or have some inspiration for other ones.

Rule 2: Each person in the company must come in focused and prepared for every session so that the most work can be accomplished for that day.

Rule 3: Each person must arrive to every session with a positive exterior, meaning that they have to be open to everyone's ideas and shouldn't back them down.

Rule 4 (Bonus): Every person in the group must be able to give some sort of feedback to each idea that's presented to give us all a confirmed opinion on if we should go with or without it.

After creating the Manifesto, we then had to write a sort of motto for the Physical Theatre Company. This motto had to be at least 3-4 lines long and should highlight the rules that we've just created.

Here was the company motto that we created:

"We aim to be willing to try ideas in different ways so that we can explore and expand upon an idea to its best possible potential. We want all members of our group to come in with a clear mind so that the outside life does not affect the creative process of the group."

I hope that every member of my group can follow this Manifesto for every session leading up to the assessment since I think, if we do so, we will have the best possible performance to present to our audience.

Working On Our Devised Piece:

After creating our Physical Theatre Company's Manifesto, we were then allowed some time to work on our devised piece. For this session, we had luck on our side since Brandon was able to come in to college so that we can give him a little taster into what we all had so far for our group response to the 'Ode To Billy Joe' stimulus.

Me, Sophie and Jake had presented our scene to Brandon, whom was observing, which I had talked about in my second entry for week 1 on this assignment. After presenting it, Brandon was very open to say that he wasn't very entertained about what was going on and didn't find it "funny enough". He did come up with some suggestions as to how it could be made better like giving a better introduction so everybody in the audience knows what's going on and having both Milo and Frankie take part in the scene since they haven't done so yet.

We all took these ideas into consideration and had decided to sit down and come up with some new ideas. This is when I took the opportunity to show the group my three detailed responses to the 'Ode To Billy Joe' stimulus via my first blog entry to see if we could grab any ideas/inspiration from them. Everyone in the group had took some of my ideas into consideration and Sophie had then proposed that we should get up and do some improvisation since our style of performance is Commedia Dell'Arte after all.

All six members of the group had split up into paired couples. These three couples were:

• Romantic Lovers (boy and girl)
• 2 Friends (boy and girl)
• 2 people competing against each other (2 boys).

In these pairs, we would act as our chosen pair Stock Characters to create an improvised scene to go along with our response to the 'Ode To Billy Joe' stimulus. For this task, I was paired up with Milo and we had both chosen the Stock Character of 'The Captain'. What me and Milo had decided to do in our piece was to have us both standing on the bridge to consult about its mystery. I entered first blabbering on about me not knowing what the people in the town are talking about when they say that the bridge brings suicide thoughts. Then along comes Milo to have a chat with me about the mystery of the bridge. The thing to take note of in our piece was that the 2 Captain Stock Characters were competing against each other to claim the inevitable prize for discovering the true intentions of the suicide thoughts that occur whilst standing on the bridge. After talking for a little while, my character then starts to experience the suicide thoughts that people can catch and actually almost jumps off the bridge only to have Milo's character to pull me back calling me a "Madman!". The scene that we created doesn't really do much other than this so we stopped after a few minutes of improvisation to receive feedback from the rest of the group.

The feedback me and Milo had obtained was mostly coming from Brandon again, which was good, but I would of liked a few other members of the group to contribute if we were to do this again in the future. The first thing Brandon had said was to try and make 'The Captain' characters in the piece appear more modern since, due to our stance, we were both holding onto our swords as The Captain does in Commedia. He had wanted me and Milo to do this as he feels he can't relate to the characters since they are not of modern age. The second and last piece of feedback from Brandon was that he didn't witness enough or very little Physical Theatre. He suggested that both me and Milo should try to over-exaggerate our movements more, for example, when it comes to one of us wanting to jump off the bridge, we could both pull each other back with much more force and perhaps even slap each other to knock some sense into ourselves. I thought that these two ideas/improvements from Brandon should be taken into consideration as I think it'll improve the overall dramatic potential of our devised piece in terms of its Physical Theatre.

Selecting New Physical Theatre Styles/Ideas:

After much trial and error, me and the rest of the group had decided that maybe following the Commedia Dell'Arte style of Physical Theatre may not work for this stimulus. We definitely gave it our all but we could not work with the style as it restricted our movements in terms of using Stock Characters, we found it hard to make our performance appear more funny - this may be due to us not really picking the best Stock Characters to work with but, nonetheless, we began to experiment with new potential ideas that we could come up with instead.

We had tried to experiment with the physical style of Physical Theatre group ‘DV8’ in our performance mainly to involve practical risks and to help communicate our ideas and intentions for each characters emotions clearly to the audience. Here is a quote I had found which helps to support this claim: “DV8 Physical Theatre's work is about taking risks, aesthetically and physically, about breaking down the barriers between dance and theatre and, above all, communicating ideas and feelings clearly and unpretentiously.”

We had then tried to work with a more naturalistic approach to the stimulus by working along with what me and the group had previously learnt in the year about the Physical Theatre practitioner Stanislavski. We had used Stanislavski's style of Physical Theatre in our previous main performance of'13' By Mike Bartlett whilst also having the staging style of 'Frantic Assembly' which was another form of Physical Theatre we had learnt at that time. With the new naturalistic style that we tried to experiment with, we had also thought about our performances structure. We had agreed to make it more of an episodic performance, much like our performance of '13'. We would include flashbacks to back up our already devised story and to have more meaning and purpose to our actions on stage, such as jumping off the bridge.

Before working with naturalism however, both Frankie and Sophie had disagreed working with this style of Physical Theatre. This was an odd occurrence as they didn't really state a reason why we should not use it and I thought that at least experimenting with it will be a good idea as we were without a style of Physical Theatre currently. I appreciate that they had disagreed to something for once, but without giving a valid reason to back it up, I was left feeling confused as to why they had said it in the first place. But nonetheless, we had tried working with naturalism following the style of Stanislavski.

To quote ‘Frantic Assembly’, their main goal for each production they show is “to do something different” – Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett, Founder and Co-Founder of 'Frantic Assembly'.  I feel that we can reflect this objective within our performance as we'd bring a naturalistic style specifically designed to engage and relate towards the audience to show a true and meaningful performance.

After experimenting with the scenes we already had but with a more naturalistic style approach, we decided that it wasn't working once again as, when one of us watched back our performance, they had found it to be quite boring to watch. This is when I had decided to say that maybe we should be working with something a little more out of the box, something that the audience, as well as the rest of the group, aren't expecting to see. This is when me and Sophie Nickerson had discussed and decided to take a 'Game Show' approach to it as it is, indeed, more of an unusual concept to look at considering that the other two groups are going with a more physical and less verbal piece and it also fits our description of making our piece more unexpected. Alongside these two things, it also makes it much easier to understand from an audience perspective as it has more of a story-line structure to it.

The dramatic potential of the 'Game Show' idea is limitless and I'm sure that me and the group will co-operate together to make a more fun and entertaining performance for our audiences. After including the rest of the group with our idea, they had instantly agreed to work with it so we then got straight to work. We had also agreed to work with the Physical Theatre style of 'Frantic Assembly' as they offer a more playful, intelligent, vivic and dynamic type of theatre. Their style of theatre also focuses on character emotions, great performances such as 'Lovesong' is one that 'Frantic Assembly' chose to do this with, and this is what we'd like to show from our contestants during their time on the game show.

Our first idea for a scene when working with the 'Game Show' idea was along the lines the same as the already TV quiz show 'All Star Mr and Mrs'. But, to make this idea work, we needed to have an effective host to lead the show and entertain the audience. When thinking about a TV show host, it's their job to make the show entertaining to watch whilst also working with the contestants to make it through the whole show without failure. Me and the group had spent a couple of minutes thinking of some TV shows and or show presenters that do this exact thing in reality so we could draw some inspiration from them to make our game show idea work. This is what we had conjured up within 2 minutes:

• Bradley Walsh/'The Chase'
• Graham Norton/'The Graham Norton Show'
• 'All Star Mr and Mrs' 
• 'Pointless'
• 'Deal or No Deal'
• 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?'
• 'Family Feud'
• 'Countdown'
• 'I'm a Celebrity, Get Me out of Here!'
• 'The Crystal Maze'

After thinking of a few show idea to draw inspiration from, I was then thinking we should have a name for our new game show. This is when I had opened to the group and said we should call it 'The Bridge' as it fits the stimulus and it does also sound like a game show-ish name to have, which is lucky for us.

To make this idea work, we had also needed to come up with a couple of games to keep our show alive. This is our line up currently for what games we're going to have on 'The Bridge':

• 1st Game - All Star Mr and Mrs (asking and answering relationship questions with couples)
• 2nd Game - Obstacle Course (drawing inspiration from game shows such as 'Total Wipeout' and 'Takeshi's Castle')
• 3rd Game - A Maze (using ourselves, as well as a few props, to block a contestants path)

For the game show idea, we had kept the concept of the couples that we had previously used for when we experimented with Commedia Dell'Arte as it may work better here. We had agreed that the couples system will work like this:

• Jake Colley and Sophie = Main Presenters of 'The Bridge'
• Brandon and Frankie = Boy and Girl romantic couple competing against each other
• Me and Milo = Side Presenters (inspiration from Ant and Dec on 'Britain's Got Talent')

After deciding this, I had mentioned that maybe the character names, more importantly their backgrounds, could have some relation to the stimulus, such as the many themes, for example, death, denial and forgetfulness.

We then started looking at how all of the different characters we had could react with each other in their pairs and how they could build on their characters personality. As previously mentioned, me and Milo went straight for the Ant and Dec type duo and we started looking at how we could possibly interact with one another, this was mostly in the form of dance since we plan to have a lot of music playing during the show. Sophie and Jake had started to think about their partnership as the main presenters by performing some Physical pieces. Brandon and Frankie went to work with their relationship as a couple. One of the main ideas that came from Brandon and Frankie is that they would play with the fact that Frankies character would be completely in love with Brandons character, whilst he doesn't seem to give that much love in return which makes it seem as though he has made his character appear more miserable than the others. 

We then started to think of what names we could possibly give for our characters along with their unique personalities. Brandon called his character Charlie. He had simply described him as "a generic chilled out guy who just gets on with life and doesn't care about the consequences of his actions". Frankies character is called Mae. She has been described as "a very hyper, super enthusiastic girl with a lot of spirit and energy, especially compared to the rest of the characters on the show". My characters name is going to be Jack. Jack is a character that mainly tries to steal the show for himself by coming up with silly puns and funny jokes to tell the audience. Milos character is called Liam. Liam is a more background character when put up next to mine. Since we're meant to be working as a duo, it would of helped if Milo could of possibly had a few more things to say otherwise there would be no point of having a duo, but, nonetheless, we had carried onto what we were gong to do next. 

We all then started looking at what type of game show it could be and what we could base the games off of. We all came back and had so ideas of what we could do. Sophie liked the idea of the first game being a Mr and Mrs type game where you answer questions about how much you know your parter. Jake came back after looking at the relationship between Alexander Armstrong and Richard Osman, the presenters of BBC TV show: 'Pointless'. Me and Milo had started to look at where we could possibly develop our character by starting to look at what we could be doing backstage such as getting into trouble and taking the mick out of people whilst they are playing the games. As more rehearsing came along, I had mentioned that mine and Milos characters didn't really work that well together. Everyone had agreed on this since I was doing most of the talking whilst he was mostly just doing some random physical actions behind me which looked a bit odd when looking at it from an audience perspective. We then took Milos character back to the basics and thought of something new that he could do, which was to be the lighting technician. The way we plan on making working is that my character pretty much bullies this technician because he gets everything wrong. Doing this develops my character further as i'm showing more emotion and opening new ideas to the group as to how I could develop further in future sessions. 

Sadly, however, after trying to work with these characters, we found that Milo was still not doing very much in terms of Physical and Verbal actions. After some thought and consideration, as well as receiving some individual feedback from our lecturers, we had decided that there would be two couples on the show instead of one. This develops our piece further as we now can successfully pull off a very competitive performance. We had also changed the pairs around a little also. Instead of having a 2 boy pair like me and Milo had used before, we decided to change this to another girl-boy couple. So the official pairs where now Milo and Sophie, me and Frankie. After experimenting with this, we found it much better to have Brandon and Jake as the presenters since they had such unique characters compared to ours at this stage.

This is when our day had ended, so for the next session, me and group had decided to be working on how we could make our 'Game Show' idea have its own Physical Theatre potential.