When returning to our devising session for this week, me and the group had discussed some more ideas about how we could link more towards the stimulus within our game show: 'The Bridge'. For the main idea of this game show we have, we had hooked onto not caring about death, much like how the mother does in the first verse of 'Ode To Billy Joe' when there's news of Billy Joe jumping off the Talahatchie Bridge. This evidently makes 'The Bridge' go much farther than most other reality shows such as 'I'm a Celebrity' since they actually try to not injure the contestants themselves but still put them in dangerous situations. This is when I thought that we could probably have a story-line to go alongside the game show to make it have more of a balanced structure that makes sense and keeps the audience even more intrigued. This was one key moment in this session for me as the whole group was complimenting my efforts on trying to make the piece have more dramatic potential, which is what we were also aiming for in this weeks session. We had all worked as an effective, hard-working team spending most of the session thinking creatively towards this idea and we had come out of it with one which seems to work really well with many links towards the stimulus in terms of its themes.
To put it in basic sense, the performance starts off in pitch black with ambulance sirens, people talking and a cameraman reporting news (not hearing what he/she says has happened because we want the audience to be left with a mystery). We then move onto the introduction of our game show: 'The Bridge'. Like before, there are three completely different games. The different thing for this time though is that each game is set in a parallel universe. The person who gets 'thrown off the bridge' for each game travels to these universes and progressively gets confused with what's going on as the show is re-introducing itself each time. Once the show ends after the third game with the confused contestant getting 'thrown off the bridge' one last time, we then make a return to what we had in the intro but showing the characters that are there since the stage was in pitch black last time. We then enter a scene where the contestant is standing on his/hers own deceased body, giving the appearance of being a ghost. The mystery is finally revealed to the audience that this contestant had an accident by driving off a bridge whilst they were travelling to meet their significant other to compete on a game show they signed up to be on. The whole story-line takes place in a sort of purgatory, a place between life and death which continues to overlap it self infinitely until the person can 'break the cycle' and then move onto the afterlife. The performance ends with this happening.
Before starting work on the story-lie of our piece however, we had needed to come up with some new ideas to experiment with in this session. As mentioned previously, at the end of the first session we had planned to work in this session as to how we could make our devised piece much more physical as it's stuck in the verbal stage currently.
Development On The First Game And Partnerships:
We came up with the idea of experimenting with our partnerships and how they could be more physical, doing this also gave us the chance to get comfortable with the relationship and also develop more on what kind of characters we really want to play as.
After much trial and error, we had found that the 'Mr and Mrs' game idea wasn't really working very well, so we neglected it and tried to work with something new. The new game we replaced this with was the classic game 'Charades'. Having a game of Charades instead does give the potential of making our piece much more physical if we can make it work properly. When working with the Charades idea, we needed to think of how we're going to play the game, this is when Brandon had thought of using a category system where we would use a graph of some kind on stage to indicate what the couples are acting and guessing towards. I was then thinking that we could as well have a difficulty system to determine how many points each couple would get. With the difficulties, we went with Easy, Medium and then Hard. We also came up with the idea that the couple can choose which difficult they want by freedom of choice. Each difficulty brings harder subjects for one of the partners to act our for their significant other. When looking back on the categories system, we went with general knowledge type themes, for example, Animals, TV and Film, Locations, Music and Sports. Each difficulty would have a specific time limit and point system. Easy had 10 points and we have to answer these questions within 30 seconds, Medium had 25 points and 45 seconds to answer and Hard had 50 points with 60 seconds to answer them. Then we started to improvise what topics each couple would pick and who would win. We had a normal game where no one knew what the answers would be and we thought that we could add more physical aspects to it also by over-developing our movements to make them bigger and use the stage more. We decided that Milo and Sophie should win the first round, but the main problem with this was that even though we told Milo the answers, he still strangely had the difficulty to know what they were when performing it again.
Feedback Session:
Not long after this, we had performed what we had to the rest of the class to gain some feedback. We had made it clear to the audience first that our game show relates back to the stimulus since we had named our game show 'The Bridge' and that the losers of the show would get 'thrown off the bridge' into a horrible mess below. When we performed it to an audience, it was really hard to stay in character since everyone was laughing at Milo since he kept coming out of his character and also saying that he had no idea what he was meant to be doing even though we had been rehearsing all day. After we had finished, we received a whole bunch of feedback about what we could do to improve and how to expand this game show idea. Deborah had mentioned about how we could make 'The Bridge' become more grotesque, to "go further than most other reality shows." This then got us to thinking about us developing this game show idea to a more horrible, thrilling show which has its 4 contestants getting kidnapped by these two thugs pretending to be show hosts and are physically forced to play their horrible line up of games.
Developing The Endings Of Each Game:
To put it in basic sense, the performance starts off in pitch black with ambulance sirens, people talking and a cameraman reporting news (not hearing what he/she says has happened because we want the audience to be left with a mystery). We then move onto the introduction of our game show: 'The Bridge'. Like before, there are three completely different games. The different thing for this time though is that each game is set in a parallel universe. The person who gets 'thrown off the bridge' for each game travels to these universes and progressively gets confused with what's going on as the show is re-introducing itself each time. Once the show ends after the third game with the confused contestant getting 'thrown off the bridge' one last time, we then make a return to what we had in the intro but showing the characters that are there since the stage was in pitch black last time. We then enter a scene where the contestant is standing on his/hers own deceased body, giving the appearance of being a ghost. The mystery is finally revealed to the audience that this contestant had an accident by driving off a bridge whilst they were travelling to meet their significant other to compete on a game show they signed up to be on. The whole story-line takes place in a sort of purgatory, a place between life and death which continues to overlap it self infinitely until the person can 'break the cycle' and then move onto the afterlife. The performance ends with this happening.
Before starting work on the story-lie of our piece however, we had needed to come up with some new ideas to experiment with in this session. As mentioned previously, at the end of the first session we had planned to work in this session as to how we could make our devised piece much more physical as it's stuck in the verbal stage currently.
Development On The First Game And Partnerships:
We came up with the idea of experimenting with our partnerships and how they could be more physical, doing this also gave us the chance to get comfortable with the relationship and also develop more on what kind of characters we really want to play as.
After much trial and error, we had found that the 'Mr and Mrs' game idea wasn't really working very well, so we neglected it and tried to work with something new. The new game we replaced this with was the classic game 'Charades'. Having a game of Charades instead does give the potential of making our piece much more physical if we can make it work properly. When working with the Charades idea, we needed to think of how we're going to play the game, this is when Brandon had thought of using a category system where we would use a graph of some kind on stage to indicate what the couples are acting and guessing towards. I was then thinking that we could as well have a difficulty system to determine how many points each couple would get. With the difficulties, we went with Easy, Medium and then Hard. We also came up with the idea that the couple can choose which difficult they want by freedom of choice. Each difficulty brings harder subjects for one of the partners to act our for their significant other. When looking back on the categories system, we went with general knowledge type themes, for example, Animals, TV and Film, Locations, Music and Sports. Each difficulty would have a specific time limit and point system. Easy had 10 points and we have to answer these questions within 30 seconds, Medium had 25 points and 45 seconds to answer and Hard had 50 points with 60 seconds to answer them. Then we started to improvise what topics each couple would pick and who would win. We had a normal game where no one knew what the answers would be and we thought that we could add more physical aspects to it also by over-developing our movements to make them bigger and use the stage more. We decided that Milo and Sophie should win the first round, but the main problem with this was that even though we told Milo the answers, he still strangely had the difficulty to know what they were when performing it again.
Feedback Session:
Not long after this, we had performed what we had to the rest of the class to gain some feedback. We had made it clear to the audience first that our game show relates back to the stimulus since we had named our game show 'The Bridge' and that the losers of the show would get 'thrown off the bridge' into a horrible mess below. When we performed it to an audience, it was really hard to stay in character since everyone was laughing at Milo since he kept coming out of his character and also saying that he had no idea what he was meant to be doing even though we had been rehearsing all day. After we had finished, we received a whole bunch of feedback about what we could do to improve and how to expand this game show idea. Deborah had mentioned about how we could make 'The Bridge' become more grotesque, to "go further than most other reality shows." This then got us to thinking about us developing this game show idea to a more horrible, thrilling show which has its 4 contestants getting kidnapped by these two thugs pretending to be show hosts and are physically forced to play their horrible line up of games.
Developing The Endings Of Each Game:
After discussing this, we had moved onto further developing the 1st game of 'The Bridge' by adding another Physical Theatre ending which we would then repeat for each game. We had thought that maybe we could include pretend buzzers. Whenever one of the contestants wants to answer a question, they simply hit the person on the head and they then follow up with a noise to indicate that they want to answer. This could also include some facial, and perhaps bodily, gestures in what appears to be a piece of Physical Theatre interpreted into a game show format. Whenever a contestant would get a question about their significant other wrong, they would be one step closer to being 'thrown off the bridge' which means they'll lose the game. We had all decided that Frankie's character would be the one that'll lose this game, so this is when we had all cooperated to devise a piece of Physical Theatre to use for when she gets 'thrown off the bridge' at this point in the performance.
Here is what we had devised:
I felt that this was another key moment in the session for me as a whole since we had all worked really well as a team in order to devise this Physical Theatre piece. Frankie had placed a lot of trust in everyone in order to carry and lower her across a space in the room in order to achieve a Physical Theatre presence in our piece. We had all remained positive throughout this whole devising process as all of us were demonstrating and acknowledging ways in which we could fit in this piece to make it work with the rest of the performance. I hope that in future sessions there will be team co-operation such as this since it was really fun to work with them to achieve something we really needed for our performance since it's more vocal than physical currently.
Here is what we had devised:
I felt that this was another key moment in the session for me as a whole since we had all worked really well as a team in order to devise this Physical Theatre piece. Frankie had placed a lot of trust in everyone in order to carry and lower her across a space in the room in order to achieve a Physical Theatre presence in our piece. We had all remained positive throughout this whole devising process as all of us were demonstrating and acknowledging ways in which we could fit in this piece to make it work with the rest of the performance. I hope that in future sessions there will be team co-operation such as this since it was really fun to work with them to achieve something we really needed for our performance since it's more vocal than physical currently.
Now that we had a solid idea of the structure of our piece, we then went on to developing the ending of 'The Bridge'. Our idea was to contrast the winners of the game alongside the couple that lost. We had all come up with a Physical Theatre piece that includes mime that we could use which transitions between the emotions of happiness to sadness. This was interesting to work with as I felt that it was increasing the overall dramatic potential of the piece as it makes the audience understand the consequences of the different games and the overall outcome. With that being said, the audience could be happy for the winners whilst also feeling sympathy for the losers. We had the song "A Drop in the Ocean" by Ron Pope to play along with this moment as we all felt that the song brings more of an atmosphere to the piece and draws even more emotions. We all found that the song shows love as a strong point because it says "you were my heaven" in the lyrics. This saying is meant to represent that a person has lost the love of his/her life. Having this works really well with the piece since one person from the losing couple, being Frankie's character, is going to be 'thrown off the bridge'.
Here is a clip of what we had devised to try to show this with:
Here is a clip of what we had devised to try to show this with:
For the next session, we're going to start working on our next two games.
Extra Ideas From Session:
Chair Duets Exercise:
Since we didn't have too much Physical Theatre within our piece, we had taken a bit of time during this session to think of what we could add that's considered 'Physical'. We had looked back upon the works of 'Frantic Assembly' and how they do an exercise called 'Chair Duets'. 'Chair Duets' is an exercise which involves two people. The couple have to make up a series of moments whilst interacting with the chairs that they're sitting/walking around on. We were thinking of using this exercise for when we're going to introduce the couples to the audience. The movements that the couples do within their chair duets could represent what kind of relationship they have towards one another. This had given us a whole range of experimentation adding simple things such as pushing, drops and catching and pulling each other.
Stretching The Personal Bubble Exercise:
Before we had done work on '13' By Mike Bartlett in 2014, we had used another Physical exercise called 'Stretching The Personal Bubble'. For this exercise, we had to use our whole body to stretch out in all directions as though there was a bubble surrounding us. We were also thinking of using this in the character introductions, perhaps mixing it with the 'Chair Duets' to involve two pieces of Physical Theatre into one part of the performance. This exercise also has a lot of experimentation to work with as we can use a partner to help stretch the bubble with us by pushing against each other whilst stretching our legs and even using each other like puppets to help have double the force on the stretch.
Charades For First Game:
Instead of using the 'Mr and Mrs' game show idea, we instead came up with using the classic physical game called 'Charades'. Charades is a game where you have to use your body to help create an image for another person to try and guess what it is. This evidently offers more of a physical theatre approach for our first game, since we were originally going to leave more of it until the Obstacle course (second game). This was the only idea that we had managed to show off within the feedback session alongside what we originally had since we wanted to know if the audience liked watching it or not. We had mixed reviews, some saying that it was not realistic enough, the movements from the person acting out the word wasn't very large and that some movements didn't even match the words entirely. We may develop more on this idea though since it's a good thing to experiment with because of its Physical Theatre value.
Four Corners Exercise:
'Four Corners' is an exercise which is used by the Physical Theatre group called 'Frantic Assembly'. The basic concept of this exercise is to have yourself walking to four specific points in a room and to repeat the process for an amount of time. This can be done at any speed and it is a great thing to use for when you want to expand your area on-stage to not stay in one place for too long. We were thinking of using this exercise in some way for the Obstacle course (second game), perhaps involving the use of legs and arms more in the sense that someone could be kicking or waving their arm very fast in a certain direction where the contestant is going to try and block his/her path.
Swerve and Duck Exercise:
'Swerve and Duck' is yet another physical exercise which is used by 'Frantic Assembly'. The objective of this exercise is to not hit anyone whilst you're walking/running past them but still being in close proximity with each other. This can be done by simply swerving or ducking. Doing this exercise in slow motion is definitely interesting to spectate and speeding it up makes it more intense also. We were thinking of implementing this exercise into the Obstacle course (second game) alongside the 'Four Corners' exercise which was previously mentioned.
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