Evaluation

During this process as individuals i think we all began working on our individual characters really well. We developed strong characters with background stories after time hotseatting observing and discussing conformity and looking at sociological and psychological studies.
In devising the process was a lot more tedious than i thought it would be initially, working amongst peers and having them as directors required a certain level of respect and understanding, which was not always established.
By going through this process and knowing how long devising could be i think it gave us a real insight in to how we would handle future projects, it really was eye opening.
In terms of cooperating as a group i dont think we worked our full potential at times, and the process needed to be happening faster in order to get a more solid final product, however luckily due to directing from the tutors before the show it helped us blocking things and made our final product more effective.
Personally i think that intially in developing my character i spent a lot of time looking into what would create her. I observed people, looked at societies behaviours in different cultures and read about gang culture, i did a lot of characterisation work and short improvised scenes as well as hotseatting. I found it hard after writing my scene with Amy Lane in which she played my mother finding truth in what i was saying though. The dialogue was hard to construct and often i felt stupid saying what was scripted. We had to try it using different dynamics and work on our body language and motives more to get a defined final product with our scene.
The scene could have been more developed if we'd had more time, also i felt that the show could have had more interlinking scenes to explain a lot of the issues we covered , because it was quite a short piece and had been rushed a bit towards the end.
There was a tableaux in which my mum( Amy)passed me the money and we slowly moved out of the tableaux and i passed jonnnie's character the money. The audience could take what they wanted from this and create their own assumptions. Mine and Jonnies characters were clearly ' bad' people in the play so they could understand why we may have been linked but we didnt actually have a scene which showed any ineteraction between mine and his character which i think could have benefited the final product and given both our characters more purpose and a more definate storyling.
The process on a whole was challenging most of the time as at times alot of us seemed to feel demotivated as we did not understand during the devising process where it was going, because most of us were used to working with some kind of scripted work or used to being given an overall theme or structure for what we were doing. We had been working so freely trying different things out that at times it had wondered in all sorts of directions. The devising processs i felt had also gone on for longer than it may have needed to.
We were given a long time to create and broaden our ideas but i think the whole process would have benefited with more structure rather than us just doing everything from something so raw.
The only positive aspect of this was that it was created purely by us and we had not been told what to do, all the idea's stemmed from the workshops we had done before and incooperated things from everyones ideas.
Next time i take part in a devised piece of work i think i need to think more about our time limit and how to divide it so it works out better in terms of rehearsing, i'd also like to have a little more direction in what i do so im not always doubting what i do, obviously we had to trust eachother and trust our directors and i felt this was lacking as we got frustrated as to why we were doing things sometimes in the devising process.
I didnt expect devising to be so challlenging and now we have had the opportunity to work as a team doing this it has given us knowledge as what to focus on more next time. As a final performance i think that the majority of us were proud that we had managed to pull it together but also relieved that it was over. I'd have liked to have done something which we were proud enough of to want to expand and perform again in the future.
As an individual i need to focus and dedicate my time more to the rehearsal process even when things get frustrating, because as individuals our contribution could help reinforce new ideas and boost the levels of the group, and it is the individual work which makes us all pull through together because once we are all commited and focused we change the dynamics for the group as it is a collaborative piece.

self analysis at this stage and observations

At this stage i feel that as a group we were still losing focus at times because lots of parts of the play were not set in stone and a lot of changes were still being made. We were doing runs and things still seemed uncertain. The run through with the technical team highlighted the things we still had minimal time to improve on and showed us that if we didn't pull together we woudn't have a show. The clock was ticking and i think everyone was more anxious at this point.

the spider

The spider was a symbol for the repression some of our society was facing. It was the idea that many people were still caught in a web of conformity and we run by authoritive figures, this idea went back to one of our original ideas when we were looking at obedience. The spider was great for a visual effect aswell. It was ensemble work and if done well could look really good.
The idea of the spider was Zee the spider who makes everyone conform on stilts wth a belt attached to him with ropes that we all connected to, the main characters would later break out of the web while the others would become part of it. These characters, the little spiders became relevant in different parts of the play as well ,going back to the initial idea of being part of the social web.
The spider structure was a choreographed piece of material that took quite a while for us to grasp as a group as we all had to come together with energy for it to look good whether we all did it in in exact timing or not.
The idea was good and we all agreed on that but doing it proved to be difficult as at first we started off doing the ensemble choregoraphy crouching on the floor, this proved to look sloppy and was too tricky so Rozana choregraphed a short routine in which we all became entwined in the ropes and then dispersed when we were let out of the web.
By the show i think this worked really well visually, and gave the audience something to question and think about.

My scene

My character Karisha had a scene to try and depict to the audience what was going on in her environment and her head, the scene me and amy ( karishas mum) worked on was to show that Karisha had been getting in to trouble consistently. Later in the show Karisha was to blame for a murder of another protaganist character. This scene of her commiting a murder would have not made sense to the audience if they had not been able to understand her motives and attitude beforehand so they could connect with her charcter. Karisha's character n this scene was in a panic because she claimed to owe someone money, she used emotionally blackmailing language with her mum. This scene showed what kind of things she may have been involved in and showed the audience that she was often in trouble, it also gave us a brief insight into the realtionship she had with her mum. This scene gave Karisha's character more depth and prupose. The next scene i was in was a scene in which i killed Nuria's character Yasmeen. During this scene me and Nurias character took part in a standoff staring at eachother alongside dramatic music which built a tense atmosphere. The stage was lit in shades of crimson, to create a sombre mood. We began a chase around the stage using a piece of material in which characters could hide behind for visual effect. The scene was done mainly in silence but was effective because of the music and dramatic devices such as the lighting and props.

Starting the process

We composed lots of short improvised scenes and ones we did not in the end use in the play. We had some ensemble choreographed scenes and some scenes to show some daily routines.
We tried different techniques and dramatic devices and experimented with which ones we were going to be using such as voice overs.
Some of the scenes we had started with were choreographed by Rozana and had looked effective but not meshed with the shows final product in the end.
I enjoyed doing the scenes of Simon says where we had a teacher character and the rest of us copying eachother and blaming eachother for something.
I also thought the ensemble piece we worked on of someone getting out of bed and brushing their teeth washing their face etc worked well with its dramatic devices, and because we had spent so much time getting it all choregraphed and in sync i felt it was a shame that we didnt use it in the final show. It would have linked well our opening scenes of growing up and was good to watch visually.
The simon says scene we didnt use was also a good scene for our title of conformity.
The initial idea was to call our show a 3d play and give out 3d glasses to the audience, the idea of this was to create an ironic idea as we go to the cinema to watch 3d films now but theatre is already 3d, the idea of 3d could be ridiculed and the audience would later realise that they did not need to be wearing 3d glasses.
In the end we called it , Is that right? an open ending question which allowed you the audience to have their own interpretation and make of it what they wanted.

Influences to our work

Our ideas often were spontaneous and came up as part of the process, some of it was instinctive and some was thought through more, our work was influenced by practioners and companies such as Brecht, stanislavski, Growtoski, Forced ent and a few others.

Pina Bauche " you once said that basically you arent interested in how people move, that you are more interested in what moves people."

We had previously when devising had a scene with a dance like choregrophy in it although in the final piece it was not used, i still liked the ideas we got from it and how it looked visually and this quote from Pina Bauche summed it up for me really.

A devised scene for my character

After exploring Karisha's character i could see the kind of environemtn she would be involved in and the kind of people she would mesh with so i worked devising a scene for her.
I wrote a short rap as i thought that this would be the kind of music that would influence her and would be a nice scene to introduce her character, in a rap which explored her lifestyle and was read out to the audience in a poetic way.

Girl like K ( The rap)

Girl like K from norf west 7 things have been effed since september the 11th
grew up in the slumz near knives and guns
i dont feel like i can walk so i just got to run
run, running away from all the pain, trynna make my money trynna sustain
they say life's easy so death must be sane
people in my knowledge so i just get brain
chat to men like they chat to me i keep it real i dont talk pretty
im messed up but dressed up which means you'll never know
keep your guard up and keep on ur toes
never know when i might come for you so dont be a dreamer
thick thighs small waist my body might decieve ya
I'll come in the night for you like the grim reaper
its gone to the point now of no return i gotta live and i gotta learn and try my hardest not to get burned.


The rap was just a little insight into her thought process and what she might do in her leisure time but it was not used in the final product. However it was good for my character building work and fun to write and play around with. I was quite looking foward to being a rapper for the night!