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!

Finding My character

An article by Paul Brachhi i read highlighted the rise of violent girl gangs and after the scenes i had taken part in playing a violent character who had manly characteristics, i decided to develop the idea of unconventional women.

The most recent police estimate put the number of gangs in london as 174 of which at least three were exclusivly girls.

These articles gave me an insight into what my character could be involved in but did not help me in building her character as i wanted to go deeper into why someone would chose to act so destructive, so i built a character and was hotseated and asked random questions, her physicality was easier for me to imagine after weeks of observing different types of people and desructive groups of school girls, who were by no means as malicous as gang members but carried out the same charecteristics in terms of acting a certain way to be accepted, pulling cruel pranks on people and just generally conforming to one another.

In order for the audience to realate with my character and actualy be able to connect with her i needed to understand why someone acted like that and not just be some cold blooded un true character. I spent time researching girl gangs, i analysed people, i looked at statistics to how children from broken homes or alcoholic backgrounds were more likely to commit crime and how westernised women acted opposed to people from different countries, was it a cultural thing i questionned is this what britains mass industry does to people, and how are the social norms different from here to different places?

Technology

My group that i was put in today conducted a short comical scene about how techinology has manipulated peoples minds. We set the scene in a rehab situation of almost like an alcoholics anonymous meeting set out. Each character had a different addiction to a piece of technology whether it was their blackberry or and x box or a t.v programme such as x factor. The fact that they were addicts was symbolic to the fact that our society is so dependant on techonolgy and our minds are in a sense corrupted by it

The bystander effect

When discussing public behaviour we discussed something called the bystander effect which meant assuming if you dont do something someone else will, the idea that our society is somewhat selfish.

The bystander effect is a social phenomenon that refers to cases where individuals do not offer help in an emergency situation when other people are present. The probability of help has in the past been thought to be inversely related to the number of bystanders; in other words, the greater the number of bystanders, the less likely it is that any one of them will help. This linked back to our topic of conformity.

More Impro work

After coming up with all our ideas for devising we became somewhat lazier and more frustrated at this point of the process when we felt like things wernt neccesarily moving at a quick enough pace, at this point we were not aware that devising could be a gruelling process at times and this was jus one of the things we had to work through cooperating as a team.

In this lesson we started off doing a really random exercise which kind of developed itself into something really fascinating to be part of.. i dont quite know what it was like visually but to be part of definately helped engage us and get our energy levels and concentration back.

It was an exercise which started off as us just walking around the space at different paces and patterns, people then started to copy eachother and build routines and stories without realiing, it became a piece of physical theatre. As the actors we became so aware of each others steps that we also became more focused in doing so.

Discussing styles we wanted to incooperate

We had more or less come up with a theme for the play being conformity and looked at different scenarios of what was publically acceptable such as:

The child sucking the lollipop

peoples behaviour on transport

people breast feeding in public

disobeying an authoritive figure.

We looked at syles after, and realised we wanted to put in a few different genres and styles into our piece to give it more depth.

-We worked as an ensemble and doing monlogues

-we worked with audience interaction

- breaking the fourth wall

-different kinds of genres such as naturalism and different styles and looked into pieces of work from groups like Forced entertainment.

When learning about audience interaction we looked into forum theatre

conducting some experiments.

experiment one

After going to central london with the group to watch a film being premiered we went off in our individual groups with the taks to film three different types of scenarios to analyse passers by , one between freind or a couple arguing, one where someone falls over and one where someone drops their purse, whilst one of the group members secretly film it. Some of the experiments worked really well especially the arguing ones, people walking by stared, builders stopped doing their work and paused with a cup of coffee and cigarette to observe as if it was a free , live version of eastenders. These reactions told us different things about our society. It kind of showed to me that we thrive off drama to a certain extent and that simple things like a couple arguing prove to be entertainment

experiment two

In our individal group Sammy , Ayla and i stuggled to come up with an experiment which was close to that of the milgrim study. In the end we came up with an idea where we could still change the variables and try new things each time.

we decided to base it on an exam like situation and conduct a short questionnaire in a classroom with random students from the college we were working in on Mondays. We would on our lunch time send someone out to recuite a few volunteers to take part in this 'survey'

During this experiment we would have two actors , one taking on board the role of the teacher conducting the 'test' and breifing everyone before and handing out the papers and one the student who was also an actor. The student was our variable we aimed to change the experiment a few times with different situations to see different reactions. the first idea we had which we did not end up performing due to health and safety was to have a smoke machine put behind the door and let into the room, the teacher and the student actor would not acknowledge the smoke, the actor would cough slightly but not react to it whilst the real student/s would have to contemplate whether to say anything or conform. We also did this experiment with the variable of a couple arguing outside, the argument would escalate and lead the student in the room to maybe react or would they conform again to the majority?...

The experiment worked really well at times and gave us a good reaction to analise and work with but at other timeshealth and safety reguulations clashed with what we were doing or the experiments simply didnt prove us right. It was a case of trial and error

It also led us to a group discussion where we questionned social behaviour such as what would you do if you saw a bag on a train unnatended , would you be suspicio? would you steal it? would you turn a blind eye?

trial and error and social experiments

we were separated into groups and giving tasks on social experiments. One of the groups jobs was to create a documentary other groups were asked to work on a pre show bit of material to get an audience reaction before the show. Two people were asked to be a couple planted in the audience to have a ' argument ' which would be staged for the audience reaction. Our group was asked to carry out some secret camera experiments in which we put people in a situation where they felt uncomforable in a spoof setup. We started of devising this scene from a questionnaire we had written which started off very 'normally' and started to became a bit uncomfortable and innaceptable. The idea of doing these scenes came from some social theorists we had looked at such as Frued. We looked at an experiment in which he was able to use someone in a position of authority to influence someone else to cause harm on another or do something that would be out of character, the point of this was to show how figures of authority or someone in a sepcific uniform gains more trust than someone else because of how we associate those unifroms with proffesions and automatically become more trustworthy that they know what they are doing.

Our scene was meant to be an interpretation of Milgrams's study

'The subject was given the title teacher, and the confederate, learner. The participants drew slips of paper to 'determine' their roles. Unknown to them, both slips said "teacher", and the actor claimed to have the slip that read "learner", thus guaranteeing that the participant would always be the "teacher". At this point, the "teacher" and "learner" were separated into different rooms where they could communicate but not see each other. In one version of the experiment, the confederate was sure to mention to the participant that he had a heart condition

The "teacher" was given an electric from the electro-shock generator as a sample of the shock that the "learner" would supposedly receive during the experiment. The "teacher" was then given a list of word pairs which he was to teach the learner. The teacher began by reading the list of word pairs to the learner. The teacher would then read the first word of each pair and read four possible answers. The learner would press a button to indicate his response. If the answer was incorrect, the teacher would administer a shock to the learner, with the voltage increasing in 15- volt increments for each wrong answer. If correct, the teacher would read the next word pair.^[

The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks. After the confederate was separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level. After a number of voltage level increases, the actor started to bang on the wall that separated him from the subject. After several times banging on the wall and complaining about his heart condition, all responses by the learner would cease.^[1]

At this point, many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment and check on the learner. Some test subjects paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment. Most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few subjects began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner

If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, in this order:

1. Please continue.
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice, you must go on.

If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was halted after the subject had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession.

The study showed that people were less likely to resist from positions of authority even if it meant going against their morals.

Looking at more texts and manifestos

A manifesto of a little girl eating and ice cream which was something that could be seen as secual on an older woman in this day became a big point of discussion for us and gave us something to extend and elobarate on, a lot of us liked the contradiction which this created visually seeing a little girl and an older woman doing a simple thing eating a lollipop. we workshopped different scenes using this visual idea and came up with some strong ideas and decided this was one of the ideas we wanted to incooperate into the play, it dealt with social norms and societies warped perceptions of things and we felt it was interesting to perhaps visually present a projection on a pair of lips sucking on a lollipop giving off sexual inuendos only to be zoomed out on slowly to reveal a child to the disgust of the audience. We felt something as simple as that could lead to a reaction and allow people to open their eyes and become less ignorant to whats going on around us in our society today, how people are brainwashed by images from the media and how our minds work and why. This pice made us comment on how media has made our consumers mind so open to sexualisation of everything it also lead us to work on how different socities act in different situations and how they may potray something differently to us if from a non western society.

Ideas, characters and workshops

We did several workshops throughout the next few lessons we worked on human body language and social theories. We workshopped complete juxtapositions of what was already obvious in society, ideas began to stem from this as we realised what we were working towards was a piece of work about unconventional social behaviour attitudes. We wanted to evoke some emotion and turn things on their heads for the audience to have different persepectives and respnd analytically to our work.

we worked on scenes of women acting like men and without seeming like the cliche 'tomboy' we wanted to tap in to the differences of mens behavioral tendancies to women. In our particular scene we wanted to tap into that anamalistic alpha male egoistic characteur. We wanted to erase that women 'bitchy' mentality we were used to and become more vicious in a manly way. We also played around with ironic idea's such as news reports on something serious made humorous and ridiculous to contradict what the media is saying to us.

my group's particular scene was promoting the craze ' happy slapping' and was an ironic and comical piece to watch as it basically dealt with the underlying issues with the mass media and how they can promote things even if it is in a negative way.

My manifesto

My manifesto had no paritcular theme, it was about life in general and i choose to write it in a poetic and stylistic way.

I lice for laughs deep from my stomach, i alugh so hard i often cry, cry so hard sometimes i laugh at what i might look like, mascara splasing down my face. I live by that saying by Marilyn Monroe ' If you cant handle me at my worst you definately arnt worthy of me at my best'

Im insane in your eyes when i bounce of the ground and go from excruciatingly happy to intensly passionate and then devistatingly upset.

My heads still attached to my shoulders and my feet firmly on the ground , i act ignorant at times when its easier not knowing, ignorance is bliss, yet sometimes i crave that knowledge , that desire to learn, i frustrate when failing, i aim higher so im always so far up in the clouds that you cant even see me. I emerse myself in self pity and chaos when i surround myself with positivity in hope to smile. Im a free spirit yet i feel opressed. Im simple, i like walks , cheap take away and the sky and stars, im complicated sometimes i walk and i dont know where im going. Im confused , im laid back. I am a contradiction. Im an indivdual and im a team player, i feel like the guy in the Trueman show, conspiracy theories , lies mental dillusion. Im growing, striving and learning though i dont ever think ill ever fully understand and i dont know if i want to....

The manifesto i wrote was completly at random , it was a random trail of though which became in some ways personal to myself, after i had read it our tutor Siobaun pointed out that it seemed like it was coming from my perspective and was quite personal to a certain extent and to be honest i hadnt really thought of it like that because i assumed it was jus a piece of random writing that had somehow managed to spiral out on to a piece of paper from my imagination.