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.