Tuck In Tuesday

Tuesday 9^th October 2012

Today saw my group coming back from a weekend full of research, which we decided was null and void because we would like to move into a different direction, gone is the school idea we were back to square one of devising and trying to create our own stimuli. 

This was because we did not feel that our old idea would connect well or how we would stage it, because it lacked dynamic tension and we simply could not find a fitting storyline to make the audience entertained and learn anything. And theatre is there to entertain people and make them learn something, depending on what you are aiming for, we did not want to risk our performance being a flop, a flop that we did not believe in or that our audience did not get.

My group had been communicating over the weekend via a group on a social networking site asking their field of research, we weren't completely without a new focus subject. At the time because of a high profile death cause by suicide we decided we wanted to focus on suicide a topic that would we raw in the mind on the general public and our peers that would be watching.

One thing we were definite about is the fact that we wanted a promenade performance, quite a lot of my group are kinetics people, and we didn't want to go with conventional proscenium arch theatre, this is because we did not want to create a distance between us and our audience we wanted them involved, theatre staged within a proscenium always seems to create a fourth wall which instantly, I feel, creates an audience actor dived.

Once we had that component decided we started to discuss triggers that could be the cause of a person to commit suicide: 

Danny - "drug abuse"

Zoe - "death of a loved one" 

Sinnead - "school environment"

Jon - "Stress"

Those were all valid reasons why a person would like to take their own life, but as a group we decided we wanted something that wasn't a conventional reason, well it could be a conventional reason but portrayed in a unconventional way. 

In the end we decided that the catalyst for our protagonist decent into a deep and dark depression was the end of a relationship that they valued very much. 

In our morning to afternoon session we reached generation/exploration/distillation stage in our devising process. 

We had generated the topic that we wished to portray to our audience; as a group we tried to cultivate as many ideas as possible from each other and our research sources. We then began to build the bare bones of our piece. 

Which was deciding which style we wanted to perform in, because we had already removed the fourth wall with the idea of a promenade performance and we wanted to make it as interactive as possible we thought that we would go for the non-naturalistic approach and look to Bretch for our stylistic elements.

Things we knew we wanted in our performance by this stage :

• A Narrator - To slightly remove the audience from the piece emotionally because we were going to be portraying a very sensitive subject. 
• Multi-rolling - This was because we knew we had the largest ensemble of actors and that everyone needed as much speaking time to be fairly assessed on their use of voice, so this was a practical and stylistic need in our performance. 

We even got as far as doing picking the locations we would like to use, when we were travelling with our audience, the initial place we wanted to use was the Cafe of the MAC, however once we had gotten down to the Cafe we recognised how implausible and disruptive it would be using that space; also the confusion it would cause members of the general public. 

So we scrapped that idea and went back to the drawing board for a space that we would like to be our starting point. However we were definite that we would like to use the Bench beside the disused fairground and the far away bridge. 

I went away feeling happy with the new developments, but I was still had one nagging question, what was the risk we were taking/portraying?