Meeting with Amy, Adelphi studio rehearsals and main planning day! (23rd October)

I had unfortunately had some misinformation about the meeting today. I thought we were meeting at 2pm but got a phonecall at 1:15pm to see where I was! As I had been at work till 2:30am the night before, I got dressed as quickly as I could and rushed round to Adelphi but unfortunately did not manage to arrive there before 2pm. I luckily did get to capture some of the wonderful stories Amy had told, but at the same time I was gutted that I only got to the tail end of the interview. To make sure this doesn't happen again I have put in place a diary so that I can organise the times visually and easier. I am aware that being late has a negative impact on the group and my own state of mind during the rehearsals.

What I did capture of Amy's meeting was mainly two very beautiful but also very inspiring stories. An interesting point to note before these two stories though is that Amy is actually partially sighted, so she can see very slightly out of her peripheral vision. Her front facing vision is consumed mainly of black and white dots. She get's very irritated that people do things to her thinking she can't see; or even, disgustingly, accuse her of being fake. She had a very nasty incident on a train with some young lads in this situation. The first story she told was about an afternoon at school, She said that her class were told that they were to go into another classroom to watch a film; filled with excitement they obviously all, like a whirlwind, ran past Amy and she couldn't keep up . She ended up at the back of the classroom and all she could make out on the screen was black and white dots. When the other children were laughing, she obviously had no idea what they they were laughing at and obviously felt left out. She then decided she would make up her own funny stories and apparently the other kids were asking what she was laughing at because she couldn't see; she isolated them from her world. I actually thought, for the fact she was a little girl, this story was phenomenal. Most adults don't have the courage to do what she did and she completely changed the tables of her situation!

Another aspect of her interview - that I could relate to myself - was that when you have something taken from you; you begin to appreciate the small things so much more than other people! Your appreciation for life seems to grow. She told us another story about how she was with her friend and she caught sight of a blackbird sitting on a gate in a field. She was totally in awe of this image meanwhile her friend was completely bewildered at why she would get excited at a blackbird on a fence. 'It's just a blackbird', Amy was like 'No but I can see a blackbird on a fence'. I think Amy's view on life is so admirable and she speaks through such wonderful imagery! The contrast between Louise's more pragmatic approach to her blindness and Amy's openness really has provided us with a good platform of material to use.

After this, we had the studio for the rest of the afternoon. We did a warm up as a group by running round the space; we incorporated elements Kane and I had learnt at Jennifer Willet's physical theatre session she ran. Unfortunately I am not well enough to make the weekly session but learnt a lot from the first session! It felt really nice to run round the space and let go of my body. After using the warm up and getting ourselves loosened and warm, we hit a bit of a block. I think we all just felt completely bombarded with lots of information  and didn't know what to do with it. Kane suggested we all lay in darkness and listen to Gymnopedie by Eric Satie to see what idea's sprung into our mind (DistantMirrors, 2012.) We felt that this piece was beautiful, sad and happy so incorporated the feelings we would want to evoke during the piece. The only idea we had that we could use was to do a physical interpretation of the blackbird scene but how we could do this we didn't know. We also had more discussions on us telling a story with people blind and then telling a story through touch. One of Kane's room mates studies art and said he went to an expedition were people walked in on cotton wool and so on so fourth. I thought that playing with the sensory elements would be really cool.

The discussion then got slightly more heated so we decided it would be best to go and find Niki as we had had a few mix up's with the meeting. We luckily found her and managed to sit in the classroom opposite. Straight away she calmed everyone down and had a look at the material we had. She was absolutely incredible at picking up small details and turning them into performative idea's which is a skill I would love to try and develop.

One of the first things that was mentioned that Niki liked was that when Kane was reading Amy's story out there was a lot of mention of the word 'She'. 'She walked into the back of the classroom, she felt isolated'; there was just something really nice about the way that it sounded. We noted this before the discussion moved onto how there was no reason why we couldn't turn Amy's Charlie Chaplin story in part of our piece. For example, if were making the audience feel death and blind, visually using black and white dots - on maybe a projector or shadow screen - could be really useful. Niki also said, one important thing is that it can be simple, organic and that audiences are clever; it is important to give them space and reflection time in the performance to let them work out what were doing themselves, get them to collaborate with us.

I then ran through some of Louise's interview and I said that the two main things I had picked up from Louise's interview. The first was that she found it actually really tiring to be blind, the thought process's of having to think where you are all the time and the way you have to direct places is difficult on your own. Niki then hopped up and said well why don't you do a circuit then and did a little sequence with a beam and stairs. I then had a vision of us all in a line, using the space and getting more fatigued as we went along. There is something really nice about this imagery as it makes the person look extremely vulnerable on stage; exposing there fears.Kane then suggested that we could bring in audio description in some way, shape or form. Another aspect I brought up was the feeling of isolation and the sound that occurs with sensory loss. I think the feeling of being exposed, vulnerable and lonely were brought up as being difficult to deal with by both Amy and Louise. I thought, performance wise, it would work well if we brought in the skills we learnt last year with cityscaping and mapping the stage in a fast paced modern world; but one person constantly unable to keep up.

Finally, we tried to pin point something to start working on for deafness; just a pin prick or scratch. One thing Niki suggested, which took a while for our heads to get around, was simply to state things that other's couldn't hear. For example, a feather falling to the floor. It is not that you are presenting it in either a negative or positive view; its just a case that you can't hear it. Like asking someone what the colour red looks like if you can't see colour. We also discussed whether it would be possible to create the vibrations a deaf person hears while listening to music; Niki said that, personally, she would speak to the technicians about this.

For next rehearsal we have decided to do some more research into practitioners and then start writing up some form of narratives to help the piece begin to form. We decided that this rehearsal will be based on trying to get some of the idea's up on there feet a little bit and hopefully that Sarah can be in so we can catch some things up with her!

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