Poster problems, flying balls of energy and Enya. (3rd November)

This lesson did get off to a fiery start when I arrived. Basically, I had been in work till about 2:00am. When I arrived home I found that Jack had made a Facebook Page and poster without consulting the rest of the group. This wouldn't have been a massive problem but the description of the page was completely opposite to what we were going for! He had put that 'it was a story on deaf and blindness and how it affected the person and there family members'. As I have also studied product design, from an advertising view, I felt the poster did not represent what we were going for in regards to the piece.

Our piece is not dark and this poster is hinting almost at only blindness.

It is also bad practice to use more than two fonts on a poster. 

I asked him to take it down and that we would have a group discussion the next day about it. Obviously, he was trying to be nice and had put hardwork in but people should not have been making group decisions like that unless everyone had agreed. Focusing on the theme of 'denying' I also had a look at texture based posters that would represent a modern and neutral piece whilst been eye catching. 

I like the neutral aspects of this poster, quite natural, 

eye catching, have to really look to work out what it is. 

Like the fact its using other images you can't 

see properly.

I like the fact it is newspaper; denying the audience of what the paper says?

Blurry Vision

Love how this is amost sensory based.

Not allowing people to see full picture.

Similar to first picture, natural looking, hard to read,

only problem is, is that it looks more like a surreal performance poster.

Overall, I think Kane in particular was shocked at my reaction to the poster as I would not back down on keeping the old one. It is the first time I had actually stood up for myself in the group; I observe and can get over powered by bigger characters. Luckily, Kane and Jack then understood where I was coming from and I said in our spare time, outside of rehearsal, if Jack wanted to make another he could and then I would get my brother (who is very good at media) to take a look at it. 

Although the session did get off to a bit of a bumpy start, we actually managed to really turn it around! Kane, went through some of the idea's they had been discussing ways to manage the circuit. We did this practically and practised a mini obstacle course around the room. We had fun playing with the tempo's, speeds and our different reactions to each other. Unfortunately, after this we lost our rehearsal space as, yet again, the rooms had not been booked out. We ended up in a classroom, along the main teaching corridor again. This actually ended up working in our favour however as we had the loud sound system we could play around with. 

As we had good access to the sound system, and felt we didn't really have much planned for the deafness aspects of our piece, we started to play around with how you can perform a song without sound. The song 'Sail Away' by Enya was then suggested by Kane has it has both very distinct and interesting use of rhythms (robkardani, 2009). It is also very upbeat and is about overcoming problems. Immediately in my head I had thoughts of people running, dancing and creating interesting shapes around the rooms with rhythms. Kane then had the idea that we could visually make it obvious one person couldn't hear; it would be everyone else's job to bring the music alive visually so that the person could join in. Jack and I then continued doing movements around the room and at one point I just spontaneously threw a ball of energy at Kane. This was learned from performance skills in first year. This then spiralled into a build of everyone jumping round the room with each other; our facial expressions were also really interesting, childish and playful. I then started blowing the 'ball of energy' to Kane and he rolled it down his body and kicked it off his foot. Like 4 bar and rising we were trying to really play with sound and control it ourselves. 

We then decided to see if we could bring this to life without the music on. We all learnt a little sequence each and mine was the spiralling rhythm within the piece. At this moment, we realised performing a piece without sound will take a lot of rehearsal practice; energy wise it is hard to capture the emotions of a song when its just in your head. It is also very important we stay 100% committed to the performance as it will be awkward to watch and people may laugh at out of discomfort; it will only work if we don't feel uncomfortable by it. Without the music, it was harder to keep the energy going we had previously but this is something we can work on. Visually to an audience though, I think it would be an interesting thing to both watch and experience. 

After this, we managed to have a quick catch up with Niki, who reiterated again on the corridor that we really need to get things up on there feet. I totally agree with this as we are waiting precious time 'discussing' good idea's that may not work practically. It hinders our time of maybe exploring and finding other avenue's to go down! She also said for us to have a look more into devising process's and how other companies come up with there work. I though this was a great idea and something I am going to look into. I felt a bit silly that, although looking at physical theatre books and work, I had not actually looked into the actual devising process as much. 

Bibliography 

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