Week 6

This week we looked at our risk assessment, so we worked together to come up with ideas and scenarios related to actions or props that could bring harm to the audience, and the ways to reduce the risk. We also looked into our performance and wrote scripts for it.
In this lesson I also got to see another group’s performance. Watching this piece was really interesting, as they found a unique place in the school that was part of a mental hospital, looking at the different ways to show different ways of expressing mental health through performing arts. The way you were escorted through the space was in a wheelchair and you were given the impression that you were a new patient; this was emphasised when you got to the last section where you were treated as someone who was different and like a monster instead of someone who’s like them, but moves around or talks differently. They showed this as an awards ceremony where the individual got to stand with the winners, and the winners acted as though the individual is a monster.
In conclusion, I feel this piece had a powerful message behind it and it left us really thinking about how you treat people. The message was powerful and the aim was to defeat the stigma attached to mental health issues in society.

Week 5

 This week we spent a productive 2 hours working as a group until we got a solid plan for our piece, as well as getting the suitable space we wanted.

Our idea is to use different characters from history to set up a parents’ evening, so the audience members will take part in a parents’ evening which we set in a girls’ grammar school; the characters are a teacher from the 18^th century, a BRIT School teacher,  a Doctor from WW1, a boys’ school teacher etc.

We played about with some of the ideas we came up with last week, and found that they were good ideas, but we didn’t have much time to elaborate on those, so we felt that this was a better idea for the amount of time we had, and it was going to highlight the group’s strength in the best manner.

My weakness from this week would be that I should have come up with the ideas faster, so we can develop them in a shorter time. The more projects I work on, the more I realize the importance of sticking to timings and how important it is to keep a high pace of work; there are times when we need to spend more time on finalizing performance material, so it is always best to do the idea brainstorming quickly and purposefully to save time for the rehearsals and the final tasks, which are crucial to be perfect.

My strengths would have to be that I kept giving ideas and found that it fuelled other people’s imagination and helped to develop ideas to create our final performance. I like experimenting with spaces and various ideas, and I believe I am a good team player.

Week 4

This week in our lessons we worked on our performance task of the assignment with meant that my group had to find a different location, as our last one wouldn’t work because it was in the way of a fire exit. So we walked around the building and finally settled on a classroom which had windows running along the wall facing the corridor. We thought that we could use this window as there is a door in the hallway that cut the window in half so we thought that we could use one half of the window to represent the past and the other window to portray the present. And having one side of it either in black and white and then the other as normal, so when we walked through one side of the room to the other, it became more lifelike.

Another idea we had was to use a small section of the corridor, where we will create a square, where we would stand tight together, then one of the group would try to come through and this would represent creating history, adding to events, and explain how there sometimes is a limit to how much history one building can take before it starts to crumble; people try and fix it, but it doesn’t work, and you sometimes have to destroy a piece of history and build something else instead which can start a new chapter. 

Week 3

This week we had our talks on 3 different site specific companies. So my group went first and we had a good group presentation, so it felt like we gave all the information needed for people to build a realistic picture of the work they are creating and their performing style. We presented the 3 companies that most of the class chose, so we found that because we went first, the other groups talked about  the same aspects of the chosen companies, so towards the end I found that information was repeated, and therefore it became a bit tedious. 
My strengths would be that I spoke with confidence, I was very well informed and I delivered what I was saying with knowledge behind it. 
My weakness would be that we could have done a better delivery of it, for example a more interesting performance.