Interesting Quote

“Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.”

The red paint on the back wall made this quote feel very appropriate for me.  Previously to explaining this to the group, I had thought that we could simply perform a scene from Romeo and Juliet, we liked the idea as we all thought the play was appropriate, but this would have had a linear narrative, so we began thinking about if we could create some connection between our play and Romeo and Juliet.  The next idea was something that I was un-happy we didn’t use, we thought that there was so much site specific material that we could create lots of small scenes and put them together.  To relate it back to our mental health hospital idea I thought these short scenes could be distorted memories, but the idea didn’t really catch on.

Our Devising Process

I felt that overall our devising process was fairly weak, we didn’t work strongly as a team, I believe this was down to conflicting ideas on the more simplistic side of devising, we couldn’t agree on simply how to create our piece, whether to devise from text or from our senses in the environment of our site.  These conflicting ideas ran throughout a lot of the devising process, which left us not much time to rehearse our final idea.

Mental Health Research

http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/emotional_health/mental_health/

This site explained about many forms of Mental illness, including: Alzheimer's disease, Schizophrenia and one I thought we could take a lot from Post-traumatic stress disorder, I thought this simply because of the red paint on the back wall, this reminded me of blood, which could be related with war, and I thought this could be a significant enough connection to start creating a piece.

Devising 2

From a few lessons of looking at the site and picking out its main features, we liked that it was on two levels, we also thought that the red paint was a major feature of the site, we initially thought of a hospital, but as the lower level seemed dirty and dusty it led us to think in a much more internal way, another aspect that led us to think this was, that we each set ourselves the task of getting a piece of text that related to our site, 2 of ours were Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’  we loved this idea of true love, but we all agreed that it was never possible, this was the moment we thought of disillusionment, and from this we got to mental illness, I believe that finding text was an excellent way to devise site specific theatre, as it can bring a whole new meaning to the site you have chosen. 

Also on my second week of work experience I worked with a company called ‘Fourth Monkey’ and currently the are working on a site specific piece of theatre which is based on Franz Kafka’s ‘In The Penal Colony.’  Some of the cast explained that they found it useful to use a text to devise from because, it gives a whole new way of looking at site specific theatre.  The two former ‘Complicite’ directors that were directing this piece, said using a text helped on a social basis between actors, one of the directors (Hamish MacDougall) said “if all the actors are all working from the same piece of text, they can communicate about it, and create a social relationship immediately, which is important in any piece of theatre.”

Devising 1

We found the most difficult part of devising was, coming up with the original inspiration, we had to look at our site (Stage Dock Door) on several occasions, and view it from different viewpoints to be able to come up with an idea for our piece. This was a really unproductive way of devising our piece, as it meant that every different idea we came up with couldn’t merge with a previous idea, for example we thought that the red paint on the wall was reminiscent of blood, however nothing else in the site complimented this initial idea. One part of devising that our group found difficult was creating a performance without a linear narrative.

A major issue with the devising process was how the group wanted to create the piece, in any group of people this would be a problem, but simply because of the lack of time we had to devise our piece, it became a huge problem, the two major opposing ideas were to do with the storyline, one idea was to create a storyline, and then fit the site into this idea, in my opinion this idea could not have worked, as the performance had to involve the site as much as possible, and if we created a story beforehand, it would have taken away from the devising process on-site.   The other idea was to pick out all of the local conditions from the environment, and use these objects and this architecture to create our performance.  We had to discover some middle ground that could incorporate both ideas.