stpperformancepiece-blog

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Aims and Audience

This is my journal on my STP performance about abuse, in this performance we aimed to showcase the different kinds of abuse (physical, physiological and verbal) and how it isn’t relative to one thing, What you shouldn’t do and just trying to make people more aware of abusive relationships.

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You don't have to wait for someone to treat you bad repeatedly. All it takes is once and if they get away with it that once, if they know they can treat you like that. Then it sets the pattern for the future

Knox(2015; 204)

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We, as a group, did not decide to call this performance anything, we thought of a few names such as gray, but in the end landed on not giving it a name as a lot of people in abusive relationships feel nameless, worthless like they are nobody, and we felt this worked within the concept of our piece.

The piece itself was intended for audiences 15+ in the aim to educate not only younger audiences but older ones as well, and show them how people could be treated in these sort of relationships, so they wouldn’t treat anyone like this if they saw any signs of what was happening, or if they had been treated like this that they weren’t alone and maybe giving them a chance to finally talk about it to someone they trust.

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Structure and Influences

While looking at how to Structure our piece we went between lots of different ideas we knew what we wanted to say with our piece but it took a while before we found a style of how we wanted it to be. We all wanted to do something we had never done before and try to challenge ourselves with the way we would perform it. We ended on deciding that our piece fits in with the wider world of applied drama as we wanted to educate people on these relationships, raise awareness and hopefully inspire some change.

While looking for influences to use with this piece we came across Aleksey Pisemsky, one of Russia’s first professional playwrights who made psychological realism in Russia. Which required the technique of conveying the speech and movements found in the domestic situations. We felt this was useful as we were looking into domestic situations and domestic abuse

We also were influenced by Stanislavski for naturalism like Pisemsky he used realistic characters so we could make it look like it was set in one universe, just one bad day, but it didn’t take away the fact of our idea of different universes, different people, it was up to the audience to decide

We used Brecht staging ideas to counter the points of Stanislavski and Pisemsky. Brecht “reveals truths…and proposes transformations…Brecht wants the theatrical spectacle to be the beginning of action” (1979; 106). And we thought we could use that in revealing the truth behind abuse, and with our staging being always changing it was a way to make even the transitions of scenes a spectacle of theatre to make the audience think deeper into our piece.

I also found this quote which I felt was very apt to our piece and a fear a lot of people may have in these abusive relationships

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Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.

Brecht (1930) scene 10

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Rehearsal Diary

1st session

In our first session we didn’t know who we were going to be working with as we put our names on a sheet of paper with what stories we wanted to use and make our own pieces from. The groups were then put together by the tutors and since some people had come in from different colleges some of us had never really worked together and no real idea how each other worked and what we liked so we decided to get to know each other a little bit better. We discussed all of our strengths and decided that we wanted to do things that we weren’t as good with to try and test our limits

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2nd and 3rd session

 In these sessions we decided on what we would do our piece on, as the story we choose had a few themes, including early motherhood, abusive relationships and life choices, We settled on the abusive relationship route as we felt like a lot of people were suffering with this and felt we wanted to give them a voice. We then moved on to scripting idea’s and who to play what characters, we started off by discussing which characters we would involve and decide to write a script for he boyfriend(who would be kye) and the girlfriend(Andrea) and tried to write a short scene for them after we ran this a few times to see how it would look we thought about the rest of the characters and ended up with the decision of doing the same words for each scene but in slightly different ways, hoping that It may make the audience wonder where this took place, if it was the same girl in the same world or in different worlds or even in her head.

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4th and 5th session

In these sessions we decided to try and find a way each character could become different with using the same script for each of us, we found that this made the piece as a whole a little bit stale and went to change it so it would be slightly different for each person. Each of us characters choosing a different outfit for her to wear.

Video of idea workshopping script for my character

 We went for the idea of each having a “key movement” in which we would all use a set of keys to demonstrate abuse in opposition to showing it on stage as, the worst part of watching abuse I feel is not seeing it but the threat of it lingering, your imagination about what could happen rather than seeing what does happen. We also decided to keep some lines of each scene in every one as we thought that it could be connected in that way but not so obvious and it would give audience freedom to come up with their own opinions on where it was, the girlshead, the same world or different worlds.

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6th and 7th session

 In these sessions we discussed how we would use the set, At first we turned to the idea of having a naturalistic bedroom sort set but then we didn’t want to show the audience where we were and wanted to give them the freedom of deciding that for themselves where it could be, in her bedroom, her memories being played out in her head or if it was different universes all together so we moved onto the basics of what we needed. Clothes for the abuser to make the abused change into, paper, and other such props. We decided to look at the clothing we would use and discussed the best way of showing meaning behind it.

We decided as the scene was going to be starting off with her going out with her friends we would make her wear red, as that can be seen as a very passionate colour then when the 1st character came in he would change it to black, we thought as an idea we could have her then change into a white and black coat from the next character, so it would show her internal struggle, and the final bit of clothing being purple as purple can represent a lot of different things, including death and freedom.

We then discussed maybe including a dance at the end in which she would throw her clothes on the floor into a pile and take them off one by one, ending up with the purple piece of clothing on her representing either her freedom or her death.

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8th and 9th session

We discussed what we did in earlier sessions with each other and ran it through in these sessions, while doing this we felt it was a bit to cluttered and wanted to put in some changes. We decided to take away the clothing metaphors and just leave in what we needed, nothing more, nothing less, we wanted the set to come off as maybe a cell only having the essentials.

From that idea we moved onto only having what was useful to the scene on the stage at the times it was needed and Andrea breaking her character to set the stage, as if setting up her own demise. We felt this would work as people in this situation  often blame themselves only and not it be anyone else’s fault, especially the person abusing them.

We then moved onto the script, we decided to only use one line from each scene to put into the other, we wanted to make it as unconfutable as possible with the first two scenes then going into her friend who just uses her and doesn’t care and lastly the friend who blames her for not being there and doesn’t want to be there anymore so she’s finally alone.

The final scene we wanted her to breakdown, like she couldn’t take anymore as our four characters were sitting on the back of the stage repeating our lines to her as she ruined what she made and finally ended in her alone in the middle of the stage going to black.

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What worked and didn’t, What would I change?

I think what went well was that we didn't show any physical abuse on stage and we kept what we did quite simple and not too complicated to follow, each character had their own reason for being there be it to confess love to stealing lipstick and collecting gossip, we all worked together with devising our piece closely everyone discussing ideas for how each other’s character could be used to show the emotions and fear to more of an extent.

I think what didn’t go as well was the scripting, none of us were rea script writers and we weren’t exactly sure how to portray such an issue as well as portraying that it could be in different universes or her mind or in the same universe.

If I could do it again I would get in a script writer to work on each scene, I would also delve into each character a bit more showing them in a more extensive light. I would also add someone to be a director, we each tried to direct each other but it was a lot of different opinions and I feel like we needed one person to ground us.

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Personal Development

Personally I feel I have developed a lot since the beginning of this process and went out of my comfort zone as beforehand I had never really tried directing anyone or writing anything for scenes but after this I have been a lot more practised in saying my opinion and using my own ideas for a performance rather than just doing what other people told me to. I don’t know whether my acting skills have increased as I didn't come out of my comfort zone in that sense but I feel my collaboration directing writing and devising skills have definitely improved and I will voice my opinion more in the future.

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Bibliography

Knox, D (2015) M&F

Boal, A. (1979) Theatre of the Oppressed. New Edition. London: Pluto Press.

Brecht, B (1930) The Mother, scene 10