Lesson 3

This week we were lucky that our space was not fully in use, meaning we could still get in there and begin to stage our piece. We could not do this fully, however, because there was still one person working in the room. That is a problem with devising in site-specific locations, but one that is reasonably easy to overcome.

Our first priority in this lesson was to cast parts. I felt like we had been making a lot of progress and had come up with a solid idea, but needed to clarify parts before we went any further, so led this discussion. The parts we agreed on were as follows: Brett is the artist, Alice is the reporter, the failed artwork is Sachelle and George and I are exhibits. We all agreed that these were parts we were comfortable with and who we were passionate about playing.

After we had cast the parts, we had to go back and explain the idea to a member of our group who had not been to many rehearsals previously, so was confused about what our final plan was. We did add a few things in from last time as we were explaining it to her. We made it clear that the audience are meant to be stepping into the mind of the artist, so everything that exists in the site that we add in must have a meaning and represent something about his perception towards life. One member of the group thought that we should never make the piece the same because thoughts are unpredictable and irrational, but I opposed this idea thinking it is too risky for an actual performance. I said we should experiment in the weeks we have prior to the performance and use the improvisation to create a solid structure with timings and cues so that there is no chance of the performance being like a "bad rehearsal". I tried to lead this discussion and keep us from getting distracted because we are running very short on time. 

We had planned to get devising during the session but as a student was occupying one half of the space we decided to have a dress rehearsal next week so we could get a real feel for what the piece is going to be like and possible flaws in our plan. 

Despite someone sharing the space, I suggested that George and I begin devising our physical theatre section as the exhibits. I wanted to ensure that we knew our objectives  well enough to devise from them. We knew what we would do would never be the same each time did it, but wanted to portray the same emotions. We explored how our bodies could interact with each other through contact improvisation working around the stimulus of love and hate. We used a trial and error style of devising: we did much more than we needed for the piece and filmed the work so we could find the best moments. 

When we got back to class we were asked what three specific genres of theatre we were using, to which we said were immersive, physical and experimental.

We were also asked how we were using theatricality in our piece. We said we were using it through us being living exhibits and the site being the audience stepping into the artist's mind.

Lesson 2

In today's lesson we learnt one of the hardest lessons about creating site specific performances; they are unpredictable. When we arrived at our site, although it is normally free when we wish to use it, today the room was in use so we could not occupy it for rehearsals and devising. This was disappointing for us because we had planned to use the session to devise and actively map out the route our audience would take. We obviously couldn't do this in the space so went to a classroom instead and tried to do what we had intended. This did not work out as we wanted it to because the space did not work right, and we did not have the same inspiration that the site provides us with. Instead, we decided to talk through our ideas and divide up who will be doing which part. This was not the best use of our time, but we will compensate this with another session outside of the lesson before next week so we do not feel at a disadvantage because we have missed out on time. 

Lesson 1

The site we have chosen is a make-up room at the back of the Obie Theatre. We decided on this site last term because it is a very interesting shape and has a very interesting use - we could think of many ideas about what the room could be and how it could inform a piece of very interesting and creative theatre.

 In our first lesson of this term, before going to our site we were asked to come up with different tasks that we could do in our site to move our idea on - having started create the idea last term. This was useful for us because we had come slightly stuck in terms of how we could develop our ideas, decided on one and develop it further. We decided to;

1 - walk around the space and say what we could see, then how it made us feel and its purpose. This is an exercise taken from a workshop done by a professional site specific theatre company that happened in the first term, something I found very useful and thought we could apply to our site. The purpose of this exercise was to detach us from our site, as we had got used to focusing on particular features, whereas this exercise opens the mind up to new features of the site and the potential that these things might have. The exercise worked well, with all of us completely committing to the exercise and we came up with some new ideas as to the themes we might cover in our performance and the different parts of the room that we could guide the audience through in our performance.

2 - moving on from the first exercise, someone in the group suggested we sat down and each made a list of the properties, qualities, meanings and the mood of the site individually and then share our findings to see if anything new came to light. This exercise brought us together as a group and we found that although there were several similarities between our lists, there was an astonishing number of differences, showing just how different people's opinions can be. We worked well as a group sharing these ideas and discussing which the most valuable pieces of information from everyone's lists were. We were upset that we had not done this exercise in the second term when we began looking at this site because it was very useful for getting a feel of the site and something actually written down that we could refer to if we deviated off the task.

3 - creating a character that might live in/use the site for anything, and writing down what this would be. This was useful as we ended up with four (as there are four of us in the group) different characters that could use the space which stimulated thoughts about what could come next for the characters, and any problems that being in the site might pose for them. Once we had shared these characters, we were going to embody the characters and improvise a scene with all of the characters together but this did not materialise very well, as we kept getting distracted and thought that it would not get us very far. 

4 - a period of brainstorming. The reason we chose this as our last exercise was because we thought that we could incorporate all of the findings from the other exercises and work together as a group to put our favourite ideas together on one piece of paper. We used snippets of our work  from all of the other exercises including using a character formulated in the previous exercise - a crazy artist who used the site as his workshop/studio, but there was something sinister about him and the work that he was creating. We thought this would be great to use as the foundation of our piece, as all of us could really imagine this artist taking the audience round his 'live art' piece of work. We then slotted in places that we could use in the site to act in; the properties, qualities and meanings of the site we identified earlier. For me, this was definitely the most useful exercise to conclude as it was a place to come together after we had worked individually a lot and to consider what we were actually going to do.

We then had a finalised idea - the artist giving the audience a tour around his workshop/studio. We thought that although the room is very bright with all the lights on, they can be turned off and just two lights around large mirrors turned on, creating a sinister atmosphere. There are also lots of close-up photographs of interesting artwork, obviously used throughout the day for inspiration to the students, but we thought these also had a sinister feel when in shadows. Every time that we had visited our site before, the room had been pristine, something we thought was very good for our piece. However, when we entered the room this lesson, it was extremely messy (see pictures below) but we thought this was much better than it being tidy, and allowed us to really envisage the mad artist existing in the space.

This table is normally clear, but we thought that it would be excellent to replace the pictures and pieces of paper that are on the table in the picture with meaningful pictures and newspaper articles for our piece that the audience can read and explore if they wish. We thought also that the cabinets being open would be less easy to add our own things to, as the room is a classroom that is in use every day, but we liked having the doors open so that the audience can see the different things the artist keeps. 

Also, behind the purple, blue and pink cabinets that can be seen in the back of the picture, there is about half a metre of space behind them, where people can slot in. There is also a large window that looks into a room in the back which you can just see the top of in the picture. We thought this had a lot of potential for putting the audience members behind the cabinets and being able to watch something going on in the room at the back - possibly the artist murdering one of the audience members to be used in his artwork.

Another interesting feature of the site is the projector which can be seen in in the top right hand section of the picture. We thought to add a multi media element to our work, we could have something playing on the projector or a sound, perhaps something that the artist has created to make it as interesting and grounded as possible. I can imagine the artist really enjoying disturbing opera music to create his work in.

We thought that this costume rack in the room would be good to have where it is in this picture because it shows that the artist has a number of different items of clothing, making the audience wonder where they 

have come from and what the artist uses them for. 

In this picture, you can also see the sink and the mirror on the right hand side which we thought could be used for having paints in the sink, or something that is freaky for the audience, something that would make the piece plausible that the site is an artist's workshop.

The picture on the right shows the ceiling and the lights which ideally we would have turned off. The ceiling also looks very unfinished and uncovered. The bars across the ceiling and lights have potential to have things draped off (if they were not on) but this is an idea we are unsure about at the moment and something we would have to clear with a health and safety officer.

The picture on the left shows the large mirror which we are very interested in for creating our piece. One idea we had early on in the proceedings was that the audience would have to watch the whole piece staring into the mirror watching it happen behind them, but we decided against it. 

 Overall, I think that the first lesson that we had was very useful because we made very important discoveries about our site which helped us to finalise our ideas. Not everything that we planned to do worked out, but even that was a learning curve for things to continue to do in the future and things to miss out. As a group, we are feeling much more optimistic about the performance now we have settled on one idea and we hope that in the next few weeks before our performance in Week 6, our ideas will continue to blossom so that we get the best grade possible for site specific.