Lesson 5

Today's lesson was difficult to make the most out of, because two of our group members did not turn up. This was incredibly annoying because we wanted to run the piece again and again and iron out any rough patches in the performance. Obviously, we could not do this with two people missing. However, both of them have slightly less complex roles than the three of us that were in, so we were the best three people to be in. I suggested that we work on our character development so brainstormed some facts, idiosyncrasies and important things about each of our characters.

We had a discussion about last week's dress rehearsal and all agreed that it was not very good. I was the scribe and we tried to brainstorm things that were missing/went wrong and things that could be added in to improve the piece. We then shared this with the others in the group via our Facebook group and waited for a reply from them.

After doing this, we decided to work on the things that were bland, and I suggested that our use of the space was not as good as it could be. I became particularly interested in the big black table in the middle of the room that is in three different sections and is on wheels so can be manoeuvred. As a starting point for inspiration, I moved the two semi-circle parts of the table away from the rectangular part and spun them across the room. From this, George suggested that it would be good if the two semi-circles made a full circle, to represent the never-ending cycle of despair that the artist is in. I built on this idea, saying as the exhibits we could move the tables around quite quickly to show the swirling state of the artist's mind. Brett liked the sound that the wheels made on the floor, a kind of squeak, and was thinking about different sounds. He said we could use the radiators to make sounds with, and George and I supported this idea. With these new aspects to our piece, we began to improvise a piece based around sound and our bodies interacting with the environment. We came up with some very innovative sounds and then had a discussion about our favourite areas and sounds that each other made. We then collaboratively said that the exhibits should be making a sound-scape to represent their moods as the piece develops and the artist could respond to these noises. We will obviously have to talk about these ideas with the other two when they get back and will hold at least one other session out of class time before the performance.

Therefore, although the session did not go as we expected it to, I think it was very useful because there were so many properties of the site that we had been ignoring that will now make our piece much better in terms of it being site specific. I was pleased with my contribution this lesson and felt like we really gelled as a group, creating a very good dynamic to work in.