Brit School Mini Site Specific Performances

Will put everybody  into groups of 4 or 5 and asked us to look around the school until we found an interesting place to perform in, when we found this place we had to ask a teacher or anybody who knew about the area we had chosen the history of it. What was there before? what was it used for? how long ago was it changed into what it is now? and then create a performance based on its history.

My group chose the TV room in the library, as it was closed off from everything else and seemed like a nice enclosed area to perform in.
We asked Amanda (library teacher) what was the TV room used for before, and we found out that the whole of the library used to be a dance studio. Taking this into account we decided to create a performance piece which was kind of like a routine, doing things in cannon, in sync with one another and then have our own soul parts.
Looking at the space we thought it would be a good idea to have our audience watch through the window into the room which we was performing in.

Sitting in the TV room we thought of 20 words which described the room;

• Trapped
• Animalistic (being an animal watched)
• Plain
• abandoned
• outcasted
• alone
• empty
• watched
• disowned
• different
• enclosed
• perfect (trying to be perfect)
• clean
• ordinary 
• incomplete
• independent 
• crazy
• mental (mental hospital)

Taking the words we came up with on board we looked around the room and wanted our piece to be based upon the television screens, we decided to get 4 different DVDs and act out the key actions in each film.

Romeo and Juliet - Held hands to symbolize family

Beauty and the beast - Picked flower to symbolize love

Titanic - drowning to symbolize the end scene

Despicable me - running around to symbolize the hyper minions and fun

While we done these actions the films would be playing and we would be doing these actions sitting underneath the table of our screens.

In the beginning we decided to do our different actions at the same time and then went in order doing each others actions together, to keep the routine idea still there. When rehearsing we realized we didn't know when to do the next action in sync with one another, so Nora came up with the idea to knock on the table which meant to change actions. 

To end our piece we all thought it would be a good idea, to in cannon get up eject the DVD and hold the case up onto the window with no emotion, to symbolize that when alone we have no character.

Zach, Daisy, Nora and I wanted the piece to be far from linear as possible which we succeeded in doing.

Audience placement..

We placed the audience outside to look through the window into our performance, to give it the affect that were at the zoo and there pedestrians looking in at our cage fascinated on what were going to do next.

Performance opportunities...

• TVs - your emotion, character, stimulus - can be visually seen on the screen
• Under the Desks - trapped, scared, sounds, scene can happen
• Transparent Window - Audience
• Chairs - levels(hierarchy), transport (getting around the space) 

Sounds...

• People outside the room
• Silence

Overall my group's performance was far from linear, there was no begging, middle or end and we wanted to make our piece as abstract as possible. Doing so this worked very well with our audience and even though they said in our feedback they didn't really understand anything that was going on in the performance, they said it was very engaging and had you still interested and awaken by what was happening.