SPA- Chasing Pavements -6

Today, we started our lesson by going through each of our character profiles and briefly explaining how we want each other to play our given characters. As Cel was absent today, and each scene will include all four of us, we split of and worked on different things. James spent the lesson figuring out what he wants to show in his scene, and creating different memories that he could have had with John. Ollie researched into a variety of different British comedies, especially Outnumbered to gain inspiration for his scene as he wants his scene to be set in a realistic family household.

Rather than working on my scene, I decided to work on the staging of our piece as it builds a good basis for us when we start devising. We know that we would like our piece to include physical theatre, but we haven’t decided on any other techniques we would like to use yet. Taking into consideration that all of our scenes (apart from the first and last, that are set at Johns funeral) will be taking place in each main characters living room, I thought that rather than changing our set to show that we are in each different characters house, perhaps we could have our stage be a boxed in area, which is the same living room for each character, but we show that we are in a different household through having notably different characters, and clear transitions into these characters. A video that I watched years ago inspired this idea, as I thought that the use of space combined with the use of physical theatre worked excellently and had always stuck with me :). 

Another possible thing we could add to our staging would be to have a sofa in our boxed performing area, as it gives the audience the simple and rather obvious information that it is a living room, but more importantly we could in-cooperate it into the physical theatre that we hope to use. Also, if we all stood behind the sofa, looking down at the area in which you would sit it could show that the sofa represents the coffin, which would mean that we wouldn't have to leave our confined space, which would mean we are making use of the potential of only one prop / item.

I explained my possible staging idea to James and Ollie, they seemed to like it, but through discussion about different auditoriums we have seen before, or any nontraditional staging we have seen,we have decided that we will be performing in the hall, having our audience (standing, in a boxed in area) in the centre of the hall and we shall each start in a different corner of the hall, each with a basic living room set-up. When our scenes start, and the others are needed, they will simply walk over to the corner, becoming more in tune with their character with each step. We have not yet decided where we will stage our first and last scene, but are all happy with the concept of walking from being one character into a completely different character.