Session 6

In today's session we looked at technical aspects of performance and began to consider what technical possibilities we would like to consider for the assessment. We also continued our work on devising. At this point we have come up with an idea for our final assessment. Our story is based around a detective who struggles with schitzophrenia, paranoia and has general mental health issues. The performance will show him as the main character attempting to solve a murder case that he has been working on for years, and we will use physical performance to show his "dark side" by incorporating the idea of shadows and voices that follow and torment him in his day to day life. We would like to use many of the class exercises we have done so far so that we can make this story in to a somewhat abstract, physical piece of performance. So far we have experimented with the use of shrimping which we learnt in our session on wrestling, as well as incorporating monkey walk, and we plan to use progressive breathing and relaxation techniques we have been doing in class as a rehearsal technique. In terms of technical possibilities, at present we are planning to keep our performance quite simple with not much technical equipment. This is so we can let the performance speak for itself and place more emphasis on our actions on stage rather than having technical aspects to "lean on". We want the performance to be raw and powerful, and let the narrative be the most important aspect. At this point we are considering a few minor technical possibilities such as simple lighting, and perhaps the use of blackouts for dramatic effect. We have also scheduled some group rehearsals in order to continue devising for our final performance.