Evaluation

Looking back on the journey that was undertaken by both the entire group and myself individually throughout the course of this assignment, I was struck by what a stark progression the scene took. We started out with nothing more than some paintings, a friend and the words "La Mer", and we ended up with a performance about a group of friends, with multi-dimensional, complex dynamics and emotions. This performance was perhaps one of the most enjoyable that I have done in y life, despite the fact that it lasted a mere 15 minutes, and now - with the rush of performing fading and the experience slowly becoming a memory - I started to think about what led to that. What choices did we make? What was it about this performance that I feel so attached to and remember so fondly? 

Our story was simple: we were becalmed on a boat in the middle of a sea during a traditional holiday away together. We sit and talk, we reconnect, we realise that we have disconnected, we slowly peel back the layers of each others lives. The only real "drama" comes at the end when one of us, Rick, suddenly and tragically dies. We leave the audience thinking about how well do we - as a society - really know our friends and neighbours?

What really worked about our performance and what I really loved was how true our characters were. We spent more time than usual exploring our characters, sitting for hours discussing and improvising, playing games and connecting, all the time in character. To make such a low drama performance work we had to know our characters better than we knew ourselves and I think that was something our group did really well. We created lives and histories. Our piece started out, during the first stages of improvisation, with us all waking up on a cruise ship without any memory of the night before. This, however, we felt should be before the events of the performance. This improvisation became more subplot to the scene, we improvised multiple "memories" for our characters and when we were finally putting together our scene we used these memories as jigsaw pieces. We could then justify WHY our characters would do something in the final scene, such as "Oh, in this improvisation my character did this, she would therefor have this fear/emotion/relationship with this character and would act accordingly."

We were constantly rehearsing to perfect certain aspect of the scene. Our group wanted to perfect character and the emotion or feeling onstage. We spent hours working to get the perfect "Vibe", so to speak, whereas some groups would have worked hard at other things such as plot. We did this because we really cared about how our audience would feel after the performance. Obviously, we could easily have done it in other ways, but we wanted to go deeper than just asking or portraying a message. We wanted to make the emotions feel real, to make the audience almost feel it too. I think this worked because when, for example, we started out and we built up the boredom onstage at the beginning of the scene I was sat at the very front of the stage. As I was acting and the boredom and tension was building I could feel the audience starting to react. People cracked their necks and started shuffling their feet, and I felt like this was a brilliant reaction to our work, since it showed that all our hard work had paid off and we'd got the reaction we wanted.

One thing that I liked about my own personal progression was how my character changed. At the start Xanthe was angry and defensive, she had a wall up and very few friends because of her witty, sarky nature. By the end however, after my exploration and development of her, she had become so much more dependent. She was like a small animal that could break at any point. She was desperate and quiet. This was a huge stretch for me to act, since I am nothing like that! However I used my own past experience and emotional memory to portray depression, and I feel that that was what made it believable. Often it is very difficult to portray something that you have never felt or understood, and the fact that I knew exactly what someone like Xanthe would be feeling and thinking - since I had felt and thought it myself - I was able to make her actions more truthful. I could explain it all and I actually went to my friends and family and others who had known someone in depression and asked what it was like being someone on the OUTSIDE watching someone else go through it. They mentioned how useless it can feeling not being able to help someone you care about, and to not be able to give them happiness. I feel like this was a turning point for me, since I hadn't thought about it that way before. This was incredibly helpful for those working around me in the scene, we discussed how the other characters would feel about it and how some of them may have less patience and want me to just help myself. I was subtle about it, I didn't run around screaming and crying and telling everyone about how depressed I was, since I'm a huge believer in the saying "Less is more" in the style in which we were performing.

As in any performance, however, not everything went to plan. One thing that really threw us was Max being in a car accident just two weeks before our performance. This created a huge difficulty for us,and I feel like we lost a lot of time that we could have spent on devising instead on rewriting parts of the piece to accommodate the loss of one of the characters. We did work round it, and I think that was a credit to our group, however in the end it was all unnecessary since Max ended up being able to perform.This taught me a great lesson in performing, which was that you can't always control circumstances. Things can go wrong, and I'll take a lot from this experience, and I'll have to prepare myself for any eventuality in the future. I think that in the future, should anything like this go wrong again in a performance, I'll be able to work around it much easier having had this experience.

Something that I didn't really like was the moment just before Rick gets hit in the scene. My idea for this bit was a sense of unity among the characters. I think that if we'd worked harder to capture the emotion of us all finally getting on a starting to recapture the strong relationships that our characters once had, then Ric dying would have seemed even more poignant. Luckily it was a very effective piece of drama and the audience reacted really well, however had we had more time to work on the scene then that's what I would have liked to perfect. Next time I think I'll have better time management to make sure I get everything in that I want to. Looking back on the previous performance however, when there were far more things that I was unsatisfied with and wanted to work on more, I am happy with how well our performance went. 

Devising 13

Naturalism

Naturalism is a form of theatre that is intended to emulate the real life as much as possible. There are no other worldly happenings - such as gods, mythical creatures or separate dimensions - and it uses believable, realistic characters who are involved in realistic situations. It uses prose instead of poetry and Stanislavsky is one of the most famous developers of the concept. the audience creates the fourth wall, giving them a fly-on-the-wall idea, and is able to view realistic situation. 

Devising 12

Mike Leigh process

Looking back on the process that took us to the fully formed characters and groups of people that we eventually played in the performance it's interesting to remember the steps we took. the Mike Leigh process of starting with a person we know and studying them and then slowly taking away from that person and into our own character who we created was brilliant. I think that it made our characters so much more real. When you create a completely new character from scratch then there's always the possibility of that character becoming stereotypical and turning into a "Stock character". All of the characters we created were well rounded, multi dimensional characters who had a real depth of emotions. Obviously in the Mike Leigh process there's still the possibility of our characters becoming shallow and stereotypical, however there's less of a risk. 

I also enjoyed the Mike Leigh concept of all the drama to be character based. Obviously there is actual physical drama, however the idea of being somewhere simple like a boat or a living room means that the drama is more "subtle". Personally I enjoy this, it's more to my taste to have less action and to have emotional drama instead. I think it allows you to show more dimensional characters with depth and a range of emotions.

To create these dynamic and characters we used a lot of improvisation, in keeping with the Mike Leigh concept, with every idea being explored with at least 20 minutes of improvisation. Every idea was tried out, even the really bad ones, and I think this meant that we could really go into and explore the ideas. Instead of thinking of something, discussing it and then deciding on that one idea we could try every possible version of that idea and develop it properly into the best end product we could. The improvisation helped us developed a rich tapestry for our characters, not only exploring the people we would see on stage but also every inch of their character. We created entire lives for them through improvisation and by the time we performed our scene it felt like I knew Xanthe as well as I knew myself. She was another part of me, a separate life that i had also lived. 

Devising 11

Stimulus material

Four Sea interludes

In my initial response to the stimuli
[http://lucywisemanlamer.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/devising-2.html]
I mentioned the idea of peace and nostalgia in the first symphony, however there's a darker edge to it that implies that anything could happen. When we were devising I brought this up and that led to us having the idea of being becalmed at sea. Nothing is happening - and we liked the drifting, melodic sense in the symphony which inspired the calmness of having no wind - however the edge was brought out in the fact that instead of it being a lovely sunny day in a harbour, we're lost. We can't go anywhere and we're powerless, and this is also the calm before the storm. This was also inspired by the senses of "something emerging" and "endlessness" that I mentioned noticing, and that the others in the group also senses, in Sunday Morning and Moonlight.

We also felt hints of these emotions and foreboding in Claude Debussy's La Mer, however we weren't inspired as much in this as the Four Sea interludes

La Mer - Charles Trenet

This song had a much more "Holiday" feel, which is what led to the idea that our trip could be a holiday, a tradition which we always upheld. We started off thinking we could all be on the boat by chance, even though we knew each other already, but I had a scene in my head of all of us pre-scene sailing through the sea enjoying ourselves with this song playing in the background. Heta and Yunusa then elaborated on this with me and we developed more of a reason for us being on the boat because of this. If we hadn't kept this song in mind and felt inspired by it then I don't think that it would have made sense for our characters to be together. It made us question why our characters were there and what were each of our characters individually intending to get out of the trip.

Sea fever by John Masefield

The line from this poem:

"And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying"

Is very  relevant to the piece. this is what inspired Yunusa's repetition of needing to get home. literally, all he needs is some wind so he can go home, and this line played an important role in the birthing of this idea

We didn't get much devising from Brighton Beach since it wasn't really relevant to our scene. If we had devising a scene set actually on a beach then we could have used this more.

Devising 10

Film 1 section of your work today

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wYl4cgcn14

Describe what is happening in this section and how it fits in in relation to the rest of your scene

This is all of the work we have done so far. Due to the fact that one of our group members suffered an accident and was injured, we had to create a rough script and read off of that to fill in for Max. This was difficult to do however we simply read in for him and ran through what we had worked out. In our most recent rehearsals we developed our scene and decided to remove the game of poker, since it wasn't relevant to the story line and simply have the cards be lost in the sea. We also added a final peak of drama whereby Rick is hit in the head with the boom of the boat. Vera, Heta's character, then has a monologue, panicking and professing her love to a now-dead Rick. The scene ends with the rest of the group stood around his body having just received a call from Rick's girlfriend, who the others did not know about. We decided to add this drama since it felt like our scene had begun to "wander", after a lot of conflict at the beginning and less in the middle we felt it needed something to "Pick up the pace" right before the end. 

Describe how you have used your rehearsals to develop these ideas 

After beginning to question the group dynamics in our previous rehearsals, we saw the dramatic possibilities of Rick being the one who gets hit.Certainly it's one of the most due to the fact that he has the most going for him. He has a job and a family and responsibilities, he wants to be on the boat least. We thought it was interesting about how he is so eager to leave and then he gets killed, almost as if there's a sense of it coming. We debated the idea of Xanthe being the one who dies, since she is the most unhappy. It would be more of a release for her, an escape, however I raised the idea that she still has more to learn. I liked the idea of her learning from this, or learning the value of life and having to go on. There's also a real tragedy about the idea of a man who has everything going for him and is loving living his life as it is dying instead of a girl who wants nothing more than to be at peace.

This drama also gave us a chance to fit in some lovely time for Heta to act. She gets a real release, her character Vera essentially lets go of everything she's been holding on to and not saying, telling the other characters the bitter truth. There then comes a lovely moment when she tells Rick that she loves him, a sort of final goodbye.
During rehearsals I felt that Yunusa hadn't really contributed much and wondered whether he was being held back by anything. The whole group made an active attempt to bring ideas out of him and questioned him on the decisions we were making and in the ended he came out with some fantastic ideas, such as instead of us using an actual boom or sound effect it should be all physical theatre. We liked this idea, since we hadn;t used much physical theatre before, and it was then my idea to use some more physical theatre by incorporating the "swaying" we'd been looking at during our Movement classes into the end to symbolise the storm picking up and us being thrown off the boat. 

Notes

After the work we did, we decided that we needed to establish the danger of the boom more. We needed to show the danger earlier on in the piece. This doesn't need to be done in a huge, obvious way, we simply need to add one or two occasions where we stress the danger of it. Heta also had a great idea that Craig could actually ask Rick to secure the boom

We were also told to be more aware of the audience. Our performance will be shown with the audience "In The Round" which means they will be seated in a semi circle.This means that there will be audience from almost every angle, so not every person in the audience will be able to see every single part of the scene. We need to make sure that we don't "Block" any part of the audience.

We were also told to look into shock reactions and such of actual killings. We need to really think about how we' react to seeing Rick die.

Due to the fact that Max has suffered an injury, as a group we had to make a decision about what to do if he can't make the performance. Our Plan B is that instead of Craig sailing the boat Xanthe will, since she is the only other character who has a background privileged enough that she would have access to and know how to run a boat. My alcoholism will be the reason for the boom not being secured and hitting Rick.
Hopefully Max will be in the performance, however we felt the need to have a plan B just in case. 

Devising 9

Research on depression

Symptoms of depression include long term feelings of sadness, loss of interest in things that one used to enjoy and sometimes anxiety. Physical symptoms include tiredness, lack of sleep, lack of appetite, lack of sex drive and sometimes feeling aches and pains. Depression can sometimes comes along with addictions to things such as gambling, drink and drugs. When one is in depression, one often feels like their life is not worth living, and often those in depression recognize that they are not the person that they used to be, or that they have become someone that they aren't truly like. Sort of like there aren't themselves, they are a different person. Those suffering from depression can find themselves feeling guilt-ridden easier, being irritable and finding it difficult to make decisions. Sometimes someone in depression will move or speak slower and have sudden changes in weight and appetite, and will often avoid contact with friends. Depression doesn't always come from a specific moment in one's life. One with depression can enjoy happy moments, however sometimes it's not a true, deep feeling of happiness and will be/feel overshadowed by the more constant feeling of depression. Depression isn't always a tortured sadness, it's more often described as a numbness. It's more constant and endless than grief, which is why it often feels more inescapable. 

Antidepressants are often prescribed by GP's to treat - not cure, treat - depression. This can be very effective to some people, however they are sometimes seen as a "Quick and easy" treatment, used to numb the sadness a little and reduce likeliness of suicidal thoughts, however they will never ultimately cure the source of a patients depression, they simply increase chemicals called serotonin in the brain, which is what raises one's mood. Possible side effects of antidepressants are nausea, drowsiness, insomnia, anxiety, headaches and sometimes in those under the age of 25 suicidal thoughts.

The way that I am playing Xanthe is that she is numb and sad. She suffers from anxiety, particularly during moments of social tension, for example when her friends start arguing, which leads to her drinking. whilst she knows how to sail and enjoys music, she has no real interests or passions and no plans for her life or ambitions. When Paige and Vera start arguing over Xanthe's lost poker cards, Xanthe feels guilty - as if it's her fault they're arguing because they were her cards. I chose to have her walking pace slightly slower than usual and all of her movements are heavy, as if she's exhausted. 

I have also decided that she will suffer from self harm. This won't be a huge story line and not immediately obvious, she will wear either a long sleeved cardigan or something to cover her wrists - which will be an active decision from Xanthe to do so as not to arouse suspicion - however after Rick's death, which Xanthe will undoubtedly blame herself for due to her drinking and lack of attention to securing the boom, Xanthe will start scratching at her wrists as she succumbs to a shock induced minor panic attack. This will be another part of her anxiety, scratching at her wrists when she gets stressed, however she will distract herself by drinking.

http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Depression/Pages/Introduction.aspx

http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Antidepressant-drugs/Pages/Side-effects.aspx

http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/antidepressant-drugs/Pages/Introduction.aspx

Xanthe's alcoholism

Xanthe will feel ashamed of her alcohol problem and try to hide it from her friends, however laugh and brush it off as a bit of fun when they spot her drinking. She will get trembles and tremors immediately before drinking, to show her dependence. Another sign of an alcohol problem is when drinking cycles are interrupted, so if Xanthe gets her drinking interrupted then I will show annoyance which will then be quickly hidden. 

http://www.helpguide.org/mental/alcohol_abuse_alcoholism_signs_effects_treatment.htm

Devising 8

Film 1-2 minutes of devised work in class

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Go9xktsebY&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Explain what is happening in the except and how it fits in with your full scene

The scene involves both verbal and physical drama between Craig and rick, which leads to Xanthe almost toppling overboard. The group discuss Paige's home life and it is revealed that Paige and Xanthe both have drinking problems. We are hoping to not add too much drama to the rest of the scene, perhaps a little emotional drama in the dialogue, but we like the idea of both elaborating and expanding the devising we have already done and exploring the personal and emotional situations of all of the characters.

Describe the process of making the decisions shown in the excerpt

We  started off with the idea of the argument between Craig and Rick building through small jibes and stressful questions from Craig, eventually ending with them having full scale conflict, however we felt that this didn't show their actual friendship very well. Rick does like Craig, he's just worried about his family and work back at home, and we didn't want it to appear like he "had it out" for Craig. We also thought of starting with everyone in full scale conflict and arguing at the beginning of the excerpt, however we didn't think it was in the girl's nature to argue, especially since both Vera and Xanthe just want everyone to get along.

One of my ideas was that perhaps Xanthe could actually join in the argument, but the group decided that since she is in the middle of clinical depression she would neither have the energy or the emotional "charge" to be bothered with conflict but she is also there trying to feel something or find some sort of happiness, so she would just want everyone to get along.

We liked the idea that we should all begin to talk however, using subtle stage directions such as the poker game to give the group something to do and show their boredom, and the alcohol to highlight the personal troubles that both Paige and Xanthe are going through.

Notes

It is shown that in the piece Xanthe has an alcohol dependency and I began to reflect on how she feels about it. Would she show it? I think that Xanthe isn't hoping anyone will notice, when Craig asks what she's drinking I am playing her looking like a fox caught in headlights. She doesn't want to trouble anyone so she brushes it off laughing and offers him a drink. She and Jade are both drinking buddies, however Xanthe uses this as more of a front, and excuse to drink without it being questioned. 

Another question that I asked myself was whether she was a peacemaker. It's not in Xanthe's nature to try to get everyone to get along, she has no interest in it and since she's usually and outsider and a troublemaker herself it's a bit self contradictory. However, there is a line where she refers to the group as some of the people she loves most in the world. She might consider this as a last ditch attempt at finding happiness or meaning in her life, and the trip most definitely means more to her than to some of the others.

We began to question the dynamics of the group, it started out as a holiday that the best friends all go on yearly, however we decided as a group that perhaps actually they haven't even seen each other in a long time, maybe even a year. Are things still the same? Are they as close as they once were? Definitely for Rick, with his family and new job, he is beginning to move on with his life. Paige moves between friends a lot, she's definitely the least bothered about being there. Craig is delighted at the opportunity to sail, he is very attached to his friends however he, like Rick, is beginning to move on with his life and go his own way. Craig and Xanthe organised the trip, being the ones who have enough wealth and opportunity to be able to get hold of a yacht, however for Craig it's more for fun than to see his friends again, however he loves the idea of a yearly tradition where they all get to see each other again. Vera can sense that they aren't as close as they used to be, I think she is seeing this as a sort of test to see if they are as close as they once were. Xanthe feels the most strongly about them all, I think she considers them to be her foundation and she's in denial about the fact that they aren't as close as they once were, possibly why she comes over to join the argument between Craig and Rick, distraught at the appearance of cracks in the group. This will be incredibly difficult for her to come to terms with and could lead to some really interesting drama. 

I think that Heta and Jade need more dialogue, there is so much character between them that could be really fun to explore, I'd like to take time in the next session to elaborate on their characters and dialogue. I'd also like to look at why all of the group are on the trip and what they'd like to get out of it.