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.