Developmental Process. To explore the different aspects of city life, we all came up with various ideas which incorporated this stimulus provided for us. The ideas which each of us came up with were a fantasy situation, school life, the London undergroun

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Alice Hand

Drama and Theatre

Unit 3: Developmental Process

The stimulus we were provided with was that of ‘city life’. At the beginning of the process we did not have a set group however Conor, Ellen, Sinead and I decided to stay in the group we were in as we all felt that we were able to work together well. To explore the different aspects of city life, we all came up with various ideas which incorporated this stimulus provided for us. The ideas which each of us came up with were a fantasy situation, school life, the London underground, London Snow days of 2009 and everybody’s late.

The first idea we tried was the ‘London underground’. We found that this was a theme which worked practically however we did not know how to expand on the idea so therefore decided to leave the idea and explore another.

The second idea we tried out was the fantasy idea as we thought that due to the fact we had to include non-naturalistic aspects to our production, that this would be the easiest of the ideas to try this out with. To start with we listed various fairy tales, books, movies and television programmes and their links with different city life aspects at the time of their development. We settled on an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ theme after I told the group about a situation one of my cousins in which he was walking down the road once and didn’t see an open manhole in front of him and ended up falling down it and breaking his leg. We decided to try this situation out along with the ‘Alice in wonderland’ theme in which a person falls down a manhole into another world and they’d go through a similar situation as Alice in which they encountered various representations of people or objects in their current life. The idea we came up with we all felt that the storyline would’ve worked and could’ve made an effective piece. However when it came to trying to piece it together we found that it was difficult to do so with the lack of people in our group and the limitations of theatre which we were faced with. In the end we found this idea may have been good for a short film but in the world of A Level theatre wouldn’t be possible to make.

The next idea we tried was ‘London Snow days of 2009’. Rather than focusing about people in the snow we focused on how the snow affected their everyday activities and the help or problems it caused for them. The first idea we tried for this one was based upon a hierarchy system, the type of people and where they would fallen within this system. The characters we came up with were; a person head of an office firm, a soldier returning from the war in the east, a wife of the solider and then a prostitute. Each one of us spoke about which characterisation would be a form of change for each actor and then saw which each of us could do with these characters set to us. Each of us were uncomfortable with the characters at first and to over come this we done a circle of focus in order to get us relaxed and able to settle into the characters. We found that this idea was the most effective and one which we would be able to build upon so therefore settled on this idea.

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For our research we focused on locating various newspaper articles of people who were trapped by the snow in different parts of the country. One particular article we located was one of a business man who had been trapped in his office building for three days before anyone was able to help dig him out of the snow up in Scotland where the snow at the time was a lot worse than that of the snow fall in London. We decided to apply this situation to the office firm worker and then acted this scene out to see how ...

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