How did group skills contribute to the development of the drama?
We approached our initial research by deciding on the path we were taking for our piece and examining what would be the best to topics to research i.e. the Wall Street Crash, the credit crunch, primitive civilisations, survival techniques etc. and then distributing these sections to members of the group to individually research. Every member of the group did their own research on everyone of these subjects so we all knew and understood every topic and to get an overview of what we were taking, which would help with our portrayal of the themes within our material. We executed this by discussing what we had found in our research and comparing it with the other members of the group. We then picked the most relevant points from our discussions and integrated them into our material.
We all researched different aspects of the stimulus during our brain storming sessions, drawing from what we knew about the image and then exploring it independently.
Ideas were developed collectively, individuals would put forward their ideas for the piece (which were often the same as other members of the group) which were then discussed and collectively performed and then modified, depending on their relevance and cohesiveness with the rest of the piece. However input seemed to keep coming from the same people all the time, so we had to extend and force particular members of the group to share their individual thoughts about our ideas.
The majority of the devising work was worked on as a collective, although some individuals could have been more involved with the process, but we all wanted to make sure that everyone agreed on the direction we were taking the piece and aspects of the scene.
Our piece was a mixture between ensemble and individual based. For the wise man scene there was a section in which we all had to act out the story of the crash moving into images of everyday occurrences surrounding work, partying and resting. To make sure that we were all together for these transitions we practised them over and over again often having to compromise our actions to make them run smoothly into one another. Throughout we all decided that if we were ever stationary or had to focus on a particular spot we would all stare at the same horizontal bar above the audience in our theatre. For our scene in the company we all had to hold boards and walk in an oval always facing the audience, this took place behind the protagonist to give the illusion that he was running down a corridor. For this we to work we had to be organised and efficient, first of all we had to make sure that there were three boards at the front at all time meaning we all had to walk at the same pace, we also had to carry the boards at roughly the same height, this was quite difficult to achieve so we did as best we could by holding them at arms height. We didn’t focus on the bar for this scene until we had become stationary; this was so we could focus on the movement of the circle and its relationship to the speed that the protagonist was walking at. To achieve this shared physical look we practised over and over again, extracting one of the members of the group to see if it looked good enough. Through trial and error we managed to obtain the same physical relationship between one another.
