The direction of the piece was unknown at this point but we liked the idea of showing why he developed and suffered from loneliness. We choose to use a playground scene from when he was a child, because this point of a person’s life is extremely influential, and in the painting Nighthawk it shows how a group of individuals in a social environment could look so alone and distant apart. The effect we wanted from the scene was to show the audience a consequence of bulling, and to have a rather happy atmosphere and then to invert that suddenly. An idea was to use a doppelganger to show all the emotions and feelings of Richard that he bottled up as a consequence to the loneliness he suffered down to bulling. But for Richard this was a friend and a tangible person, and therefore communication between Richard and his ‘friend’ was scene as weird and he was outcaste even more. We became excided about the idea and felt we could take this base in multiple directions. We firstly decided to show our work in progress to our teacher and we keen to see how the idea would look. The response we received was good and that the idea was effective in getting the attention of the audience. The advice we got was to prolong the ‘happy’ atmosphere from when they were playing together, as it would enable the audience to attract experiences in a playground they had with an image of happy children playing. So we went back to devising to incorporate teams between the children and to slow down parts of the ‘fight’ scenes between sides. The response from our final performance on this scene was good and they thought that the contrite was unexpected.
In the office scene we felt that the doppelganger could get confused as another office worker. We tried a variety of effects to draw attention to the doppelganger and the fact the convocation was all in Richards head. The first was all other members freezing while they began to talk; this was ok but was rather boring to see every time they began to talk. Another way we looked at was to give them artificial exaggerated smiles, as it would reflect the artificial life of workers set out in ‘The wasteland’ by T.S.Elliot. The final way we looked at was to have the workers flop down as if they had been switched off and to have the fake smile, this is an incorporation of both styles we had rehearsed and we used this in the final performance.
The Magic If helped us develop and construct characters for our piece and contributed to an improved performance. The Magic If is the ability to ‘imagine’ what is would be like to be in a different situation, I used to find how to walk into a office and be invisible as Richard, what I would say in response to questions. In rehearsals I looked at how I could give the most believable performance, and on the night I felt I came across as submissive and did not want to socialise as I had my friend (doppelganger). To establish this I wanted to link it from the problems suffered as a child, and us the same gestures and movements. Communicating with my doppelganger I wanted to be seen as ‘weird’ as I was actually talking to myself, as a defence mechanism to any sort of oppressive dialogue.
Speed Runs and exaggerations were used later on in the rehearsal schedule as they affected the efficiency and delivery of lines rather than alter the technique. The benefit of speed runs was that it helped motivate the group and get some energy in the rehearsals and performance. By scaling emotions, actions, movements and voice ‘larger than life’ it helped find the right level by reducing the level until it becomes clear where the right level was.
The sequences in the office scene took a lot of rehearsal time up as it was fundamental to be in sync. The idea originated from an exercise looking to display the moronic monotonous images, and we diced to bring them together in choric scene where the movements reflected the dialogue. We wanted to make the images seem more robotic and therefore we practiced this right up until our performance.
The units and objectives
