Devising Week 5

Mondays session was only short so we spent this time working on two short pieces we wanted to include later on in our piece. To bulk out our piece we are including a therapist session for Nyakeh. He will begin opening up about his issues and Matt will appear and lead them into a second Physical Theatre sequence. We discussed how we wanted Matt to appear and Nyakeh came up with the idea that Matt will sit in the audience and when its his time to enter the scene he will stand, and take small, slow steps to reach center stage where Nyakeh will be waiting. We have chosen to do this to bring the story a little closer to the audience physically and not theoretically! We want them to notice this actor has just sat next to them and then when we gets up and walks, he will remain in full actors neutral which will set the audience on edge.
This lead us on to us using masks. The masks will be used by all of us until we reach our therapist sessions. This means it will help us portray that as humans we often don't open up and release our feelings so as soon as we get to the therapist  the masks are taken off and we open up and show the audience who we really are (again physically and theoretically.)
The masks will all be identical but painted black to show that we keep all our emotions to ourselves and they pile up and create a darkness mess of contained emotions and feelings. The masks are a good way to portray a sense of secrecy to what the characters behold and that is something we want from the audience...

Mask use
The mask is worn over the face to hide the identity of a person by using its own features to create another being (commonly known as a character). Masks, over the years, have varied in appereance as in their use and symbolism. "A mask is an object normally worn on the face, typically used for protection, disguise, performance or entertainment." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mask However masks have been known to be worn all over the body and not just over the face. The image on the left is a stone mask dating back to 7000BC and is probably the oldest mask in the world.

The word mask originated from the French word 'masque' which means to cover,hide or guard the face. Masks were used in rituals and or ceremonies in ancient practise across the world. The evolution of masks has hugely changed from creating decorative masks to not be worn to masks we are most familiar with nowadays which are safety masks for machine work and in sports. More stereotypical mask use we are all familiar with now is mask use in theatre. The Greek Theatre and Chorus often used masks especially when this sort of theatre became popular. It began with street artists performing. These street artists often performed pieces that would make-fun of those higher up in the 'society tree'. The masks meant that their identity as street performers was kept private. Masks also often feature in contemporary theatre we know today with their uses varying widely.

Using masks in our piece will show the audience that we all (humans in general) keep our emotions to ourselves and find it hard to open up to anyone. The masks represent us covering up from the world and keeping everything to ourselves but when getting into the therapy sessions we begin to open up and then allow ourselves to rid the masks privacy.
    The masks will be worn until the therapy sessions which will keep our identity hidden until we take them off. This means our speech could become harder to hear for the audience as we will have our mouths slightly covered. This lead us to the idea in which we cut the masks in different ways. For example mine would be cut so the mask just covers my eyes and Hannahs mask would cover one half of her face.
We wanted them all to be the same colour (black) and have Franks mask worn only in the scenes he portrays his depression and saddness a bright white colour; to show that he puts on a front to all his clients.
I think we need to experiment with the masks to really know if we should use them or not as there are ways to show what we are trying to show through physical movements instead of the simple use of masks.


Secondly we worked for a short amount of time on a monologue/physical theatre that I will perform alone because my character is less involved in the 'love triangle' but just closely knit with Frank. Some questions we put into the equation to start my thought process off was "I really like my therapist because I hate my home life, its shit." I came up with the idea that my character is in an abusive relationship at home which began her sessions with a therapist and it escalated from then on.
This is something that we covered really briefly and I will work on building up my characters background story and will also work on the monologue/physical theatre sequence but for now we had dusted over the ideas and used the short session we had to do so.

Thirdly, we put our piece structure down on paper because we have the tendency to veer off the set ideas. So our piece begins with the all cast interviews with the police. We will have a large projection of the questions behind us and we will all be wearing the black masks. It leads straight into Hannahs therapist session and here will be where she reveals her face. After Hannahs physical theatre sequence including Matt and Nyakeh it will go into Nyakehs therapist session which is where Matt appears from the audience. My monologue/sequence fits in here. Matt's therapist session follows. Then mine and Franks argument scene,  and then reaching the end we will return to the all cast interview scene and ending with Franks suicide death scene...

For our Thursday session we only had

50 minutes to work on oir devising pieces. We wrote up some objectives to reach in this 50 minutes:

 

We wanted to focus this 50 minutes in Matt' therapist session. We began to discuss what Matts aim was and what we needed to tell the audience in this scene. We wanted Matt to be attending these sessions because of his sexuality but it became really difficult to choose how we wanted Matts character to be. We tried with a 'chavvy' cocky character and it switches to this bold character being insecure about his sexuality. This really didn't work- I think this is because it felt to much of a cliché'. We tried him as a very gay, gay guy and again this didnt work! In the end, we still hadn't settled on  a character trait for Matt' character so we all set off for the weekend with homework to create a character profile so we could come back Monday knowing more about our characters.

Homosexuality is a big thing in our world today and it always has been. It can also be a hard and touchy subject to use to entertain (in theatre) We wanted Matt to come across normal. Not overly camp because most gay men are not like that! Matt would just be this ordinary guy who happens to be gay but hiding it from his friends and family- because even in the 21st Century people still don't agree to those whom are homosexual. So this meant it was really important that yes we portray Matt as a normal. ordinary guy who is finding it hard to tell others about his sexual orientation. 

       This is why when we got Matt to act slightly camp; it really didn't work! Getting someone to act camp purely just to show the audience that he's gay has massiviley phased out and we also wanted to move away from this and their stereotypes.