Rent week 5

This week we sang through seasons of love working out who sings who and working out the harmonies for everyone to make sure it sounded as good as it can be. We then worked on Tangp Maureen for a while to make sure that everyone knew what they were doing. We then had our production meeting discussing who is in charge of what. I'm making the posters and programmes . We decided that we should keep the show as original as possible whilst putting our own twist on things. We decided to have our audience in cabaret style seating making it a less formal setting and having separate stages round the audience aswell. We could use these for Chriatmas bells when the scene onstage is changing

Rent week 4

This week we have worked on the number "Tango Maureen". We got taught a dance which I had trouble with at first as I missed him teach the first part to us because I was trying to get my partner to actually feel comfortable doing the dance. I felt like that I have now picked up the dance from going through a couple of times and is now just the challenge of eveyone getting the walks around the stage in perfect time with the music. We then went through this again next lesson correcring the timing and then went through "life support" and "Will I?" only using backing tracks. I think I have the timing for "Will I?" right and now just need to rehearse to get the singing right especially as the range of the song is quite big.

Tuesday 20th October

Today we continued on our movement piece that we have been working on and added in quotes and a small contact improvisation part. I think that the main parts we need to work on is our timing so the piece can be as effective as possible and the actual characters that each person has as I feel like at the moment they are coming across as random people rather than actually people who have used and abused these girls in different ways.

Picture inspiration

This is the set of "curious incident of the dog in the nighttime" where I think the idea that they are constantly sat on stage and watching the action and then just stand up to perform the character that they are. They could also just be able to hand out a prop to the characters onstage. They also put on various accessories for each character as a costume to be able to change character quickly whilst still seeing a clear difference between the characters. It's also easier to do simpler actions and then sit down again rather than go on and off stage. We would be performing in traverse rather than in the round though as it would suit our piece much more.



I think the use of floor projection of various quotes for our piece could be used so that not only can the audience tell that the scene has move on. It would also make it more hard hitting if we include facts and statistics. I don't think that we should change these quotes on the floors too much though as they could become distracting. I think that they need to be in contrast to the colour of whatever the stage will look like, I feel like they should be with full opacity rather than see through to make them stand out more.



I think that the use of dim lighting should be used a lot in our piece because it's quite a dark piece. This will also allow us to use spotlight on each character to show emphasis if they feel lonely and the fact that they have nowhere to go showing the crisis they are in. Also, we can dramatically change the lighting when something significant happens.



I think this is an inspiration quote because it shows that woman are being held back in the world and I think that we should address this issue and then put this quote on the floor with who said it
 to get the pint across more. I think that we can now use this quote for woman rights as it shows everyone's a team but haven't been able to be one because half aren't being allowed to even though we're all even.

Human trafficking

This is our human trafficking piece that we started today

https://youtu.be/sOLiAprOcV0

I think that it looks good especially with the grabbing and how we lift Ellie up and almost drop her. I just think that we just need to finish it off and make sure that everybody is aggressive with their movement towards her and not too soft or nice.

Rent week 3

We started this week by doing a run through of everything that we have done so far. We then continued on setting the opening of Rent. I'm glad that we haven't made it too dancy because I think that Rent as a musical as a whole shouldn't have that much dancing in it but the dance bit that we have put in suits the piece really well. This will help the audience stay interested rather than just watch people singing. We then moved onto "Life Support and "Will I?" which are about an AIDS support  meeting.  The two songs aren't very long but aren't the easiest songs to sing as in "Will I?", there's lots of overlapping. I start this number off on my own and I think with some practice, I could do this number confidently. I just need to work on the last note that I keep cracking on.

Future Conditional inspiration

Below is a clip of an interview from the show future conditional where we had the idea that there would be a theme rather than a story to our piece. I think that the fact that the stories can then vaguely link with it still making senese. I think that it would be better if we didn't try too hard to link all of the stories together as I think that it could end up with it being a bit too fake rather than it looking natraul.

https://youtu.be/iVmWnFdRd4I

Thursday 15th October

Today we discussed all of our ideas that we have so far and then discussed to see if anyone had any more ideas and we looked at pictures onto some more pictures to find out more about the horrible situation that is happening. We then took inspiration from a video of a movement piece that we saw and began to think about a dance that we could put in so we have a variety of techniques used to tell the story and the audience won't get bored of just us acting. We then decided that we would change our whole theme/concept of the piece to women rights looking at various issues of women rights itself. This also meant that any previous scenes that we did could be kept in and could link t o the new idea that we had. Our different story lines should include: refugees, Human trafficking, soldiers, suffragettes and arranged marriage.

Monday 12th October

Today we worked on researching stories for a refugee idea that we had. We found the picture below that shows a dead child on the beach:

This then inspired us to find more stories to see what we could put in and make our piece more about women rights rather than just about two woman. I found the story below in the lesson. We didn't do any practical work as we were finding stories and presenting them to the group.
https://vimeo.com/5092423

Black Watch

On the Blackwatch play, it shows the theme of soldiers that we may be doing. I like the idea of the fact we can use flashbacks with the piece. I think that we could also have it that the way they are able to transfer scenes really smoothly. I'm still not sure about this because we may not want to rush into the scenes too much otherwise the audience may get confused and may not understand what is going on. I think it would have to be done right. It also has an idea for an interviewer who comes in and question what goes on. I think that we could instead have a councilor and the flashbacks can be from the story that he tells from his past to the councilor. I also thought that we could use some of the slow motion mixed with the music that they do along with a monologue although this could still work well in shorter bursts for shorter amount of time.

https://youtu.be/LVzHw979gHY

Idea 3

Another idea that we had for our piece is that we could do a soldier idea that we could show two different woman, one traditional where they stay at home and one modern day and show the difference that they have. This would be set in modern day with the wife being stuck at home doing everything for the husband and the woman soldier  being on her own without needing anybodies help and gets to be independent. We had an idea that we would have short scenes for each part of the day which will be different for these women with them having complete different days. I think we could show the emotional impact each of these women have. Even though they do different things, they're lives are still stressful and one has to please her husband whilst the other has the stress of being in the army all the time. I think this can be expanded on and it a great idea as it shows women rights

Rent week 2

This week we have gone through"La vie boheme". We spent a whole lesson going through the words for this as it is a tricky song with lots of  unusual words and tricky sentences that are hard to say, let alone sing. I think that the song is challenging but is actually really fun to sing.

We then added movement next lesson making it come to life more. I just think that we now need to perfect it to make sure it has the effect its meant to have on the audience. The song is really good with movement an I think that it will be one of my favorites, if not my favorite song of the show

Idea 2

We created an idea to do a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in a freeze frame and if we put this in the piece we would have to expand it by maybe using multiple freeze frames and I hope that we carry this on because if we can expand this, I think this could be very good as it fits in with our stimulus very well and is a subject that more people should know about. I was thinking that if this was our idea, we could show the whole story with the person suffering from this to have a full flashback. It could start with the promises that he could be lied to as a soldier and then him going into the army building up in the ranks and then a tragic accident happening. This could then lead to him being promised help but then him being torn away from his family. This could be done through multiple techniques like movement, scripted, freeze frame or flashbacks. I think that that the flashback could be done by another actor with the person now being older and being alone with nobody to help him.

Below are some diagrams of our ideas when we were deciding what stage to have. We decided to go traverse in the end as it was easier to stage things where everyone could see. The red circle are the cast members with the audience being the green circles. The green were set behind in traverse to make it easier for the cast to get to stage.

In the round

Traverse

Idea 1

As our stimuli is humanity in crises we thought that we could do about slaves as slaves are quite a big issue for in the world right ow and have been for centuries. The fact that it impacts the whole world, it shows that its humanity rather than just a couple of people as it can affect everyone in some way. The idea we had was that slaves are battling for survival against their controller and the fact that they can’t be broken when it’s just two of them but when they team up together they are able to get over the controller and stop being repressed by him. I think that we could put this into our piece but we would have to stretch this out quite a bit as it’s only a movement piece at the moment that last for a couple of minutes. An alternative to this could be to have a couple of different stories mixed into one. I think that this won’t be the best idea we could go for as you won’t be able to expand on this too much but I feel like we could be able to link this in with other ideas if we find a common theme with this type of performance.

Thursday 8th October

Today we thought that it would be a good idea to start to discuss the difference between woman and wife and thought that the best way to show this would be cross cutting. I thought that this would work well only if we had suitable lighting to go with this to highlight all of the action that is going on. We all thought of individual stories that we could do. I came up with the idea of that they could just talk to the children like in the play that we saw in London (future conditional). I then thought that the bag could just be given to one of the actors that are sitting in the audience. We thought that it would be a good idea to have both of the women to be taalking to a friend talking to each other. Then we changed the dialougue as it sounded much more like a monologue than a dialogue with friends. I think that our group need to plan out dialogue more rather than come up with it spontaniously as it never actually works and doesn't sound good.

Response to stimuli

I think that the stimuli that we have been given is very inspiring as we have been able to have multiple ideas and I feel like that it is very broad. I don't think our group will struggle with finding ideas that we could do, I think the struggle may be converting ideas into something that is presentable so we can have a good performance and making a point in our piece rather than just something that doesn't make a point.

Tuesday 6th October

Today we tried our piece in traverse. I think that this works better than in the round because you can do more with this because there are less angles that you would be worried about when it comes to audience. This also means that we can still make the audience feel part of the action like they are sitting in a board room with the two people having a debate with. We have also included a movement piece for everyone at the sides who are in the audience, that was originally meant for the two actors who were speaking to do making it more effective and making more sense as the argument was a naturalistic argument. We also changed the dialogue so that it didn’t sound so much like a debate with politicians, rather more than one with two people in a board room talking about this subject making it less formal.

I think that this scene is now much more effective and makes more sense as well and the movement piece that showed what each gender was doing has changed for the better. It is now shorter showing what happens with each gender in shorter way at separate times and makes more sense for the audience and I don’t think that they’ll be confused which gender to watch as they are now done at separate times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=yLbXA4ncIHE

Starting Rent

This week we started on our next production of "Rent the Musical". We have decided that we won't be doing the full musical because it is too long to do in a short amount of time as we have to do the performance before Christmas. So far we have set the closing to act 1 which is la vi boheme. We have decided that everyone can chip in and put their opinion in on what we can do. This means we're more then just characters.

 We have also set the opening number "Rent" using various props that will then emulate the loft that Mark and Roger live in. We also put basic choreography into it at one point aswell. This all goes on behind mark and Roger so they are still the main focus of the scene

Thursday 1st October

Today we tried our performance in "In the round" to see if we could get this to work so that they are like a boardroom. This turned out to be very difficult because we struggled to make it realistic with "In the round" because this means that at least one person will be able to see something making stage combat really hard and we then eventually thought that we had to cut out any combat out as it would look really unrealistic. After trying this for the whole lesson and struggling to make it realistic, we decided that "In the round" was not an option because of the struggle of the round stage and how we could make it realistic for everyone.