Slavery mind map

I created this mind map of ideas I had about one of our ideas that came from 'Humanity in Crisis', slavery. I imagine this piece to include lots of different techniques to make it interesting, with more movement than dialogue to stop the piece from becoming too cliche.

Voice

Today we were working on using just voice, so no movement at all. Again, using one of the ideas from  our initial brainstorm, we were to create a short piece using this technique. We chose to do the Hillsborough disaster as we didn't think we would use it for our actual piece as there is not much you can do with it, but thought it would be a nice one to workshop. 
Someone suggested using our own footsteps, building up to imitate the stampede and using repeating phrases that may have come from the crowd as it was happening. After building up this repetition, letting it escalate and get louder, I thought of having just a single scream as a climax. Using the scream to silence all of the other noises worked well and then I had the idea of saying facts like the number of deaths and about the game etc. These facts were to represent the after effects and all of the news reports that would have gone on after the disaster. I think this all worked really well just using voice and was an effective way to create the atmosphere without acting it out which would not have been very realistic. 

Tuesday 15th September

We have been working on our physical theatre and contact improvisation, so we were given the task of creating a shirt piece based on one of the ideas from our brainstorm incorporating these techniques. Our group chose to do slavery as we thought this was a more general idea that would be good to workshop. We started by imitating the conditions they were kept in in the ships they were carried in, all squashed together, chained so they could not escape. 

We tried to focus on the mistreatment of them, and how little control the slaves had over each other by having two 'masters' controlling and pushing the slaves around. For the last section we thought we would use some contact improvisation. I thought we could separate off into pairs as it is easier and more effective to do contact improvisation in this way. Also I thought it would be good to show how the 'masters' could influence the other slaves and really emphasize their power even when it is not directly them doing by having the one of the slaves dominate the other in the pairs, highlighting the male power over females in that time. 

Contact improvisation

In today's lesson we were looking at contact improvisation as it is a useful technique that we may want to include in our devised piece. We started by watching a short video of a man and women doing a contemporary dance. This was to give us an example of some of the sort of steps and connections that we could use, although obviously this was more dance-like and fully choreographed. 
We got into pairs and were given a few minutes to choreograph a short piece of contact improvisation that had a story. Ellie and I decided to do a car crash, so we were almost reaching to each other at the same time as being pushed away from each other, like you would in an accident. After watching everyone's we went back and tried to add in some kind of weight transference where one person was supporting the other. 
I think after this we would find it easier to create a piece of contact improvisation although I'm not sure how good we would be at fully improvising as we are not completely confident with this skill yet. 

Contact improvisation - slavery

Tuesday 8th September

Year 13

Today we started our devising unit, starting by deciding our groups by pulling names out of a hat. This worked well as now we are with some of the people we didn't work with on the last devising unit, so hopefully we will have more ideas and get experience with working with a different group of people. 
We were given the title 'Humanity in Crisis', which is our theme for this piece. As a starter in our groups we brainstormed everything that we could think of relating to this title. 

As a group I think we came up with lots of ideas and everyone seemed to make an input which is good. Although quite a few of our ideas are to do with war or similar situations I think we should steer away from doing  war piece as it is very common and may be hard to devise, and won't look good unless it is done effectively. Now we just need to research into our initial ideas, look at them in more detail, and see if we get any further inspiration from them.