Education - character profile

In our devised piece we all play a teacher (each with different characteristics) for the meeting scenes and then we each play either a student or teacher in the classroom scenes. 

Teacher - in the meeting I play the teacher who leads and starts the meeting but she sometimes struggles to control the rest of her colleagues. She is quite well spoken and in her early thirties so has been a teacher for about ten years, so has a fair amount of experience.  She expects a certain amount of respect from the teachers but also thinks that they're in put into issues in the school are important, hence why she called the meeting to discuss education. As a teacher she is worried about the current state of education so brings up Michael Gove's statement to start a discussion to get their opinions and advice. 

I imagine her to dress much like this, with a smart pencil skirt and white shirt with a colourful cardigan to make it more casual. These are sensible work clothes and would be comfortable and smart for being in all day and allow her to move around the classroom. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Education - staging

We have decided to do our piece in traverse as it creates more of an atmosphere for the audience and allows them to get closer to what's going on. I think traverse will also make it more interesting as they are seeing things from different points of view, and in the classroom scenes feel more a part of what is going on. We spent quite a while decided whether to have the audience at the front and back of the hall or long ways but decided this way would give us more performance space and allow the audience to see more. 

For the first classroom scene which is based on a Victorian setting we originally set it with all of the desks uniformly facing the front, in a 2,1,2 formation with the teacher at the front. After trying it out in the actual performance space with the seating in place we decided the audience would see more if we had the students facing in towards each other apart from Kyle in the centre who would still face the teacher.  

In our last classroom scene which is supposed to represent what would happen if we brought stricter punishments into education. It is supposed to be a very formal set so we decided to have all of the desks facing forward and in orderly rows, so you can only see our profiles. This creates the tense atmosphere that we want for this scene and in forces the rigidity of the rules in the classroom. Removing the fifth desk from the centre of the classroom also gives us more room to manoeuvre around the desks and for Dan to eventually be tazered on to the floor. 

For the meeting scenes we have decided to keep the set the same so it is a constant thing to come back to, making it clear when time changes. We have decided to have the meeting held around a table which we use our desks to create to make it realistic. As we are doing our piece in traverse we thought it would be good to have a round table to that everyone could see at least three people's faces from where they were. Having the round table also meant we could all see each other and react to what each other was saying. 

Evaluation

On Tuesday 15th December we performed our devised piece that we had created around the topic of education.

During the devising process we were quite organised, I think this was partly due to the fact that one of our group members was going to be off for two weeks near the end of the process. Although this was frustrating in a way, not being able to properly rehearse for two weeks,  it did make us plan ahead. We managed to get all of our movement pieces done before he went away as we could not do them with a person missing. This left us with two weeks to work on and finish each of our scripts for the meeting scenes and perfect the details of our performance like costumes and transitions that we could do with Dan's input over the phone. So overall I think we cam to the performance day well prepared and ready to perform, just with some of our tech to perfect. 

The structure of our piece really worked with the topic of education, helping to break up the sections of actual school scenes and meetings so the performance did not become boring. As a topic I feel it had the potential to become slightly dull as it is something we encounter every day, but this was good as it challenged us to consciously think about making it interesting to watch and trying to portray it in a way that engaged the audience and made them think. I really like how we created our crept to discuss a possible outcome for education in the future, with different eventualities for each scene, which got us into each classroom scene which then created visually what we had just been talking about. This as well as helping with the transitions between scenes made it clear to the audience what was going on in each classroom scene and linked the meetings with them making the piece more of a whole range instead of two pieces just spliced together. 

Something I think we could have improved were the transitions between the classroom and meeting scenes. We did not give much thought to the transitions until we started doing full run throughs. As part of our piece we relied heavily on each having a desk and chair. These are then used to create all of the different classroom scenes and then a circular table for our meeting scenes. Moving both a desk and chair by yourself is not the easiest of things and does not happen very quickly, especially when they have to be set out in a certain way, therefore we decided on a few things to make the transitions more uniform and look more professional. Firstly we decided to move the desks before the chairs and then added a piece of music to be played while we moved everything to disguise the noise. I think the music was a very good idea as it removed any awkward silence when we were moving things, it also gave us more time to create the scenes as we did not have to rush. 

A part of our performance that I think went really well is the dialogue. We spent quite a lot of time going over and perfecting our scripts, asking various teachers for advice on how an actual meeting would go. I think this meant that our scripts were quite accurate as to how teachers would talk in a meeting. We  recreated the final scene quite a few times, thinking carefully about how a real argument would unfold, also tweaking parts of it to make it funny which I think we did in the end without it becoming too inappropriate.

For our meeting scenes we had to create a different teacher character for each member of our group. We tried to think of all of the different types of people you could have, for example bossy, young, arrogant, rude, lazy etc.  I think the different characters we decided on really complemented each other and also helped a lot when we were trying to creat the scenes as we could bounce off of each other. For example we had Dan as and older teacher who was arrogant and felt that he was superior to everyone else at the meeting which created a slight comedic feel which was nice to have as well as causing tension between the teachers which helped us build up to the end scene. Kyle’s character was a newly qualified, young teacher whose opinion was therefore not highly respected and so struggles to get his point across and becomes irritable which again adds to the tension. Lastly Ashley’s character who was one of the most important, although he only entered in the last scene, was the late teacher turning up at the end of the meeting. I think the creation of all these characters worked really well for our piece and helped to create a realistic atmosphere and make it entertaining to watch. 

We tried to keep our set basic as it was only there to set the scene initially and needed to be adaptable for the different scenes. We decided to use exam desks as these would clearly emulate a classroom as well as being easy to move around when we needed to change the scene. We did think about bigger desks but decided this would make it harder to change the layout of the classroom and may make the space look empty. Using the desks to then create a circle to give the impression of a circular meeting table, creating a realistic setting for the meeting. I am very happy with how our set actually turned out, I think the tables were very effective considering how simple it was. It worked very well to make it clear to the audience that the setting had changed although I think we could have thought of an easier way to move the desks and chairs together, like having extra people to help us move them. 

One thing I think we could have improved was our use of different medias. Although we did use a brief PowerPoint I think we could have used more videos and things on the projector to add to our piece. For example during the meetings scenes when Dan was speaking about the cane and discipline in Victorian schools we could have projected a short video about Victorian school while we were transitioning create the Victorian atmosphere and also give the audience more to watch. Also we had discussed having a virtual teacher during the futuristic strict school which I think was a good idea but we didn’t use it in the end. 

At the beginning of the process we came up with lots of different initial ideas that we wanted to explore. We really liked the idea of doing a piece related to drug use and so experimented creating a couple of short mainly movement pieces inspired by this. I think we could have done more to incorporate and adapt the things we created into our education piece as they would have fit well with the movement theme for the classroom scenes. 

Compared to our last devised piece I think it is a lot more mature and developed in the actual idea and execution. We spent more time looking into possibilities for what we could do and didn't get carried away with one idea, like our last devised piece, and then run out of ideas for creating. Our previous devising piece was very disorganised and our group got very distracted very quickly, where as this time we were organised and managed to create a piece we were all happy with.