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.