Messing Around

So this week in drama we messed around, and had really good fun.

Its okay though, the reason we were playing was to devise. We spent the first part of wednesday morning's lesson working out the "conventions" of Bloody Mess and Forced Entertainment. Once we had done this we spent the second half of the lesson "playing". I was terrified when I first got into the room, I was like looking around for something to save me or for someone else to tell me what to do. I think I must have the loudest "policeman in my head" ever, as I permanantely worry about what I'm doing. So playing to devise is like one of my worst nightmares. However, that is probably one of my best lessons ever. I really did get a lot out of it, I know I started later on, I had to wait for Richard and Spencer to begin before I felt it safe to start. I did see a lot of myself in maria, she seemed uncomfortable and exactly how I expected myself to behave, but I shocked myself and had a go, and had fun. We also got a lot out of this devising process, we learnt about characters, movement and key things we could include in our piece.

I found this in drafts and don't have much of a clue as how it was there and never got published. I don't think I am particularly good with blogging, I find that words come easier when typing rather than writing but that I put it off more or something comes up or I forget, I think having a book in my hand is a solid reminder that I have something to do. I also find it difficult to bold words that stand out, but when I do re read my work I read it all so I don't know if my lack of highlighting words is a problem or not.

Our last week at school was a difficult one, as due to snow Maria wasn't able to make it to all but one lesson. So on the tuesday lesson we did a bit of round table analysis and discussed our characters. I found this time very useful, we decided that our characters would have an exaggerrated quality that we have, for example Spencers wandering and eating or Marias slightly controlling/aiming for perfection thing. As I'm playing a James Bond type villian while I wouldn't normally be like bad it's because while I expected to hate this new way of devising I didn't, so I'm sort of bringing out a contradiction/opposite in my personality with my character.

On the wednesday lesson we did some devising on the structure of our piece and the bits we are going to put in, then we filmed about half an hour of our rehearsal to show Maria. I found the film useful to look back on and it has kept all the thoughts that we had while devising fresh in my mind through the holidays. The film is basically us showing Maria what is going to happen and when, and who's going to be where and stuff. We have kept the line up idea like we saw in 'Bloody Mess', so we are going to all introduce ourselves to the audience and explain the character we will be playing etc. We are also going to use Maria's character to play with the audience and get them involved, something we will work on more throughout the piece as I think audience interaction was a key theme/idea for Forced Entertainment.

On friday we finally had Maria back, and instead of starting straight away we sat down as an ensemble and discussed our thoughts on the video. While Maria had been away we had worked on her character, which without her was difficult, and we put down out thoughts into the video which she then watched. We kind of made her into a bossy doninatrix type character and used the fact that she did not like the messing around devising and we used a comment she had used in her blog as a joke. Maria took the joke the wrong way and so posted about it in the facebook group, I talked to her about it before the lesson to check everything was okay and then we discussed it as a group. It is the first time that there has been a misunderstand within the group, and I think the only reason it really happened was becuase we weren't there altogether. We are a close group and I think we're good friends as well and wouldn't ever want to offend. it's all good now and I'm itching to get back to school to work on our piece, and showw off my acid test, which I'm quite proud of.

Georgia Stanley