Have a good day guys :)

by George











hey, hey guys I came up with an idea..... murder scene! :O muahahahahahahhahahaha ha

Horatio's Daily Routine - Brittany Measor:

Below you cans see a link to a Google docs where the script for our 'Horatio's Daily Routine' scene is. This is a brief script as to which we can adapt to our scene appropriately. Within this scene out aim is to establish Horatio's Daily routine, how boring it is and what he is fed up of and therefore his reasoning for wanting to get rid of his identity. Our main focus is to show the audience how Horatio is fed up if his routine and how it is very predictable and boring. I will not visually be in this scene, although I will be doing the voice over in the background which will be narrating Horatio's every movement. The following people within my group will be using physical theatre to portray the following items within Horatio's flat; Rochelle portrays the television, George portrays the telephone, Lauren portrays the clock and Jack portrays the coffee machine and Danny plays the character of Horatio Freezer. Physical theatre will be playing large role within this scene as it will ensure we successfully show the audience Horatio's reasoning for wanting to lose his identity due to boredom and predictability within his life.

Horatio's Daily Routine Script

An average Morning - Danny

So I researched the Average morning for people so that we can incorporate some/all of it into the "Waking Up" scene:



Working Day:

5-7AM: Alarm goes off and they get up and out of bed.

7:20AM: Teeth are brushed and Showered (Depends on how long the person has)

7:30AM Got Dressed and Now Eat Breakfast/Read Newspaper

8AM: Head off to work.

I am thinking that we could do some sort of Physical Movement where I rapidly go through all these things within the space of around 2 Minutes.

by George



hey guys I spoke to my mates who one is in the process of GRS and the other has been through it. they said they are happy to answer any questions we have to help us if that's what you guys want.

posted by George.

THE FACTS:

Sex reassignment surgery ( is a term for the surgical procedures by which a person's physical appearance and function of their existing sexual characteristics are altered to resemble that of the other sex. It is part of a treatment for gender identity disorder/gender dysphoria in transsexual and transgender people. It may also be performed on intersex people, often in infancy and without their consent. A 2013 statement by the United Nations condemns the nonconsensual treatment of "normalization" surgery to treat intersexuality.




PHYCHOLOGY:

Gender identity disorder (GID) or transsexualism is defined by strong, persistent feelings of identification with the opposite gender and discomfort with one's own assigned sex. People with GID desire to live as members of the opposite sex and often dress and use mannerisms associated with the other gender. For instance, a person identified as a boy may feel and act like a girl. This is distinct from homosexuality in that homosexuals nearly always identify with their apparent sex or gender

Individual research - Brittany Measor;

For the scene we are creating at the moment, research about a priest is essential to ensure our scene is believable to the audience. The main focus of our scene is to establish the fact Horatio Freezer's life is easy going and he is happy now he has 'lost' his identity - the song Happy - Pharrell Williams is played over the section where Horatio is seen visiting his boss, doctor, friends and a priest; thanking them all for there help to take him to where he is today. Then the music suddenly cuts out as 'Sophie' or the new 'Horatio' enters searching for help. When Sophie reaches each of the stages she is begging for help, begging for an explanation and beginning for a reason as to why it was her. Within this scene we struggled slightly with the section including the priest, focusing on dialogue and what the priest would say back to the young girl.

Firstly, I decided to Google the definition of Priest and resulted with this;

Priest

An ordained minister of the Catholic, Orthodox, or Anglican Church, authorised to performance certain rites and administer certain sacraments. 

Secondly, I decided a simple but important question to ask would be how can you ask your priest for help; after looking through many results why page was someone who had actually done it before and there response to this. Below you can see a screen shot of this website and the information needed;

1. 
   
   
2. Now, the main thing I had to research was the language Priest's would tend to use when discussing someone else's problems or issues to help with our dialogue issues. To do this I used the Google search engine, I typed in 'What type of language do priests use?'. With this, a result that came up frequently was the use of Sacred Language. It was then defined as; As sacred language, 'Holy language' (in religious context, or liturgical language, is a language that is cultivated for religious reasons by people who speak another language in their daily life.
3. 
   
4.  I then searched for examples of sacred language that we may be able to include in our piece and if not use the influence from these lines within our piece to create our own version. The results consisted of;
5. 
   
6. Because of man's union with the Self and his unbroken knowledge of it, he is filled with joy, he knows his joy; his mind is illuminated.
7. 
   
8. There is nothing that is not spirit. The personal self is the impersonal spirit...The self is the lord of all; inhabitant of the hearts of all. He is source of all, creator and dissolver of beings. There is nothing he does not know.

He is not knowable by perception, turned inward of outward, nor by both combined. He is neither that which is known nor that which is not known, nor is he the sum of all that might be known. He cannot be seen, grasped, bargained with. He is undefinable, unthinkable, indescribable. The only proof of his existence is union with him. The world disappears in him.

Whose line is it anyway - Prop usage - Danny Savage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSxc3bi6Gho

In WLIIA they have a game mode where they get a prop and have to make use of that prop in many different ways. Instead of constantly using ourselves we should maybe bring in unusual items and try to incorporate them in our Piece.

For example:

Using a hat as a steering wheel

A toaster as an alarm clock.

This gives absurdity to the audience and also relates to our story because our character, Sophie isn't who she says she is, so neither can the objects she uses.

Week 4-Jack

So far our work began on a rocky start with several restarts and scrapping of ideas. However, we have made a good start now on our piece and used/developed previous ideas such as the work we did for initial material 3 of the U2 song "Stuck in a moment you can't get out of" put changed it to a scene where the girls are getting ready to go out for a night on the town. this scene establishes the characters and the focus on Brittany's character "Sophie". The girls get ready in front of the "mirror" which is the audience.

The second scene is at the nightclub and the queue for the nightclub. This was easily developed as we knew we needed to involve a physical theatre element and the changing of identities. We developed this scene by making a the queue line be pushed forward and the girls, in slow motion would fall onto one another and slowly move to get back up and move around each other. We incorporated Danny as the original "Horatio Freezer" who drops his ID when the girls lunge forward. Horatio seeks to lose his identity and does so by swapping it with Sophie's. Once the girls are in the club Sophie mentions the ID that is Horatio Freezers so the audience knows that there has been a swap.

Our third scene which is still in development is the office scene where the workers enter the office slowly and freeze once they have entered until Danny enters. They then start to converse and move around in a flushed state due to the chaotic work environment. This took quite a while to sort out the movements but once we finished it, it looked very good and well choreographed. The ensemble movments for the phone call is still in development as is the recorded message.

Drama games i found - Posted by Lauren

Alphabet Conversation

Have a conversation where each sentence begins with the next letter of the alphabet. This may seem difficult at first, but improves with practice. If you get stuck, you can also use sounds to start a sentence, for example 'Mmmm' or 'tut-tut'. Here is an example:

A: Anyone seen my cat?
B: Black one, with funny eyes?
A: Can't say I remember.
B: Don't tell me you've forgotten what it looks like?
A: Every cat looks the same to me.
B: Fortunately, I found one yesterday
A: Gee, that's great!

• You could also try beginning somewhere in the middle of the alphabet. Then when you reach 'Z', return to 'A' until you arrive back where you started
• Try setting the scene or location before you start
• It's great for car journeys too!

Random Sound Story

Use some random sounds as the basis for creating a story.

How Do I Play It?

Split into groups of 5 or 6.

Ask each groups to come up with a selection of random sounds - with each member making one vocalised sound.

Next, the group decides on a sequence in which these sounds are made and practices it in that order.

Each group performs it's sound sequence in turn to the whole class.

Now the groups are asked to make up a strange story in which these sounds occur.

This game is good for a plot.

Master Master, Who Am I?

A game to encourage accent, a silly voice or character to disguise your identity.

How Do I Play It?

Start in a Drama circle.

Choose one participant to be Master and to be blindfolded. Tell the Master they are to listen carefully and try to identify the owner of the mysterious voice.

Choose another member to say the words "Master, Master, Who am I?" in a different voice. The blindfolded Master has to guess who is speaking.

I think this game would be excellent to play especially as our piece is about mistaken identity.

Youtube clips from other Alevel devised pieces and a new scene i thought of -Posted by Lauren

This first link is to a devised a level piece idea is taken from the practitioner  Stephen Berkoff who we have also looked at.

A-level Drama Devised - The Unfortunate Tale of Lucy Ferr - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1Gi7tq7GLM

This piece looks at stories and narratives also the entire piece is written in rhyme. I love this piece because of the physical theater they use, the voices, the lighting and the whole rhyming to tell a narrative. Their characterisation is soo good. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ha34d0UCA4A&spfreload=10%20Message%3A%20Unexpected%20end%20of%20input%20(url%3A%20http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DHa34d0UCA4A)

Again in this piece the physical theater is soo good and i think there is soo much more we could do with our piece. 

I think at the very beginning of our piece we should have Brittany ( Sophie who loses her identity) should be sat on the floor with full colored mask on with only the lamp on and then i think the rest of us could be her transformation in flashing lights and move like her inner monsters until we surround her. Within doing this we can create light and dark, shadows and because we have done something similar to this already in our very first piece we can draw on repeating words whispering ( like we did when we took words from Stephen Berkoff's script).  

I  then think we could somehow change and then continue from the party scene as if we have gone back in time and at the very end we somehow lead to the first scene. 

Individual post by Rochelle Mistaken Identity - Comedy of Errors Stimulus

Individual post by Rochelle

Last year we focused a lot on a shakespearian play 'Comedy Of Errors' this play's main theme was Mistaken Identity and we went to see a live performance of it and it had a lot of humour incorporated into it. This play i think is a very good piece of Initial Material we can use  to help add chaos and focus a lot on the loss of a persons identity. A little bit of information.

Right a quick summary - two twins separated at birth, don't know they're twins. One is rich (Antipholus of Ephesus) with a servant  (Dromio of Ephesus) and one (Antipholus of Syracuse) is working class with a servant. ( Dromio of Ephesus) As you can guess they both get mixed up in each other's lives, the poor one  breaking off his brothers marriage, messing up money issues , there is even mix ups with the servants as they all have been given the same first names. Originally there weren't the two servants but they were added for humour for an Elizabethan Audience. After watching Comedy of Errors I think it's an excellent piece to  use as stimulus for our mistaken Identity Piece and see where it takes us!

Here is a link to a spark notes website with all the info on the play if you'd like to read some of it or look at themes or notes and stuff!

http://m.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/errors/summary.html

Inidvidual Post by Rochelle Week 4 - Starting our final piece

Post by Rochelle -
Productive work in week 4 - Tuesdays lesson was very effective, we've managed to come up with the theme of mis-identity. Having the main character Sophie go out on a drunk night and have her ID's switched creating a new name for her/himself "horashio Frashier" and so far we've managed to link it to previous pieces that we've created in the past few weeks. Also linking in different styles of theatre such as Naturalism, Physical Theatre, Complicite and Absurdity; also I think we decided on including the audience an breaking the fourth wall. I've included some photos from our Facebook group to show how we work and have been communicating well with each other to develop and adapt our piece.
H
   B y

 A few photos from Rehearsals -



For sweds we hve to be able to write about specific initial material 'U2 -stuck in a moment' and how we developed it and because we had the stuck in a moment thing we should drag out that first scene to focus on the individual stories which leads an opening for side characters in the following scenes for example making it more focused on Jamie's babysitter and her being stuck to her phone and more questions about My relationship. Also more focus on girl mirror time to show the audience Sophie's "Brittany" character to get her liked by the audience!
We'll talk about it all on Thursday but I'm gonna google mis identity performances and see if we can get some stylistic ideas!

Narrative structure.- posted by Lauren.

A Narrative structure is a literary element described as the structural framework that underlies the order and manner in which a narrative is presented to a reader, listener, or viewer. The narrative text structures are the plot and the setting. Most movies and plays are written in the form of a narrative structure. Narrators tend to appear throughout media and society. Even the newspapers need a narrative structure.
In films narrative is most common in fiction films, but however they can appear in all sorts of films.
A narrative tells an ordered scene of events connected by the logic of cause and effect.

Exposition: Meeting the characters, establishing the setting, setting the tone.

Rising action: The central conflict is introduced and the tension between the protagonist and the antagonist begins to mount.

Climax: The climax is the turning point, which marks a change, for the better or the worse in the protagonists future.

Failing action: The major action has happened, so its the aftermath.

Resolution: The conflict is resolved.

Naturalism Notes - Danny

What is naturalism?

Naturalism is when you act as if you are in the natural world, with no physical Theater breaking of the 4th wall etc.

"Naturalism is a movement in European drama and theater that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It refers to theater that attempts to create a perfect illusion of reality through a range of dramatic and theatrical strategies: detailed, three-dimensional settings (which bring Darwinian understandings of the determining role of the environment into the staging of human drama); everyday speech forms (prose over poetry); a secular world-view (no ghosts, spirits or gods intervening in the human action); an exclusive focus on subjects that are contemporary and indigenous (no exotic, otherworldly or fantastic locales, nor historical or mythic time-periods)" -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_%28theatre%29


Plays that use Naturalism:

• A Bitter Fate (1859)
• A Doll's House (1879)
• The Power of Darkness (1886)
• The Father (1887)
• Miss Julie (1888)
• Creditors (1889)
• Drayman Henschel (1898)

i feel - Posted by Lauren

As a group i think we work really well and come up with some fab ideas but however saying this i think we have too many ideas and not enough time to try them all out. I think we should all take a turn to express our ideas and see which we like best and rather than talk for agessss like we do , we should just try it. Devising is all about trying things out.
I also feel we should stop pausing through performances... purely because we do it alot and i sometimes feel like we waste time.

However saying all that we have come up with some great ideas and fab performances, and i think we know where were heading :).

My drama book of knowledge- created and posted by Lauren

Here are some pictures of the drama book of knowledge i created on some professional drama groups. I thought we could have a look at these and use them within our work.

Nonsensical dialogue

Other works of Nonsensical language -Posted by Jack Mower

Recently I became more interested in the use of nonsensical dialogue and have tried to find other examples in non-play based pieces such as books, music and films. Some example in Music are songs such as "I'm blue" by Eiffel 65 which contains the lyrics "I'm Blue da bee dee da ba die" as the chorus of the song. and the song  Numa Numa by O-zone uses nonsensical words for the beginning and other verses. Many other songs use another form of words or rather another genre called Scat which is the vocal improvisation using wordless vocals and nonsensical language but still fitting with the rhythm of the song. This is an interesting effect which is usually associated with Blues and Jazz music.

In Television shows there are many characters and whole series based on nonsensical dialogue. The Sooty Show or Sooty and Sweep have either no language like Sooty or squeaks for Sweep and yet the other character Puppet and Human alike can both understand these two no matter what noises they make. The television series Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men is similar to this as Bill and Ben didn’t use words or if they did it was intermixed with random words and noises yet some characters such as the Sunflower called Weed could understand them and have a conversation with them often helping them in need. Many children’s shows also have nonsensical dialogue such as the teletubbies saying very little and most of it is random babble. An older show that involved noises rather than words was Clangers. The series was about mice-like creatures that live on the moon, speak in whistles and eat soup given by the soup dragon. This show was extremely popular and is believed to be making a comeback for a new generation as well. While many plays are slated by the critics for the use of nonsensical language and absurdist shows like these are still popular, maybe due to the target audience of children but it has worked in other ways too.

In literature this has worked well. Roald Dahl and Dr. Seuss both use unusual and nonsensical words in his works especially in Seuss’ case. Dahl does this in his works the BFG where the BFG uses strange words to describe things such as Whizzpoping as a word for flatulence. Dr. Seuss uses nonsensical words in a majority of his works. A poem that is nonsensical is the Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll with lines such as “his Vorpal sword went snicker snack… he went galumphing back” the poem is in the sequel to Alice’s adventures in wonderland and a significant amount of the book is also nonsensical.

Nonsensical language and characters are seen in film as well. The most numerous amount of nonsensical characters are the minions in Despicable me 1 + 2. These yellow creatures have very few words but make nonsense speech to one another and yet understand this as does the main character Gru. These films are again targeted at children and as comic character but are still used to a great effect in both films showing different emotions and situations well without using real words. 

Individual post by Rochelle SCRIPT

My thoughts - Lauren.

As a group we used non sensicle dialogue as a way of communicating with the audience. I feel it went really well as it not only added humour to our performance but also added frustration and made the audience think they had no idea what was going on.

I also liked the way we used ammersive theatre- having the audience involved in our piece as our Jury.
The use of animals in our piece and the story line of a petty crime makes a clear comment about

the legal system and the fairness of the law. The animals could also make a statement about how people are treated in society.

finally I like the way as a group we looked back on what we have done before and took ideas and developed them further, for example ( characters, physical theatre, non sensicle dialogue).



Posted By Lauren

waiting- Created as a group, posted by Lauren

23 September 2014.

Over the past week or so, our stimulus was 'waiting'. Waiting for either something literal, or metaphorical.

Our second stimulus based on the idea of 'waiting' was part of a text from the play 'The Trial' by Stephen Berkoff. Each member of our group picked a word we liked from the text.. they were; Law, Hope, Deceived, 'The world is growing darker', and 'there is no door and there is no entrance'. From this we then used constraints to help us start out piece. We picked 5 constraints including; Silence, a joker, ensemble, change of focus and physical theatre. The main idea we came up with was order and chaos and how in life there are rules that society have to abide by, there is no escape.
As a group we all combined lots of different ideas until we found a couple that we really liked, we then took this and rather than talk about every little detail, we just got on with it and experimented with the ideas and trying new things out.
We eventually came up with the idea of Soldiers to start with and how when someone does something wrong it changes the course of the future.
In the beginning scene, we are all stood in a line as Soldiers. Our leader (George) is giving us a rule (salute) that we all have to follow/abide by. However when it comes to one of the soldiers turn (Danny) he doesn't do the correct procedure and is immediately the focus  and belittled by everyone else who stares at him before the Commander/leader shouts "No" and we all fall to floor as if we have been shot and killed in action.
In the next scene of our performance we rise from the floor whispering the words "the world is growing darker" repeatedly and surround Danny representing the dark, we push him with a metaphorical power , perhaps showing the "wait for death", we also mention "there is no door and there is no entrance" to show how isolated and trapped society is. We then used one of our constraints "Change the focus". Jack and Danny then swap places whilst the dark world (i.e: everyone else) circles around them clicking to add suspension, this takes the focus of Danny and onto Jack.
In the last and final scene we all came up with the idea of setting up a family home where we await our soldier (brother, dad, son) to come home from the war. In this scene we all use non sensible dialogue, this is to frustrate the audience however at the same time draw them in for the big twist at the end.

Our performance has a lot of the practitioner Beckett's absurd theatre style as we use some of his devices like; Non sensible dialogue, Reflection of treatment by society, repetition, and use of pause. I think our group found it hard not to talk about what we wanted to do for too long, however saying this we worked as a group and pulled together and came out with a great idea and a great performance. what worked for us is we all had an idea, we all had something to incorporate which was great. However what didn't work so much is that we sometimes tend to get side tracked and loose focus.

Posted by Lauren.