Evaluation

After weeks of creating and rehearsing we have finished and performed our final devising piece. In the end, we created a ‘mission impossible’ style piece with added drama and twists. In our dystopian world where everyone is watched and controlled by the elusive Jamie, a group of rebels work to take her down, but it ends with a twist and Jamie is revealed as the leader of the rebels, Sam. After a mass shooting Ruby ends up killing Sam and becomes the new controller of the people, but with no rules except live life to the full.

I found it difficult at the start of this project. As devising is not something I am used to I didn't really know where to begin thinking of ideas, other than looking at the song ‘Chasing Pavements’ and the music video that we were shown in class. However after discussing various ideas with my group and thinking more into what else the title could mean, instead of thinking literally, I began to have more ideas about completely different things we could do. The first idea we started devising for, the horror based game, started off well but as we tried to come up with what to do next we realised any idea we had was very similar to a film, and so we decided to scrap that idea. I think this is a good example of how we worked well as a group to make decisions and get on with the task without wasting time.

During the process I thought we were quite organised with planning what was to go into the piece and what would happen in the story. A down side to this is we did spend quite some time just planning which took away from time when we could have been creating, which I think would have helped with developing ideas and seeing what worked and what needed changing. Another thing that held us back was, as a group, we were rather inclined to getting distracted and not getting as much done in lessons as we could have done. In the future to prevent this it would be a good idea to create a rehearsal schedule so we did not have time to get distracted.

Another thing we could have improved is the amount of fighting within our piece. After running the whole play and performing to our audience it became apparent that there was a lot of stage combat, some of which was not needed and seemed to just be there for the sake of more action, but it did not necessarily add the atmosphere of the piece. Also some of the stage combat was not very stylish or accurate so did not look as good as it could have, we should have worked more to make it look realistic. This would have made the sections of fighting better to watch and reduced any comical parts within it.

My favorite parts of our performance were the movement parts as they were the smoothest parts in my opinion and fitted the best with our style as there was no cheesiness or comedy involved. We were good at creating these movement pieces and with the different talents in our group it was easy to pick good music and create the movement to go with it. With our more dance based movement piece I think people could have practiced more to get it perfect, especially those who are not that confident with dance as I think some timing issues detracted a bit from the effect of it.

The ending of our story was very important and so we spent quite a lot of time on it. I was very happy with our final ending. We experimented with about three different endings and after deciding an idea was either too cheesy or just not very good we quickly got onto the next idea. Again this shows how we worked well as a team coming up with different options and ideas when something was not working, and not wasting time dwelling on an idea but getting on with creating a better one. Our final ending worked well to bring the whole story to an exciting and surprising end, and hopefully shocked the audience, keeping their attention to the end of the performance.

Some of the feedback from our audience was that they did not feel a connection to the characters, so when they were killed at the end of the piece they did not feel any empathy and so it was not as effective as it could have been. I think if we had had more time and the performance was longer, we could have gone into more detail for each character and developed them as people, making the audience connect to them, but this would have added substantially to the length of the piece. The short monologues we had in the night scene of our piece were the start of character development, but I feel we could have incorporated these throughout the play rather than all at the same point as it was rather basic and a bit boring as a scene, I think most of the audience stopped paying attention as the back stories also became quite similar.

From the start of creating our piece we knew the costumes and kind of props we wanted. I think this helped when we were creating as we could imagine what it would look like and we could choreograph around the props that we knew we were going to have. Carl did a really good job with the guns, I feel they really added to the futuristic feel of our piece and helped make the time when it was set clear, as well as them being effective and simple to look at, adding a bit of depth to the piece as most of our costumes were black so the silver added some dimension, but still in keeping with the dark style.

During the rehearsal process our group did not use the actual performance space to rehearse in until the week of the performance. This made it quite hard when it came to the real performance as we had not had time in the space to practice entrances or exits. As a result the transitions between scenes were not as clean as they could have been and the performance was not as professional as it could have been. In the future I think we should make more of an effort to have the performance space so we can used to it and use the whole of it as much as we can. Also our lighting did not work as it was supposed to, due to unclear lighting cues. To prevent this we will have to have more of the group checking the lighting and not assuming that the person doing it actually knows how to create them.

Overall I think we needed to develop our piece more, working more on the characters rather than the actual story. I feel we needed to take more risks and not just stick to what we know works; this would have added more excitement and differentiation to our piece. We stuck to techniques we are used to using, like movement and physical theatre, but I think we should have thought more outside of the box and come up with even more ideas to make our piece different. Saying that I think we worked really well as a group at sharing and compromising on ideas, trying to incorporate everyone’s input, and so there were no arguments or disagreements within our group which helped us perform more as an ensemble than as separate performers.