Curious Incident Day 12

The main focus of our lesson today was to try and create the noises and rush of a London street. So far, we have only focused on creating places or objects without focusing on sounds or movement to make it look more realistic. We split the class in half and each had around 20 minutes or so to try and replicate a busy London street. My group liked the idea of having our Christopher in the middle and we move around him, embodying various objects you would find in London. For example I pretended to be a taxi, we also had sirens, roadworks, street acts and so on. However, we were finding it hard to create the hassle as we didn't have enough people. However, we had the base of the idea and the beginning of a soundscape.

We watched the other groups performance and they had gone for a similar idea to us. They had a soundscape of shouting, quick moving and so on. But, they did have a nice idea when everyone slows down and goes quite with someone approaching Christopher and asking him a question, before speeding off again. We eventually fused out two ideas together, making noises, running around and so.

Christopher in London - creating the street

In terms of developing my own skills I feel that the soundscape helped us identify weaknesses in our ability to convey realistic scenes and so on. By creating this I have managed to grasp the idea that not just acting goes into a performance, but thinking and believing objects are there, the sounds and sights, reactions to various scenes. As an actor, I have to be able to do all of this to make a scene as realistic as possible as our play requires no props.

I think our final scene was very successful, it looked original and embodied a London street scene perfectly. I believe I behaved professionally, I worked quickly, contributing ideas and helping out whilst listening to others. However, one weakness in the performance is that it isnt particularly revised much. We all know to be running around making noise, but there are no queues or timings for when we slow down or when we go to Christopher to push him over, which was evident when i had to rush over.

In terms of developing the production further I believe we have to give as much energy as we did in this soundscape into the other scenes in which we create things. For example, noises in Swindon or the train station, to not only capture the audience visually, but audibly as well, to bring our performance to life.