Curious Incident: Day Eleven

We began rehearsals today with an exercise. This exercise was to walk around the room, but re living our journey to school for that day, really paying attention to every detail we saw, like how many houses we saw, what was on the houses, how many cars were there or what was the weather like. Trying to remember every detail was particularly difficult as we later discussed that everything we tend to remember normally affects us, and the things our brain doesn't absorb is normally information we do not need nor does it affect us, like how many cars past me this morning, it simply isn't needed. This task was in aid of us being able to understand the details Christopher would take in, for example, he would know how many cars past him, maybe even their colour in order. Where we would give a rough time of leaving our house, he would know the time precisely. This exercise was useful, as when acting out scenes with hardly any props and creating specific places or objects using our bodies, we really need to pay attention to detail to make our performance encapsulate the audience, so that they know exactly what we are creating, whether that be a train station or a car or just acting out a scene in say, a garden or house, we need to make it obvious to the audience where we are. After this, one person was selected to re tell their journey in as much detail as possible. We all sat and listened, trying to picture the journey. This helped us gain a stronger understanding of the detail we should have thought of, but again, shows how much information we miss and how hard it is to remember such detail.

Our second task, again, was focusing on Christopher's logical thinking process. In the play, he admits he has problems understanding metaphors. So, in groups we had to think of a metaphor and explain it in a way Christopher would understand. My group decided on the metaphor, "You're like a bull in a china shop." We found explaining this was very difficult as it was hard to dumb down, we got the base of it, but when explaining it to someone like Christopher, who would always ask why it became difficult. He would ask questions like "Why is there a bull in a china shop?" or "Why is it not a glass shop?" which helped us understand that he simply cannot grasp anything that isn't logical, which we can incorporate into scenes with Christopher, which will affect our tone and actions around him.

Our final task was, in the groups we were already in, to devise a short piece based on the line Ed says... "If you don't tell the truth now, it'll hurt even more when it comes out." We decided to go for a piece based on one of our members previous experiences in a relationship were passionate feelings were said and felt but only felt one way. The relevance to the line was that they both went along with it and one our member found it harder to leave as he felt he had got himself trapped and felt bad when their relationship eventually ended as he went along with it so long. We are due to perform it next lesson. Although, we do not think it is the best piece, we have had to construct it in fifteen minutes, but feel as if it holds relevance and shows a clear message.