Devised piece: Day 6/7

The last two lessons we have been working heavily on our next scene which will be our argument scene. We began with brainstorming ideas for where we wanted to go with our arguments and how we wanted to end each alternative ending each time. Our ideas are below.

It took us a while to devise our argument. We went for the story line we created where the gang force Finn to break up with Tess as she is interrupting the way the gang work and is distracting Finn. We wanted to show that the whole idea of someone going against the gang was a serious crime back in the 30's, therefore devised the argument around violence. The gang feels insulted by Finn and let down by him, they begin to tease him and insult him verbally, so he lashes out, leading us into a fight scene.

We worked hard on the fight scene over the two lessons, we didn't want to make it look silly or over do it and we wanted there to be a sense of maturity about it. We didn't want it to look like some kids had just decided to take the easy route and start flailing arms in an inartistic way. We blocked what we wanted to happen at first, so we knew the sequence of events and could go onto create movements and an exciting fight scene.

Once we had blocked the scene and improvised the dialogue, we went back to practising the dance between Finn and Tess to show the rest of the class as it was the only finished piece we had to show. We ran through it and allowed for any pointers or improvements in technique to be offered. We knew we had to slow it down and remember to try and keep the flowing, slow movements throughout. We took this on board and carried on, with the improvements in mind, sadly we haven't had an opportunity to video our improved routine, but hopefully will do in future.

We came back the next lesson knowing that we had to work on the argument scene as it was rough around the edges and we needed more of a backing story to the other gang characters, which we vaguely discussed. We ran through the piece once or twice, tweaking the sequence slightly. Once we were happy with our scene, this took around an hour, we ran through it to the rest of our group and they pointed out what could be better. For example, we needed to make sure that our stage combat looked professional and realistic as, on several occasions, some of the punches were clearly not anywhere the faces of others. We practised this and adjusted where we stood and the angles at which we threw our arms and how we reacted. In addition, one of our tasks is to put in as many theatrical techniques as possible, so this fight scene is a perfect opportunity to use some. We decided that slow motion would be a great addition to the fight as it was all very single paced. We went back through our sequence looking at actions we could make slow. We mainly looked at the parts where a heavy punch goes in or there is a fast bit before to show a real contrast in speeds which will hopefully engage the audience more and give our piece a really sophisticated edge and sense of maturity, to show that we have thought long and hard about this scene and haven't just thrown it together.

For the future I think we really need to focus on a backing story for the other gang members, as we don't really know anything about them, who are they? Where are they from? Do they have any views? We need to think about this as it would help the audience make sense with them and maybe build a connection to the characters, to understand them, and to show that we can create a variety of characters in our piece, all with stories to tell themselves.