Devising: Day 5

We picked up where we left off last lesson, by running through the dance. However, as we ran through it again we began to think up a few more ideas. The dance we had originally was pretty dull and boring, so we tried to come up with a few new lifts. I was a bit nervous about these lifts at first as I have never done something like this before, so we had a good half an hour or so practising and rehearsing and watching where I was meant to hold and so on before eventually being able to do them fluently. Once we had got the dance in place, we ran it through from the beginning and filmed it. We feel that the new lifts we incorporated are much more interesting and allow us, as actors, to show our love more, as the dance seems more intimate than before. Obviously, we have to make sure we are acting whilst dancing and use our facial expressions and eye contact to make this love visible to the audience. This should make the audience feel more towards our characters as they can see our emotions and can begin to build up a connection or relationship with us, by aiming at their heartstrings we are able to create an attachment between audience and characters, so if anything happens it will strike the audience with more effect.

Afterwards, we went back to set the dialogue between the gang members and author in the speakeasy. This was difficult though, as although we set it, dialogue was hard to come by as we hadn't really thought through what was going to be said, so we need to work on this in the next lesson to make sure gaps are filled in the performance before we move on.

When we were setting the dance, we split the group and got the other half to think about ideas on how to go on with the performance.

If its visible our ideas include...

• The gang talking to Finn, expressing their disapproval with Tess.
• Sending Finn away when they rape Tess where she becomes so stressed she takes her life or breaks up with Finn.
• Leads to arguments where Finn drowns his sorrows and cheats on Tess when he is drunk.
• Or he falls out with the gang and turns against them.

Of course, the point of our story us that the author writes various endings, so the likelihood is that all these ideas will feature to give our different endings. We feel that these are good base ideas on which to build upon and allow us to get creative with our techniques. There is a lot of potential for how we can set theses scenes. That may be a more lurid, contemporary scene for the rape. We could use lifts and slow motions. Throughout we could use a split stage with the author and characters, possibly even monologues. Of course, these ideas will be thought about a lot more thoroughly, and hopefully we can come up with some really nice pieces using everything we have learnt so far.