Evaluation Of Our Performance

I feel like our performance went quite well, considering we had to teach the last bit to Jack quickly and Emily was missing from our group.

I thought our piece was going to be very good because we had worked hard on it and had come up with a solid idea that was inspired by our strong stimulus. I thought that our piece would go really well and I was excited to perform it to a large audience, as I wanted to see how they would react to our piece and how it would make them feel.

I was a bit annoyed that only two people turned up to watch it, along with the teachers, because I was really looking forward to having a larger audience and it felt like we were just doing another run-through. I also think that at the beginning, I turned around a little too quickly to start the, "Have you seen my mummy?" part because the teacher's weren't really settled. So if I could do it again, I think I would leave it a bit longer before I start the piece, to create more of an atmosphere.

I think we mainly thought of all the problems we might have faced, but I don't think we realised how cold it was going to be, but we managed to perform through the snow! The audience  reacted well to our piece and seemed to get involved, I think the two girls who came to watch it felt a little intimidated because there were only two of them and they weren't as able to get into it as they might have done, had there been more people.

I felt I managed to feel emotional in our piece, so my performance seemed more real to me, but I think if we had a bigger audience, I would have fed off their reactions, which might have given me a better performance. I need the adrenaline of performing to an audience to really be able to access my emotions.

I thought overall, our performance went quite well. It could have been a lot better if we had all the audience there and if we had all of our performers, however despite this - and the freezing weather - I think we managed to achieve an interesting, thought-provoking piece of site responsive theatre that effectively responded to our site and our stimulus.

Jack's Feedback

Jack watched our whole piece today and, again, said that it was really good. He gave us some more helpful hints on how to improve it. Firstly, by correcting Raphy's Yorkshire accent by telling him that Ian Brady was Scottish! And then he told us that the interview scene was too long and felt a little slow, so we thought we would cut it down to just the important questions. He also told us that we should take out the question of Alex asking Raphy's name - because it becomes too obvious for the audience. I think by leaving that little bit of secrecy it makes it a little less obvious and makes our piece more open to all the themes that could be explored around child abuse, rather than focusing on just one story.

He also told us that the sound worked really well, because of the space we have, we have very good acoustics and this allows us to really be able to project our voices and still carries the sound when we're not screaming, e.g. the singing sounds really effective.

Jack also gave us the really helpful point, that Sarah and Raphy's contact improvisation scene was too nice and that he thinks their relationship would be darker and more cold. So we went inside and still kept the beginning of it, where they bump into each other and have a romantic meeting, but then it gets more sinister as Raphy starts to hurt her and they start to fight and roll on the floor, whilst stopping occasionally to look like they're going to kiss, to keep the real emotion in their relationship and what kept them together. I think that this really helped to improve our piece, as we now have a longer section that reveals a lot more of our story all through movement.

More Devising

Today, we ran what we already had, to make sure it all still worked well and effectively referred back to our site. We then devised and ran the ideas that we had last week to see if they worked in our site, because we had only spoken about them inside last week. We then figured out the ending to our piece and decided that after Alex does a police interview with Raphy, we should have Sarah and Raphy's section of contact improvisation to portray Ian Brady and Myra Hindley's relationship, the people who were playing the children and had their hands on the hand prints on the wall, would slowly turn round and walk towards Raphy and Sarah and hold hands and walk in a circle around them while singing, "Twinkle, twinkle, little star" this further tied into our theme of children and nicely links into our stimulus, as it gives the piece a sort of creepy tone.

We then decided to incorporate a bit into our piece, where the children seem happy to be going off with Brady and Hindley, so after we stop singing, we stand still and Raphy and Sarah tell each other they love them. We then all held hands and ran up the stairs giggling and laughing. We decided this would make the audience think about the fact that we wanted to go with them and thought it was all fun and games. We then included a section where Emily becomes a news reporter and describes that several children have been taken. While Sarah and Raphy run off to the side and "the children" stay looking down onto the audience and each have a line to say e.g. "I'm scared.", "I don't want to.", "Mummy, help me." etc. we start whispering these lines and as Emily is talking, we get louder and louder, until we're shouting. Then when Emily shouts, "Keep your kids indoors." we go silent.

We thought this would be a really effective ending to our piece and give it a little more depth as it really looks into our stimulus and uses a lot of inspiration and other aspects of the site. We spoke to Emma for a bit when we went inside to brainstorm even more ideas and had a conversation about our stimulus and whether we have got everything out of the site. I think we have done really well with using the space around us and it will look a lot more effective when we have the audience walking around us. We then made the important observation that as well as our work being site specific, it is also site responsive because we have worked well incorporating the different elements of our site into our piece.

Jack's Feedback

The feedback we had from Jack was mainly positive. He said that he liked the way the audience could walk around and said that we had a very strong opening which would engage the audience. We then had a discussion with Jack where he gave us some ideas of some other scenes we could do next. He told us that as we had a very abstract beginning, it might be a good idea to have a very naturalistic scene next. So, we came up with the idea that Alex would be a policeman and would be interrogating Raphy as to why he had pictures of the children. Meanwhile, Emily, Jack, Tuwaine and I would still pretend to be children, playing in the playground, while Sarah went around and took photos of us.

We thought it would be a good idea to have this naturalistic scene, so that our piece had some kind of narrative, but because of our beginning, it wouldn't have a narrative structure and was still all influenced from our site.

I then had the idea that we could have children's toys - randomly laid out in our site at the sides, to create more of an effect for the audience. When Jack asked us if we were going to have any music, I came up with the idea that we could have children's nursery rhymes playing on a tape throughout our piece.

We decided to brainstorm the rest of our piece and decided that after the interrogation scene, we would have a scene where the police find where they were keeping us, so Sarah was going to run in and say, "Come on kids! We're leaving." and make us pack our bags and run off with her, just before the police come to find us. We haven't blocked that scene yet, but thought it would be a good idea as it leaves the audience in suspense and allows us to use our stimulus more, as they still don't know where all the children's bodies, who were taken by Brady and Hindley are.

Devising Process

For our devising process, we firstly used a scene that we had devised in class a few weeks ago, to do with our site. We took our idea of the children being puppets and having two people being Myra Hindley and Ian Brady who were controlling them. We used this scene as a starting point as to what we could devise around it, as we were sure we wanted to put it into our piece.

In our first rehearsal, we came up with the idea that there should be 5 children and 2 people playing Myra Hindley and Ian Brady and when we went to our site to make up a piece, we had the idea, to start with a child in each corner of our site, facing away from the audience. We then came up with the idea to have each child turn around and start saying, "Where is my Mummy?" "Have you seen my Mummy?" etc. - this gave us a really good starting point to our piece and how we wanted to make the audience feel.

We had a debate about what to do with the audience as we debated putting them inside, watching us from the staircase, however we found that this would extremely limit our work, as they wouldn't be able to hear us. We then decided to have the audience outside, but had a long discussion as to whether we should blindfold them or just have them in a line. Sarah came up with the idea that we should have the audience wandering around our site, inbetween us, as it gives the audience a chance to explore our site and makes them feel a lot more involved with the piece.

We then had the idea to incorporate the puppet scene, so as we wandered round asking the audience members if they had seen our parents, one by one Sarah and Raphy - who were playing Hindley and Brady, would slowly pull us into a circle, facing inwards. They then positioned us, to make us do childlike actions. e.g. mine was to cover and uncover my eyes, as if i was playing peek-a-boo. Then Sarah and Raphy would walk around us and when they tapped us, we had to turn out to face the audience. We had to make our actions even bigger when we turned around to make it really clear to the audience what we were doing and why.

Then we came up with the idea that we should all go around the audience again, walking around and each having a few lines that we had to keep repeating to make the audience feel scared. My line was, "I don't want to hurt you. Don't make me hurt you." Once we had each come up with our lines, we walked around saying them, getting louder and louder until Raphy shouted, "Shut up!" Then we ran to the wall with the handprints and placed our hands over the handprints as if we were the children.

We then decided that Raphy and Sarah should come up with a scene between them which describes their first meeting. We thought if we made it really romantic and sweet, it would make the audience sympathise with them and make them feel confused. So Sarah and Raphy performed a piece of physical theatre, which describes them first meeting by bumping into each other

After coming up with these ideas and performing them to Jack, we got some feedback on what else we could do/improve on.