Experimenting with ideas 2

During the week Karen got us to look back at the stimulus in order to gain fresher ideas that could inspire new material. After looking at the stimulus again some of my opinions change about the music. For example:

1. I started to see the music as more of a celebration rather then the gangster and crime idea. I think when I first listened to it the era of jazz was the only thing on my mind so it made me immediately think of the gangsters but the second time I listened to some of the upbeat music and some of the lyrics which were a lot happier. 
2. This music also made me think about youth and newness. The music was very new it that era and therefore I started to image coming of age for a character or the new change in society of that time. It also could be that someone new enters the town  and it causes a mixed opinions. 

Energy states:

A few months ago Karen showed us psychological energy States  where different stages of tension can be created in the room. However this week we looked at a physical energy States where you us our bodies to create the tension. 

1. Exhaustion - the body is heavy and hard to move around
2. Laid Back
3. Neutral 
4. Alertness
5. Passion
6. Tragedy

We then decided to add these States into one of our devised scene. We decided to create a murder mystery in the style of force entertainment and commedia  d'art. Forced entertainment don't have any boundaries so they will improvise the whole scene if they want which is what we decided to do.  I thought this was A good thing to use as it allowed the audience and the actor to not know where the story would take us. Also they have used a technique where they all sit in a line across the stage facing the audience so we decided to add that to our performance as well.

When I thought about it the performance style felt very panto as the characters were interacting towards the audience and they were very hammed up characters. We also decided to used commedia d'art characters as they are each very individual characters like in panto. I think this was a good idea to experiment with as it was quite easy to put and energy state with each character. 

I played the character of Zanni who I link with the energy stage of alertness. As the character is usually a servant and always wants to please his masters, I thought he would be quite alert as they don't want to do anything wrong. Also the Zanni seems like quite a young character so I presumed him to be more energetic then most of the characters.  To make the character seem alert I decided that he would always look at other people and he would try to listen into other people's conversations.

Even though the idea ended quite well, there was a few improvements that could have been made. For example:

1. When the chairs were dragged behind and people were being killed, it could have been made bigger for the audience. This would have made it funnier for the audience as the characters in front would not react to the bigger sounds of the people dying.
2. Because the scene was improvised, we weren't sure who was to speak next so quite a bit of dialogue was overlapped. So I think we would perhaps need to script some of the dialogue so that the audience is able to hear all of the voices.
3. We also had many people who were being killed of so it took around 5 minuets for the scene to finish and by that time the audience would have lost interest. So we need to speed up the death which would give more pace to the scene and may make it funnier as the people are dying so quickly.