Experimenting with ideas 3

In our lesson, Karen got us to experiment with putting kids games into our performances. We first of all looked at cat and mouse. We added this game into our original bar scene where a black man gets isolated from the Mafia and the ladies. I thought that the game linked to the scene as the mouse becomes isolated from the other players in the game and they are penalised by the cat. We also added a forced entertainment style movement explosion to the bar scene when Chloe swears because she becomes fed up with being chased by the cat. We all then go crazy and start throwing chairs, screaming, running around and jumping off of things in the room. This then leads us into a game of sleeping lions in which Chloe wakes us so that we might get our chairs ready for our murder mystery scene. I feel that this creates a very smooth transition between scenes and it shows a variation in pace and energy.

We then decided to revert back to our cathouse scene. We decided that the scene was based around an affair between Yasmin and James, the cathouse shows how they both were unfaithful to each other and it linked to the sex crazed time period of jazz. Each boy sits in a chair with James in the middle, the five girls then enter and we all perform a 3 movement piece with each guy. In this piece it shows the power of the women in the cathouse and their unloved relationships between the girls and guys. I personally found this scene challenging as I haven't really performed this intimately before, however I do feel that the scene is needed in the piece as it shows the difference couples in relationships.

Development:
To develop our kids games ideas we decided to look into children playing a game of tag. I felt this linked to the original stimulus as it created a joyous energy that we felt when listening to the stimulus.  We started by playing the game of tag normally with James shouting out different styles of movement, for example slow motion, rewind and fast forward. We then decided to add themes like when we performed the cherry orchard in different scenarios like spy's, serious, childish and scared. I think this worked as it changed the mood of the game and it therefore made the performance bearable to watch for a long time.

We also decided to look back at the cathouse idea in order to add more emotion. We made the girls have more of an intense facial expression and the boys have more enjoyment to the scene. James also created a way to remove the chairs off of the stage at the end of the scene by placing their hands onto the chair and flipping around it so that they could carry it off. This looked very effective as all of the guys performed it at the same time and it looked graceful which sort of showed a more intermit side to the guys. I also suggested at the beginning of the piece the men should drag on their chairs into their starting positions of the scene.

Once we had finished going over that scene me, Yasmin and Chloe all thought that our whole performance could be based around love and relationships as that scene is so effective and it links to the partnership in the stimulus. So we then decided to separate our group into pairs so that we could represent 5 aspects of love in the couples. I was paired with Rhys and we decided to look into a relationship that has lost the passion or love. We wanted to explore this in a naturalistic scene where the husband arrives home late and the couple argue which leads to the husband being kicked out of the family. I thought this was effective as it was the only piece of work that our group has done without physical theatre and it therefore showed the realistic manor of the relationship. However when we showed it back to the rest of the group, they saw the piece as a sort of domestic violence piece that could eventually become quite physical.