Structuring and Creating 1

Aim:
For our devised performance we decided to use the themes of love, mafia and social acceptance. We felt these themes were a good starting piece for our performance as when we looked back at the scene we had already created we noticed that these three themes were the most common in each of the scenes. We then decided to aim our performance at people aged 16 to 25. This is because I felt that our audience would relate to our age group more is they are around the same age, plus the performance does delve into some taboo subjects which may be inappropriate for other ages. We finally decided to come up with the working title "the cliche of love". We are definitely not going to use this title as it doesn't quite suit the performance but it linked to some of the themes.

Mafia scene:
In today's lesson we decided that we needed a scene that would show the life of the Mafia in a group physical performance. We decided to show 2 gangs having a fight between each other sort of like in west side story. To start with we split into pairs and created a small physical fight that could be repeated in different tempos. I was with Pau and we used movements like pulling away from each other, pulling on each other shirts and mirroring each other's hands whilst following with our eyes. This inspired Pau to think that there was a mirror between both of us (separating our two worlds even though we were the same person). I was representing his dark side and he represented the light. The idea was that I was trying to escape from the mirror so that I could have control over what our body does, where as he was trying to keep me in.

We then decided to use Pau idea by having all of the pairs doing our movement piece to show how all the members of the Mafia were trying to fight against their dark sides. It sort of became a balancing act as there always had to be one person in the pair inside the mirror. I therefor had the idea that at the end of the duets, the light side could become so weak that they drop to there knees. The dark side would then drag them off of the stage  whilst they are trying to hold on to the floor. I thought this would show how the Mafia giving into their dark side and so they committed their crimes which could then have linked into our prison scene at the end of the performance.

We didn't really have time to explore this idea however we did look at another idea based from this scene. We started with our original separate duets which we repeated for 5 times. Then James came up with the idea that we could get two police officers that enter the stage and everyone stops what they are doing and star at the officers. Suddenly the bunny hill theme would come on which would involve the whole cast being involved in a slapstick chase scene. I thought that this was a good take on the scene as the audience are expecting something very violent to happen when the police enter but instead their is a complete contrast that lights up a quite serious topic.