Kim evaluation

Site specific Evaluation: physical aspect

Our physical piece was inspired by the crash of a lift in 1903 which 10 dead crushed under the body of the lift. We began the piece by singing silent night because the crash occurred near Christmas. We were inspired by the works of Labem and his flick technique we incorporated this into our piece when we were replicating the broken bones of the dead as they fell. Using sharp jagged movements we recreated the imagery of bones gradually smashing we did this though a wave of movement starting small the progressively smothering our audience member. As a group we wanted to give the audience an experience and give them the illusion that the lift was falling. We did this through using a Frantic Assembly lift technique were we hovered Immy over our audience member were she appeared to be almost levitating above them as she physicalized the sensation of falling. After we had done this we then became neutral and continued singing with a blank expression to give the perception that we were corpses ghost like

4.

This final rehearsal was very intense.It was all about scrubbing up the rough edges adding effects making perfection.

What changed???

We decided to no longer use music and that instead we are going to sing silent night as that creates a more dowering affect that creeps the audience out and we're singing the song silent night because the event happened during Christmas time.

We've decided that we will only have one person in the lift when we're performing as the experience will then become more intense and personal.

From teacher feedback we've also decided on adding a beginning before the lift scene  and an after event after the lift scene lead by Ursula who will be a maid cleaning the area who hates Christmas however she is giving out party decorations and wine drinks e.t.c.She then leads a person into the lift where they will experience the lift falling then afterwards ursula be there when the lift doors open and she will be taking Polaroid photos then sticking them up with other photos of when other people have come out of the lift as to say they we're part of the event when the lift fell.

What might be added?

We might involve using more contact with the audience member and by doing this it will make them feel uncomfortable.

We still plan for the final performance to have smashed mirrors,blood capsules and another strobe maybe.

We might also use make-up on our faces to give a dead/blood effect. 

3.

Inside the lift we plan to for the piece to involve ALOT of physical theatre and less talking or none at all.

we're planning for the atmosphere to be filled with the music and the sound of the broken light. our performance so far is based on physicality, personality and facial expression.

How will you use physical theatre?
Our original idea was to do contact improvisation however now the audience member is to be central in the lift while we circle around them. We then plan to start with our fingers moving them in disorientating ways then continue into the wrist then up to the elbow then up to the shoulder is when we then involves the other arm  starting from the fingers. This with the strobe lighting causes a great effect on the mind and eyes visually.
It was hard creating physical theatre in such a confined space while trying to be creative but i figured that the the big expressive movements aren't always needed to make a big impact.
What to add?
We may add a strobe, a black curtain to cover the entrance so that it blocks any light, cracked mirrors and blood.

2.

Above is a picture of my group having a discussion about our chosen place.

Our time became very intense as we bounced off each other with unique ideas some of which consisted of using strobe lighting to show the effects of the lighting when the lift broke and fake blood in balloons was a another suggestion as it would have a great effect visually with the strobe lighting and shows that some people got seriously injured.My suggestion was to cut wires to stick of the side of the lifts to represent the effects of the lift dropping and the damage.We played around with the lighting in the lift by making it pitch black using a coat to cover the light which stuck to the side of the lift.

The best part was experimenting with music inside the lift.One song which worked for our piece was Retrograde by James Blake as it has a slow,mysterious and distant melody and vocals.While listening to the music we tried reacting to it through physical theatre showing the slow death of the people who died in the lift based on the story we found.

Who are the audience and what is there function?

Our preliminary idea for the audience is that they are guests at a party in 1902 as the story were basing it on happened at a party in 1902.They will play the party guests and they people who looked down and into the lift once it fell.They will witness the whole event of the lift falling and they people ever so slowly dying.

Installation?

We planned to involve music and maybe even a voice over with simply sounds such as heavy breathing and screaming.

Do they know more about the place then i do?

As a group we are still contemplating on this however right now the audience know as much as we do.

what is our reaction if an audience member screams or cries?

We will place warning signs to show that what's in the lift may be a bit graphic.Plus because the audience are watching rather than being involved they can easily walk away from the piece.

1.

I titled this lesson as 'Getting to know our site(getting to know you) referencing the song 'Getting to know you by Marni Nixon (Deborah Kerr Original Version)from the 'King and I'as like what we were doing today,this song is about introductions and getting to know who your with.

We learnt about what were the lifts capabilities.Unfortunately since the last time we used this lift it has stopped working.At first this caused inconvience as the conventional way of using the lift was to be incorporated in our piece.However this came as an adavantage as we've came up with a more inventive piece.Our piece is now based on a real life historical event which happened in a lift which was broken.

We are using the idea of text based theatre and we're interpreting this piece through physical theatre.I suggest we could also use multimedia to tell the story and fill the atmosphere and space.

Below is a link to the song 'Getting to know you.'Just in case you've never heard of it. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1o1t-PhkFAQ

final rehearsal

In yesterdays session, we were polishing our piece, and making sure that it all worked efficiently. We also worked on our timings, to make sure the piece would be able to run smoothly. We all discussed that we should be more powerful and could really start to push the boundaries with what we were doing. We made sure we kept blank faces for everytime we ran the piece, as this looked and felt rather sinister. 

We had two staff members come and observe our piece in order to give us some feedback. They loved the piece in the lift, and felt that we did it rather successfully, however we didn't have enough context. At this point we decided to do some research over the weekend and to print related things off and to create a museum, gallery to get our story and retelling across.

physical section

We start by surrounding the audience member in a circle. We the start with our wrists and use a staccato transition to move it into different unnatural positions. We then did the same with our elbows, then our full arm including shoulders, then including the second hand. This looked amazing, especially with the strobe lighting.
We then wanted to manipulate the audience onto the floor into an almost semi-supine position. We then picked Imy up and lifted her up and down and rocking her from side to side. TO create an illusion as if she were falling onto the audience in slow motion, This tied in with our stimulus of the lift callapsing. Imy would then let out a huge terrifying high pitch scream, by which time we will have lowered her, back to her original position.

silent night

Silent night, Holy night

All is calm, all is bright
Round yon virgin, mother and child
Holy infant, tender and mild
Sleep in heavenly peace,
Sleep in heavenly peace.

We decided to sing this carol during the piece repetitively as it could be manipulated to become a spooky, ghost-like song. As we played with harmonizing etc we realised that it would sound better in a monotone tone as it suited the piece a lot more than as if it were a beautiful choir singing it.

We could have just played it through the speakers but we felt that it didn't have the same purpose and effect that it does when sung live in a confined space.

rehearsal

Rehearsal

We discussed alternate ways in which the audience could view our piece. In conclusion we decided that instead of them viewing it behind a sheet of plastic, one audience member should take part in an immersive intense experience inside the lift. We were inspired by Artaud’s ideologies and we aim to make our audience member’s experience cathartic and powerful.

We started to devise our physical theatre piece and have finalised what props we are going to use:

·         Strobe light

·         Blood capsules

·         Broken mirror

·         Magnets  

 Costume
 Our costume will be all black with white make up and smudged black eyes. This understated look adds to the eerie atmosphere and makes us look ill and corpse-like to foreshadow the experience that is to come.

research

We decided we would create an abstract physical theatre piece in the lift to show the 1903 lift accident. The audience would watch it through a see-through sheet of plastic. Through physicality, we will portray bones breaking and the lift crashing. We do this by making disjointed and abrupt movements and holding Immy so she is off the ground and falling while screaming. The piece would also consist of us leaning on each other in slow motion and devising a sequence with a strobe light and music.

This video by PUSH inspired us as it includes slow motion as well as lifts that we could attempt to compress into a small environment:

http://youtu.be/KhlShytmHLo

properties and qualities

We identified the properties and qualities and meaning of the site as a starting point in order to develop our piece.

Properties

·         Broken Light

·         Metal floor

·         Thick walls

·         Opening door

·         Various buttons

Qualities

·         Small enclosed space – trapped, claustrophobic

·         Buzzing sound of the light – broken, damaged

·         Rattling – on edge atmosphere

·         Door closing sound – heavy and dramatic

Meaning

·         To move people from one location to another

After analysing and discussing we came to the conclusion that this site has an extremely tense atmosphere due to the sounds as well as the image. The sounds we identified were rattling, buzzing, slamming and clicking. All of these sounds are negative and lead one to think that something is damaged. Similarly the materials in the lift such as the harsh metal floor, the thick doors and the confined space lead us to explore lift disasters.

AUDIENCE

Up until this week we had planned to have the audience to be looking inside the lift from the doors, however we decided to make it more immersive, and knocked the capacity from 15 down to 1. This would mean that we could have a more concentrated piece of theatre targeting all of our energy to one audience member. This was a risky decision but we discovered that we would be able to have a repetitive flow of runs, as a lift goes up, and we drop the audience off, we could go down and collect a new one. By having six of us in the lift this would mean that the audience member will feel vulnerable  and exposed. One of Artaud's techniques was to make the audience feel uncomfortable and with this vulnerability we would be able hopefully pull off a successful piece of immersive theatre.
During the session, We discussed props that we may need, and delegated them between one another to start to purchase these. Ella was to get a strobe light, I was to get a mirror and blood capsules, Leanne was to get a speaker. Imogen some Candles, and Kim a black sheet.

SITE

Our Site - The Lift

The Lift

We have chosen the lift adjacent to the TTA department to be our chosen site for many reasons. The low buzzing sound of the lights provides an eerie feel as well as the depleted materials that are part of site such as chipping paint and a broken light bulb. All of these factors add to the site’s feeling of danger and vulnerability which drives our piece.

Our piece is site generic as we are exploring a freak accident that occurred in 1903 when a lift dropped six stories containing seventeen people.

Stimulus

"On the night of May 22, 1903, in Pittsburgh, PA, a large group of mostly young people who attended the Pennsylvania Electric Mechanical Institute were having a celebration party on the fifth and sixth floors of the Donnelley building. About 700 people packed the two floors for the ball, and at around 10 PM another group of seventeen passengers was loaded into the elevator on the first floor, bound for the party on floor six. Just as the elevator reached the floor, it suddenly let go and fell six stories, crashing into the elevator pit. The multi-ton elevator cable and assembly came crashing down onto the elevator, crushing the occupants. When the party goers heard the crash, they rushed to the elevator. In the panic, some nearly fell into the open shaft. Four bodies were pulled from the rubble and taken to a morgue. They were so badly mangled it was not until the next day they could be identified. So mangled were the bodies, they could only be identified by the cloths they were wearing. The others in the elevator, the youngest being only 3 years old, somehow survived. The accident was blamed on overloading of the elevator with 17 people when the maximum weight allowed for only 10-12."

This is the stimulus we have taken to devise our piece from, we chose it as we feel it is fitting to our site as well as to our actors. It will be an immersive piece that will only have one audience member. This means the experience will be very intense and confrontational. Within the lift we are going to develop a physical piece to perform where we show the crash and the way the bodies were moved by the force. We want to incorporate colour to represent the blood of the people inside, so we are thinking about having red paint that we throw in the lift as well as strobe lighting to represent the technical side of the disaster.

SITE

We choose the TTA lift at the back of the OBIE for our site, as it has a lot of interesting qualities. These include smeared marks all over the walls, a strong buzzing sound coming from one of the lights which is broken. It has a nineties sort of feel, it feels very unsafe and looks as if it could belong to a block of council flats. The doors creak open and overall has the potential to enable us to create a scary thought provoking piece of site specific theatre. 

jake - evaluation

Today we had our assessment, overall I feel as if it went very successfully. As it was exactly as we expected. We took the teachers advice on and created a setting outside of the lift, this included a cabinet filled with artifacts, and had classical music playing. We had a black table with facts written over it in chalk covered in candles and had a rose laid in the center. We also found a huge black board and covered it with facts and five Polaroids of us as pictured above. We also got Ursula to go up the stairs during our piece, and waited for the audience member to exit and capture their face. This was meant to show that they had also died, and then was added to the collection on the board. To ideally make up the 17 people in the lift. Overall i am pleased with how the piece turned out however i would have ideally liked to have had more of a connection with the stimulus, but that would have come with time. As we didn't really have that much time to rehearse and work on characterisation as most of our time was spent on devising, through a thought process.

Performance Evaluation - imogen

On Wednesday we performed our Site Specific performance in the TTA lift. We Began by setting up the environment outside of the lift, we brought in candles and flowers to form a kind of 'shrine' to the dead and to create the sense of tragedy. We also found a huge black board that we covered in chalk writing using words like

'fall'
'10 dead'
'1903'
'death' 

This was all to add to the atmosphere and to hint at what our piece was about, in the centre of the board we had the 5 polaroids of us lined up with the quote

'Falling into a bottomless pit of happiness and no grief.' 

Which we found as someones response to the question 'how does it feel to die' and we felt was perfect to once again hint at what our piece was about.

We also decorated the rest of our space with poems and quotes about 'falling' and 'death' as well as having chalk and dust on the lockers and cabinets as we wanted the objects that were out of place to still fit in to our piece as they were something in our site we couldn't remove.

I'm falling

So slow, I can feel time passing by

I was convinced I could fly

I'm falling

The sensation is great

For the ending, I still have to wait

I'm falling

Can you see me coming to earth

I´m telling you, it is the falling worth

I´m falling

Reality coming closer

It´s finally over

nothing but darkness like and endless dream of darkness.

This was all part of our 'museum' idea, so there were images of old fashioned lifts and lift accidents around as well as polaroids of peoples faces as if they were the 'dead'. I think the site looked really good once we were done and i think we successfully made every object in the space look like it was meant to be there. Our actual performance went really well and i think we were successful in taking our audience fully out of their comfort zone. To improve i would have liked to repeat the piece more than once to a new audience so we could see how differently it effected people. Also if we were to choose our site again i think we would have chosen somewhere that wasn't so central as this meant we had students and teachers walking through and moving pieces of our set. I also think with more time we could have developed our physicality more and thought about how we could push ourselves further in our movements to create an even more surreal experience for the audience. 

week 5

This week we worked on refining what we were doing in our piece, making it all cleaner and working out the timings. As a group we all agreed that we could be more brave with what we were doing in the piece, really wanting to give the audience a sense of relief when they leave the lift. Therefore we focused on our physicality's and facial expressions, working at a 10 and seeing how it effected/ changed our piece. This was really helpful as it meant we created new ideas really quickly, for example incorporating sounds and allowed us to see what did and didn't work.

We also received some feedback about our piece, advising us to look into the experience for the audience before and after the lift and creating a possible museum. This is something we have taken onboard and are planning to do. We also liked the idea of taking polaroids of all the people who went in the lift and adding them to a a wall to constantly be updating the site.


Museum :

These are some possible things we will have in the museum.

Images like these will help to show the time period our piece is set in as well as foreshadow for the audience what will happen in the lift. As well as these images we also want to have objects that relate to parties, i.e champagne, music etc as this is where the people in the lift were going when it crashed and we feel this will create an uncomfortable atmosphere due to the derelict nature of the lift we are using contrasting with these glamorous items.