Double - Refugee Devised - Blog 2 - 15/09/15

Today we continued our Brechtian work on refugees, although this time the Year 13's weren't with us. As last lesson we struggled devising straight from our stimuli, we were given a script to inspire us also. We started off by reading the script aloud in our given characters. We then started discussing ideas on what these characters could be doing and where we could add Epic Theatre techniques. Following this brainstorm we looked to our devised piece and discussed what we were going to do. We decided that we were going to use the same names in the scripted piece we were given and give them all different services they were used for then allocate each character to someone in our group. For example, Lorna played the role of Kiri, a child soldier. 

After this, we came up with the idea of our story; this idea was a big mixture of quite a few thoughts contributed by the group. Firstly, Charlie said that we should have everyone in a circle, on chairs, in an AA meeting style and we all discuss and share our dark pasts, then Rhiannon came up with the idea of having a master to all of these "slave children" and he's trying to sell them but still having the staging in the same way. After all agreeing on this we decided to build our characters quickly. Rhiannon was Veronica and she was a prostitute, Charlie was the slave master, I was Cojo, and Ollie was Yao and we were twin street entertainers, James was Jess, a transsexual prostitute and, as already mentioned, Lorna was Kiri, a child soldier. We quickly improvised the beginning scene and it turned out to be very dark and sad.

Someone, I can't recall whom, came up with the idea that we use the scene we had just improvised as our last scene and our first scene be the same, "Introduction of the slaves," theme but made comical. This, at first gets the audience laughing at a very strong and difficult political topic without realising and then as the piece goes on and on and every backstory is revealed, the audience begin to realise what they were laughing at. This technique is very Brechtian as Brecht was passionate about getting a message across to the audience. For the beginning scene, we decided to go with a circus/freak show motif where us slaves are now starting off as the, "Acts for tonight's big show" and Charlie is now starting as the Ringleader; this means Charlie constantly has power over us throughout the whole piece, whether we're circus acts or slaves.