Single - Devised Unit (CP) - Blog 18 - 23/02/16

This lesson we decided as we had all of our scenes devised and we had the entire room to ourselves, we would sort out our lighting for our performance!

As this was my first time using the lights I decided to familiarise my self with the lights and play with the different functions. We had two different types of lights, two behind the audience, which have warm white, cold white and neutral white settings, and multiple lights around our performance space which have multiple colour settings.

Below is the written outline of the light settings we have so far:

The settings at the top are for the backlights and the settings at the bottom are for the lights around the performance space.

For the opening scene Hope came up with an idea which elaborates more on the issue of Charlie's death. She said that we should have a scene where Shanice is being visited by a police officer at her and Hunter's home and being told the bad news about her fiancée's death. I then added onto this point and worked out how we can include this into our performance without using techniques we already had in our piece:

• Shanice starts onstage, at the table, and hears a knocking at the door; she walks offstage to answer.
• Officer Fisher (me) will greet her and ask to come in and Shanice allows him too all offstage. This voiceover-like dialogue brings something fresher than the regular dialogue which would be featured a lot in the rest of the play.
• The pair then enter and sit at the (dining) table. Fisher tells Shanice about her fiancée's death and we freeze.

Depending on whether we keep this scene or not, we'll look into how we'd join this into our previous opening scene.

We also renamed our character (again!) as we agreed that the names didn't suit the characters at all. Hope chose the name Kourtney as it is a typical name for a "chavvy" urban black girl, I chose the name Ben as it's a typical wealthy (he transferred from a grammar school) and gay name and Charlie changed his character's name to his own name, Charlie. This is helpful as, when he plays DI Sanderson in rehearsals, he continually calls his other character Charlie rather than Hunter so this name choice resolves this issue.

For the interrogation scenes, we chose to have a dark lighting scheme with no lights excluding one of the backlights on the cold white setting. This really accentuated the shadows of the actors onstage which symbolises the lies/secrets they may be hiding. For the school scene, we're using orange lighting to create a sepia effect to represent how far back in time that period was. We're using pink in the dating scene as pink is very representative for the theme of love and we're using red for the You Don't Own Me scene as it's a darker variation of the pink showing how Kourtney and Charlie's relationship has gotten darker; the lack of the white backlights in this scene fully promotes the theme of darkness.

Next lesson, we will look at analysing if the piece needs any further changes and, when they're dealt with, continue setting our lighting.