Single - Devised Unit (Ghost Stories) - Blog 11 - 28/02/17 ADD VIDEO

Today we decided to rehearse everything we had so that we could fully wrap up the two scenes we already had: The Paparazzi Scene and the Suicide Scene!

For the Suicide Scene (hyperlink), the only improvement is see necessary is for Rob to be louder with his narration so that he can be heard over the music. Lowering the volume of the track would create less of an atmosphere so Rob definitely needs to be louder. Besides that, this scene is finished.

For the Paparazzi Scene (hyperlink), the Breakfast show part needs to be acted more naturally as it sounds very acted. I feel that this is because the group is reading from the script still which makes it difficult to fully act it. Seeing as the script isn’t at all long, we will have it learnt for the next time we run through this scene so that it can be performed more naturally. Once we work out this issue, we will have two finished scenes!

Next lesson, we will recap the Ollie’s motif scenes so that we can possibly make them longer. 

Double - Performance Workshop (Sweeney Todd) - Blog 9 - 27/02/17

Today we worked on A Little Priest, the song that closes Act One and kicks off the chaotic murderous rampage of Sweeney Todd and Mrs Lovett. We at first thought that Rob and Lorna would interact with each other a lot and mime the different characters they’d murder but we felt that this would be pretty boring if not pulled off right and we wanted something a bit more extravagant for this song as it’s a huge pivotal moment in the musical. We wanted there to be plenty of movement but keep it imaginative. That’s when we remembered a video we’ve seen before of Kristen Chenoweth performing “If You Haven’t, But You Did,” from the 1951 Broadway show Two On The Aisle. In the performance (which is linked here) she uses another person and interacts with them as a dead body. She moves him around, picks him up but the guy moves around aswell but makes it look like he’s dead still. Not only does this make it very effective and dark but also very funny too.

We thought that we could easily transfer this into our Sweeney Todd by using the body of Pirelli! We could have the body/Dan come in from the passage leading under the stage and Lorna and Rob interact with him putting him into the positions of their “victims to be”.

Next lesson Lorna, Rob and Dan will carry on with this and Ollie, Tom and I will go over “Johanna” as we have Tom.

Single - Devised Unit (Ghost Stories) - Blog 10 - 23/02/17

Today we continued with our paparazzi scene and focused on the next section. We wanted to have some dialogue which the other sections in our piece lack. We wanted a group of people discussing our celebrity "drug addict" which decided to call Sam Marshall. We were going to have it a group of teenagers at school but we felt that we'd lose maturity in the piece and make it less believable. So we decided to change it to a group of network TV directors who are arranging who's going to be on their Sunday breakfast show. We felt that we could show how the media warp and manipulate situations and have our TV directors discussing how much of a mess he could possibly be on set and how it'll rake in views while in reality we have Sam Marshall walk onstage with his bags from rehab in a split screen and show that in reality, he is completely normal and that the media have pretty much ruined his private life.

The movement I have as Sam Marshall is simple which only requires me to walk onstage and take out my clothes etc out of my bag but its the dialogue between the TV directors on the other side of the split screen which makes this section effective.

So this lesson we spent the remainder writing out the script for the TV show part. We wanted to keep it short but still have enough content to create an effective scene. Our first draft was alright and contained the right context but we felt it was far too short so we had to extend it. Below is a photo of the final script:

Next lesson, we will rehearse this entire scene and move onto the final scene which would star Lorna as the main actor.

Double - Performance Workshop (Sweeney Todd) - Blog 8 - 20/02/17

Today we worked a considerable amount on The Epiphany and the short bit before where Anthony storms in upon Judge Turpin's  near fatal shave with Sweeney.

With this we weren't sure whether we should stay naturalistic with The Epiphany and have Rob portray the new psychotic side of Sweeney through his pure facial expressions or do something similar to the 2007 film and have represent Sweeney hallucinating and showing him on the streets of London threatening citizens of London. In order to choose, we tried both.

To start off we went from the end of Pretty Woman which is where Anthony storms into Sweeney's shop, exclaiming that Johanna would elope with her, and Judge Turpin leaves Sweeney, disgusted with the company he keeps. Frustrated, Sweeney sends Anthony away and Mrs Lovett comes to find our what's wrong. This scene proved quite difficult to act out at first as we didn't have Tom as Anthony but James stood in for him so there wasn't many issues.

When it came to singing the first part of The Epiphany before Sweeney goes a bit mental, I felt that Rob was far too static; although he had good facial expressions, I thought there was a lot more we could do with such a complex scene. We wanted Rob to pace a bit more being extremely angry whilst Lorna is trying to ask what's happened. During the "there's a hole in the world," part Rob walks to the front of the stage and flicks open and closed his razor and on "not for long" he raises it up to the sky. He lowers it fiercely on "die" and then turns to Mrs Lovett on "Tell you why Mrs Lovett." Rob then interacts with Lorna creepily pushing her in the chair and threatening her with the razor. When he starts keening, Rob walks away from her and stands at the front of the stage.

We wanted to experiment with the abstract side of this piece and see what it would be like if I we do something similar to the film where Sweeney goes around London. We experimented with Rob jumping down from the stage and then walking between the rest of the case representing the townspeople. We didn't get anything set in stone though so next lesson we will work more on this.

For the remainder of the lesson, we cut down the script removing lines and sections which we didn't like or didn't think were necessary.

Single - Devised Unit (Ghost Stories) - Blog 9 - 10/02/17

Today, we continued on with our paparazzi physical theatre and I had lots of ideas to add. This morning we had a physical theatre workshop from someone outside of school and there was plenty that we could implement into this piece. Below is how much we have so far:

• I walk onstage and the soundscape starts immediately and the others run on immediately and try to get a photo of me, I keep trying to walk through patiently and when the soundscape finishes. We all freeze and I’ll be stood in front of the pack of paparazzi; the music will then start (which hasn’t been picked yet). 
• I start walking to the right slowly and the others stand still in a group miming holding a camera and this imaginary camera follows me everywhere I go. This means that when I then drop down to tie my shoelace, the cameras also point downwards to me. 
• As I stand back up, I turn over my back shoulder and start walking in slow motion while the paparazzi walk one step per beat of the song (the song would be quite lively) and on the 8th beat, they’d turn in a random direction as if they’re searching for me. After around 6/7 of these, I stop centre stage facing the audience and the “pap” is behind me in a line (Ollie-Lorna-Rob).

I wanted to use an interesting technique from the workshop which was making something natural look abstract by larger movements. For this instance, I’m eating breakfast. So pour my milk with both hands, I scoop quite dramatically, I eat it and then I get pull back by Lorna and Rob snaps a photo of me, I repeat this again but with Ollie taking a picture of me and again where I go straight back and both of them do it. Finally, I do it once more but fall back and then get thrown back up to fall forwards on the floor.

This is as much as we got, so next lesson we will continue.

Single - Devised Unit (Ghost Stories) - Blog 8 - 07/02/17

Today, we focused on our third scene and tried to come up with a topic to base it on. It took us a while to come up with a topic as we didn’t want to use a very common topic as the past two scenes have done (terrorism & domestic abuse). However, we felt that we could do something very different with the topic of drug abuse. An amateur performance that Ollie went to see before based their entire piece on 9/11 but it was only about halfway through that the audience would realise this as they were very vague with how’d talk about the disaster which made it very ambiguous. We thought we could do this with drugs and have each of us have a statement about drugs but make it sound ambiguous. Examples for phrases were:

• “It’s the smell that gets you, that gets you wanting more.”
• “You would’ve had some only half an hour ago, but you find yourself craving more.”
• “Just the mention… my attention on anything else just drops.”

After this we thought more about how we’d incorporate an individual into this scene as we wanted all of these controversial topics to haunt each of our characters. We then thought about real life people who were hooked on drugs before and our attention went straight to celebrities. The likes of Macaulay Calkin, Drew Barrymore and Charlie Sheen have all been addicted to drugs before and we thought deep into how this may affect their publicity and egos. For a regular person to get hooked on a substance, very few people are worried or even interested, however if it were a famous face, it wouldn’t take minutes to appear on celebrity gossip websites and YouTube channels. We thought that these celebrities who come out of rehab must have a rough time getting over their addiction as it is, let alone having cameras in their faces everywhere they go. We thought this would be the perfect base for our scene: a celebrity haunted by the paparazzi.

We then started thinking of questions a celebrity would be asked and below are several of the questions we came up with:

• Is it true that you’re broke?
• What’s next?
• Are you high right now?
• Did your girlfriend visit you in rehab?
• Have you read your reviews?
• Why did your agent drop you?
• What have your parents said?

We then went on to record each of these and more so that they can be overlapped to provide a paparazzi soundscape. I thought it would be effective to use this as the opening of a physical theatre piece where the celebrity would step out of rehab, for example, and the soundscape begins with the other three actors surrounding him/her. We agreed that I would play the celebrity as it would make domestic abuse easier with a female as the centre attention as woman are commonly portrayed as innocent. Next lesson we will focus on creating this physical theatre piece.

Double - Performance Workshop (Sweeney Todd) - Blog 7 - 06/02/17

Today we ran the scene between Todd and Pirelli which results in his death. We had Rob and Dan act out the section minus Pirelli’s death individually with no direction to see how they perform it and we gave them the following feedback:

Dan needs to interact with the space more, at the moment he’s only using the chair when he can be using the walls, the table, the razors he mentions or even Todd himself.

Rob needs to decide how he’s going to react to Pirelli being there, whether he’s going to be scared that he knows the truth about Benjamin Barker or angry; both were reflected in this runthrough multiple times.

After receiving feedback, they performed it again which I felt was a lot better. They interacted with each other more and their movement was a lot more interesting. Next, we worked on Pirelli’s actual death which all had ideas for. We could have Pirelli fiddling around with some fancy ribbon whilst sitting in the chair and then Sweeney could grab the ribbon and choke Pirelli to death with it. We could have Pirelli sat with the ribbon again and Todd slices his throat from behind; however, we felt that this would be difficult to use blood packs without the scene looking bad. We also thought it would look cool if we had Pirelli standing and turn when he says, “Beadle Bamford.” As he turns, Todd slices forwards dynamically to which Pirelli would grab his throat and squeeze a blood pack which could be in his hands the whole time. As he turns, to the audience, his neck and hands are now smothered in (fake) blood. In the end, we went with the following movement:

• Rob strangles Dan with the Ribbon and then once he hits the ground, he gasps for breath and Rob stabs Dan. Rob then picks him up and hides his body underneath the steel decking.

Double - Performance Workshop (Sweeney Todd) - Blog 6 - 03/02/17

Today we worked on the blocking and the singing of “Pretty Woman.” In the scene before, Ollie and I enter the Pie Shop while Sweeney reveals the body of Pirelli to Mrs Lovett. We cross paths on the stairs and then it is only Sweeney and Turpin alone in his shop. From there we perform our dialogue which then leads into the song. Before blocking our movement throughout this song, we sang through it a few times to get used to the timings and to learn the harmonies properly. This was something Rob and I struggled with but after working on this all lesson, we were much more competent with the song.

Next lesson, as we have both Tom and Dan back, we will work on Pirelli’s death and have Tom sing through “Johanna.”

Double - Performance Workshop (Sweeney Todd) - Blog 5 - 01/02/17

Today we worked on Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir scene and The Contest that follows. We started with planning James’ movement; we didn’t want him to be static throughout the piece but we didn’t want him to run around too much as this would make the scene unrealistic. We decided to let James take full reign for a moment and see what he came up with before adding more to it.

After James performed his opening, we felt that it was a bit bland and needed more movement. We planned James’ movement to start from either the stage, entering from the curtains or from beneath the stage (we tried both to see which works better) and then he would walk around the audience and interact with them based on his lines (“Rub it in sir”). After trying both (pictured below) we decided that James appearing from the curtain makes more sense as Pirelli would enter extravagantly from the curtain too and it also looked more impressive too.

We then read through and rehearsed The Contest where we had only one small issue: where we were staging The Contest. We had two options, have it take place up on the stage or down on the floor in front of the audience (Both pictured below).  Although, performing it closer to the audience would make them feel more involved and as if they were actually the townspeople of London, we decided to perform it on the stage as it would make The Contest more a grand performance as well as simply being a shave.

Next lesson, as we don’t have Tom or Dan, we will bock and rehearse “Pretty Women.”