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.