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We used a poem from a book called 'Beyond Bedlam' which was a book of different poem written about mental health and people suffering from it.
We liked this poem as the language is good to end the piece with and is a soft and comforting poem to hear.

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https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/statistics

https://www.time-to-change.org.uk/personal-stories

http://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/

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A section of an interview we used for a physical theatre scene

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From the outset we knew we wanted to educate people on mental health and how it can effect people. A large number of teenager suffer from mental health but not many of them really understand what it is Being teenagers ourselves we felt the best way form teenagers to engage and listen is to hear it from other teenagers. We wanted to put a message across of what mental health is and how it effects people but didn't want the piece to be too dark as that gives a bad impression of our topic. But still had to make sure it wasn't too light-hearted that no one too it seriously so we had to make sure we had enough of both to create an enjoyable and educational piece.

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To gather information we needed to produce a consent form so that the person we are interviewing knows what we are going to do with the information and so they know at any point they can withdraw anything that they say in the interview.

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This week we made a start on our physical theatre scene but we want to make it the best it can be so are taking time to explore different ways of approaching the scene. We also found a way to link the first scene with a part of an interview saying how people should be accepting of how they are. Our idea to link the two is to have a military roll call type scene where I tell people to proceed to society as long as they don't have any faults but when Cameron doesn't answer me when I ask him I tell him to conform to society instead which leads into the piece from the interview.
Because we want our physical theatre scene to be to a good standard it is taking a large amount of time and we still have half the scene to go plus starting other scenes too.
For next week we want to have finished the physical theatre scene have at least one other scene more or less done too and have one scene planned out ready.

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This week we managed to make a start on the devising of my piece using the first question from our questionnaire as last week we were saying how it would be good to open the piece with how we opened the interviews. We took all the answers to the question and found a lot of people either said, 'tired' or 'cold' but one person replied with 'shit' which being very different from our other replies gave us the idea to each person to come on stage saying these replies but when a person says 'shit' all the others stop and look at that person. We wanted to do this to show how people who have issues with mental health are singled out.
We have a really good idea for a piece involving physical theatre that would be good to get started as soon as possible.

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We are now getting a good amount of content from interviews and potential interviews from people with varied opinions on mental health which is excellent for content purposes as it gives us more creative ability being able to show different opinions on the matter. We have yet to start devising our scenes as there is still a lot of content to collect before we start bringing the piece to life. Though the fact we haven't started devising is  worrying as our preparation time is slowly running out however we do know we want to involve the content from our first question as we think it would be good to open the performance with the answers.
Next rehearsal we are going to make a start on our piece to try and make progress.

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Today we created a questionnaire of what we wanted to ask people in our interviews. We made a list of possible questions to ask, some in relation to mental health, but some that might not seem so obvious, for example; I came up with an opening question of simply 'How did you feel when you woke up this morning?' allowing us to get an insight to their first feeling of the day. We're still at an early stage of the creation of this piece so we are yet to start devising but myself and Cameron thought of an idea for a scene where there are two characters on stage and one is typing but the other is reading what the other is typing at the computer. We thought of this idea as something that is very popular nowadays are forums that are dedicated to mental health.
For next week our aim is to start interviewing people so we can start devising as soon as we can.

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Today's rehearsal was a big success as we managed to get the watch scene to a standard that we as a group were happy with which is the last thing we wanted to make progression with before we were happy with our entire piece so now we can work on making the scene transitions slick and easy for the performance. As a group we need to be more confident with the order of scenes because several times we've had to stop a run through due to confusion of what scene comes next.
next rehearsal we need to organise the running order to ensure everyone knows where each scene is. We also need to now work on transitions so we don't lose the flow of our performance.

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Evaluation of Performance:

Our plan to gather material for our piece was to create a questionnaire of set questions and interview individuals. After we had the interviews we typed them up into a document and we picked and chose our favourites pieces and the pieces that had the best opportunity of creativity. Personally I felt our performance as a whole went very well. Our acting was very good and it showed that we spent a large amount of time preparing for the performance. We catered to our target audience of teenagers/ young adults as we managed to add enough humour into the performance to keep them engaged but enough drama to people to convey our message to raise awareness of mental health. The audiences response to the performance was positive as they seemed to have enjoyed the humour mixed with drama as when we wanted the audience to laugh they did , and when we wanted them to focus on key moments of drama, they were silent. We used a good range of storytelling techniques like physical theatre, verbatim. In our piece we didn’t tell a linier narrative but instead told a series of short stories using these different storytelling techniques. Our strongest aspects of our performance were our physical theatre scenes as we gave ourselves more time devising these scenes than dialog scenes to make sure our use of physical theatre was as good as it could be. Our greatest challenges were the watch scene as by the time we created in a way we were happy with it was the 3rd or 4th version of that scene. Another challenge unfortunately was attendance as towards the end of the rehearsal time members of our group became more frequently absent which consequently delayed our rehearsal process. I think to improve our piece it would have been better to have more of a narrative that is consistent throughout the performance as ours didn’t follow much of a main story so we could have intertwined the short stories with an over-all larger narrative. The use of physical theatre is a technique that I really think I’ll use again.

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We were asked to perform our verbatim pieces to get an understanding of our progress what where we need to improve. Unfortunately a member of our group decided not to turn up for our performance making it difficult to create our scenes in the way that we had planned so certain scenes had to be scrapped which was frustrating as we wanted to asses as a group and individuals where we could improve.
Something we need to look into is the use of space on stage. We haven't been able to rehearse our piece in very large areas so trying to get an understanding of space has been difficult.
On a more positive note we managed to reach our end of term target we set ourselves as a group to know what we are doing as a group as in lines, scene ideas and characters with the exceptions of two scenes.

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After coming back from the Christmas break we as a group were adamant on continuing from where we go to last term. This was to devise a scene that myself and Mungo have a conversation about people being part of clock work. We spent the majority of the lesson trying to find ways to get our entire group involved so it fitted with the next scene. For this I came up with the idea to create clock work using physical theatre but after much debate we decided against the idea as it was too complicated for the time we had left before the performance.
As it was the first day back to rehearsals we struggled with focus as shown by our lack of progression in devising a scene but hopefully in our next rehearsal we should be settled and ready to continue rehearsing as usual.