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The main theme of our piece is radiation and it's dangers. We wanted our audience to be more informed of how harmful radiation can be and how people in history have suffered immensely due to radiation poisoning from exposure to the element and the effects it can have on people physically.
We also intended to inform our audience of the stories of Marie Curie and her life, the Radium Girls, the tragic story of Michiko Yoshitsuka, and the mistreatment of Eda Schultz Charlton. It was felt by us that these stories aren't as well known as they should be and that the struggles of these people deserved to be acknowledged.

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We wanted to keep our performance simple, with the focus being on the acting rather than the costumes, so we opted to keep our costumes simple, as this something that our practitioner, Paper Birds, also used frequently in their performances.
We decided that a simple black top and black trousers would work as they acted as a blank slate that allow us to put our other costume pieces on easier.

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For our performance, we needed quite a few props to use as storytelling devices. In our first scene, we use a tea cup, an empty pot of noodles and a tv remote control to hide small slips of paper with key quotes on them. We also had to include a newspaper to progress the story. Unfortunately, we struggled to find a real article that worked well with our story, so we had to get creative and so I created my own newspaper clipping full of small jokes for myself and my group (image below).
In our second scene, the props were minimal but vital. The Radium Girls were known to paint watches using radium, so we found two small tipped paintbrushes and two watches so that we could replicate the action of painting the watches to show what the women in the factories did.
Similarly to the newspaper, for our 'Eda' scene, we needed a flyer for a job advertisement and as we couldn't find one, I took it upon myself to create a one depicting a woman in a1940s style dress claiming to love her job. This flyer also include small jokes and references to the scene (Image below).
APPENDIX 5

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We wanted to keep the staging simple so that it would be easier for us to switch between scenes without spending too much time moving the set around. We settled on three white boxes in a staggered line, with a table, centre stage right, positioned diagonally so that it would face both the audience and the other actresses on stage, which would allow us to act in the scene and address the audience in a way that felt natural and meant that we didn't have to stand and step towards the audience, causing us to ruin the flow of the scene. We'd have two yellow chairs placed behind the desk for the Radium Girls scene so that the actresses can sit and mimic painting watches. We also intended for a small suitcase to be positioned on the floor on front of the boxes. It would be full of props so that we could easily access them without the audience seeing what's inside the suitcase. We also planned to use projections, a Paper Birds technique, on a large board behind us to better develop the story visually for our audience.

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The practitioner we chose, Paper Birds, have a key theme in all of their plays; the use of verbatim. This is the use of quotes from real people, however you have to use the exact phrase in the exact way the original quote was said so as not to lose the initial meaning. Since we were showing the stories of people who are mostly deceased and from decades past, we weren't able to hear how things were said, but we were luckily able to find many quotes to use due to diaries and court cases. We had an issue in our 'Eda' scene, as we need too many quotes and statistics, which caused us to lose the meaning and message of the story (humans being unknowingly experimented on).
We had the opposite problem with our 'Radium Girls' scene initially, as it flowed well as a performance, however it lacked quotes. As a group, we did research into articles and the court cases and found several quotes that we could take and place into the scene without it becoming too unnatural or forced.

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APPENDIX 3
In August of 1945, two Japanese cities were destroyed when America dropped atomic bombs on them in an effort to stop the war. The bomb on Hiroshima was dropped August 6th, and killed an estimated 140,000 people. Many of the civilians were obliterated in the initial blast, but the ones who survived suffered tragic and painful consequences, such as cancer, chronic diseases, and birth defects in babies.
Michiko Yoshitsuka was only 14 years old when Hiroshima was bombed. On the morning of August 6th 1945, she overslept and almost missed her train to work. She had to decide if she would run and try to catch her earlier train or wait for a later one which would’ve got her to work on time too. She ran to Yokogawa Station and managed to catch her train on time. This decision saved her life. The blast was blocked by Hijiyama, a tall hill between Hiroshima and Fuchu, and didn't reach the Toyo Kogyo factory building where she worked. Many of her school friends were killed while waiting for the later train.
Michiko headed up a mountain path, the Nakayama Pass, to try to find a nearby relative's house. She walked for an entire day and night and wasn’t reunited with her mother until the next day. The pair walked for10 days before they found out Michiko's brother was at the epicentre of the explosion and died instantly. Life only got more difficult for Michiko. In 1948, at the age of 18, she got married to a man who spent more time with his mistress instead of her, and a year later she gave birth to a daughter who unfortunately passed away, presumably due to the radiation that Michiko had been exposed to. A few years later, her mother sadly died of cancer, leaving Michiko alone with two children and a soon-to-be-divorced husband. She also developed many illnesses from her time in Hiroshima, such as a high fever, bleeding gums and a bloody nose, her hair would fall out, and purple spots would appear all over her body. She was put into isolation and doctors believed she wouldn't survive, however she did. She lived until 2012 and left behind a legacy as a survivor of one of the most atrocious, despair inducing incidents in all of history, a story that would be shared by her two children and four grandchildren.

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APPENDIX 2
The Radium Girls was a nickname given to a group of factory workers in the first world war. They were instructed by their superiors to lick the tips of paintbrushes that had been dipped in radium in order to make them small enough to paint the dials of watches so they would glow in the dark, making it easier for soldiers on the battlefield to see their watches in the dark. It's believed that the government and the factory workers paid off doctors to say that radium was safe and had health benefits. Women started having negative side effects, such as teeth falling out, migraines, ulcers that oozed blood and pus, haemorrhages, holes forming in their bones, and even their jaw bones snapping off! Mollie Maggia was the first woman from the factory to die from radiation poisoning, however her cause of death was ruled as syphilis as a way to tarnish her reputation and shame other women from coming out with their fears about radium.  Grace Fryer, another woman who worked at the factory, had her spine crushed from the fractures caused by the radium. She, along with four other women, decided to fight back against the factory owners. A lawyer by the name of Raymond Berry picked up their case and helped them fight it in court. They were forced to settle out of court; however, they’d raised enough awareness about the dangers of radiation that Grace felt satisfied that change would be made. Unfortunately, most of the money they received as compensation was used to pay for their funerals as many of them died shortly after. Most of the women who survived ended up developing tumours and getting diagnosed with cancer. It's because of this case that we have workplace safety measures in place.

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For our piece, my grouo decided to use the styling of the drama group Paper Birds, as with their interpretation, we felt that we could more effectively share our message, aswe believed that their techniques would work effectively with our performance.
The techniques we used were:

•Verbatim
•Social or Political agenda
•Multirolling
•Direct address
•Ensemble/chorus

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Our chosen stimulus was a quote from Martin Luther King.

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter"

The original meaning of this quote is regarding black lives matter, however we are all white, so we felt that it is not our place to speak on a topic so extreme that we have not personally been effected by as it may seem insensitive. We initially interpreted this as feminism, as we are all women and it's a prevalent issue that plagues us. In doing our research on women who were mistreated, we came across Marie Curie, who wasn't allowed to accept her own Nobel Prize, and decided to focus our research on her and her discovery of radium which eventually lead us to develop our piece on Radiation.

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APPENDIX 1
Marie Salomea Sklodowska was born in Warsaw, Poland, November 7th 1867.  Her parents were poor school teachers and she was the youngest of five siblings. She became a governess after her mother died. She moved in with her sister in Paris in 1891 and attended Sorbenne University where she studied physics and mathematics. There she met Pierre Curie, a scientist working in the city and married him a year later. They worked at the School of Chemistry and Physics in Paris where they researched invisible rays given off by uranium. This is where she discovered polonium, through grounded up samples of ‘pitchblend’, dissolving it in acid, and separating different elements. After doing this, they also discovered a new radioactive chemical called radium.
In 1905, Marie and Pierre were awarded the Nobel Prize for physics for their work on radioactivity, along with Henri Becquerel. Allegedly Marie wasn’t allowed to collect her own award due to her being a woman, however she passed her doctorate thesis in physics that same year.
In 1906, Pierre was killed in a street accident after being knocked down by a horse and cart.
Five years after her husband's death, Marie was awarded a second Nobel Prize for creating a means of measuring radioactivity.
During the first world war, she worked on developing small, mobile x-rays that could diagnose injuries on the battlefield. She worked with her 17-year-old daughter Irene at casualty clearing stations close to the front line, x-raying wounded soldiers to locate injuries, bullets, and shrapnel. These machines are still used today to allow doctors to examine moving images in the body.
At the age of 66, at the Sancellemoz Sanatorium in Passy, France, Marie died of aplastic anemia due to her exposure to radiation. Marie and Pierre’s bodies were reburied in the Pantheon – a Paris mausoleum for France’s most revered dead. This was done on the orders of French President Mitterand in 1955. Marie was the first woman to be awarded a place in the Pantheon.

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After brainstorming ideas, we decided to give our performance a slightly episodic structure, with only brief moments after each scene to return to 'ourselves' for an easier transition into the scenes.
The first thing we did was research. We found three interesting stories (Eda Charlton, Michiko Yoshitsuka, and the Radium Girls) and we looked for court cases, documentaries, articles, and even their diaries to find important quotes that told us about their lives and would help us to get our message across without feeling too unnatural in the scene. We then took those quotes and tried to create a short scene that would show the different characters in important moments in their lives.
For the Radium Girls, we placed them in the factory to show how they had to work, and also to show that they were afraid to lose their jobs regardless of their health. Putting them in the factory also allowed us to introduce the idea of other workers in the factory, which allowed us to comment of the 'disappearance of Mollie', and the idea of sickness and the government lying and saying the women who came out against them had syphilis to ruin their reputation. We figured since the scene took place in America, we'd use American accents to properly quote the women. This meant that we had to make sure to not use any British slang that would cause the scene to feel out of place.
Once we'd come up with concepts for each of the scenes, we decided to write one scene each, so that they would all feel different and unique in tone. This caused some problems each scene feeling slightly too disconnected from the other, so to fix this we shared the scenes and gave feedback to one another on ways to edit and improve the script.
We wanted to make sure that we had plenty of Verbatim usage in each scene, however this posed a challenge.  In our initial writing process, the Radium Girls scene had too few quotes, whereas the Eda Charlton scene had far too many! We worked together to try and find and equal balance between the two scenes.
My assigned scene was focused on Michiko Yoshitsuka and her tragic life. I did some research on her story to find a scene to focus on. I decided to look at her arrival to work on the day the bomb was dropped. This would allow me to show her with her friends before the incident and the aftermath of the disaster in one scene. I found the diary transcript recently translated by her granddaughter after the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima. This allowed me to discover what Michiko felt and thought on the day of the disaster and use her her words exactly as they are written to attempt to accurately display the emotion behind them.
We included a monologue in each scene for the main character focus of the scene so share their inner thoughts. These were full of verbatim quotes for more accuracy and emotion. This allowed each actress to have their own moment to explain to the audience how their character feels in the moment while also explaining their situation and also how they'll be effected in the future for additional context for the audience.
Paper Birds also uses lots of chorus or ensemble work, so we decided to add this into our Eda scene via two or more characters speaking in unison to repeat an significant quote that the main character had said. We felt that this would help go highlight the importance of the quote the the audience.

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Quinta Magglia - A Radium Girl. She worked in a factory in America during the first world war, painting watches with radium. She is the sister of Mollie, the first radium girl to die.

Michiko Yoshitsuka - a 14 year old student and factory worker. She survived the Hiroshima bombing thanks to a split second decision to catch the earlier train, losing her brother In the explosion. Her mother developed cancer, she lost her daughter two weeks after birth, and she developed many diseases, all as a result of radiation poisoning.

Eta Charlton - A mother and a widow who was unknowingly a victim of the Manhattan Project. The government injected her with radiation without her knowledge or her consent, in order to test it's effects on humans. She ended up becoming very ill and dying due to this betrayal of people in power. She didn't find out what had been done to her until 30 years later. By then the damage was done. She never got justice.

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Originally, we decided that we'd focus our theme on feminism and how the entertainment industry treats women.  We later changed this to Radition. Some of our concept ideas were:

•Wage gap - Actors vs Actresses.
•How the media perceives women.
•All female vs All male films.
•The mistreatment of Judy Garland.
•Jackie vs Marilyn - how women were pit against each other.

Our other -Non feminism- topics were:
•Thalidomide.
•The Abervan disaster.
•Marie Curie and radium.

After some research, we decided to use Marie Curie and her research as the inspiration for our piece.

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APPENDIX 4
48 year old widow, Eda Schultz Charlton was an unfortunate victim of government negligence and betrayal.  In Autumn of 1945, she was admitted into University of Rochester's Strong Memorial Hospital due to a mild case of hepatitis. She ended up being involved in one of the worst cases of human experimenting ever documented. She, along with 17 other people including 4 year old Simeon Shaw,  were injected doses of .3 microcuries of radium . This is 43 times the lethal dose. She was in and out of hospital for the rest of her life and died of a heart attack in 1983, yet doctors claimed the experiments caused no health problems to poor Eda. She didn't find out that she was experimented on until 1974 - 30 years later. Her son, Fred Schultz, angrily stands by his comparison of the experiment to the Nazi's in Auschwitz. Dr Joseph Hamilton was the man behind the experiments, and he claimed it was kept a secret to prevent the enemy government from using radium against us, however, keeping it a secret from the test subjects themselves is a grotesque act of cruelty and abuse of their trust. It was later discovered that he'd been experimenting on his non consenting patients since the early 1930's.
Eda and the other victims never received any form of justice for their suffering.

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At the beginning of the year, we were presented with 4 different options use as stimuli to gain inspiration for our piece.

Alys Williams - Don't Mind
This is a song about waiting for someone and falling in love. The vocals are beautiful and slow and there is a motif of her vocals saying "cha cha" throughout the verses. The song is slow but the beats in the chorus make it seeks faster and more upbeat.

Leisure - William Henry Davies
Leisure is a poem about life and the fact that's it's too short to enjoy. The poet seems to criticise how fast the world flies by and tells us we should slow down and appreciate the small things. It has rhyming couplets throughout.

Quote - Martin Luther King

"Our lives being to end the day we become silent about things that matter"

This was said by iconic black activist Martin Luther King and is a criticism of people who sit by idly and ignore real issues in the world in the hopes that they'll go away. Here King is saying that we need to stand up against diversity and issues so that we can come out stronger.

Cardiff Bay Beach - Dorian Spencer Davies

This is a painting depicting Cardiff beach. The colours in the picture are vibrant and bold. The most notable colours are blue and yellow, which contrast each other nicely as they're opposite on the colour wheel. The lines are bent and distorted, giving the image a comical feeling. It could potentially be interpreted as a child's perspective of a fun day at the beach.

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For our performance, we each play multiple roles, including ourselves, so it was important that we used distinct voices to distinguish characters. It was also important to alter our voices as our practitioner, Paper Birds, used verbatim as a dramatic technique and a key element of verbatim is repeating quotes in the same way that the original person spoke it so as not to alter the meaning of the phrase. This meant that in certain scenes taking place outside of our country, we had to use accents. For the Radium Girls, we had to alter our voices and attempt American accents to highlight that this took place in the US. This initially proved to be a challenge as we each stuggled to transition in and out of the southern accents without it sounding strange. We overcame this with some practice and the inclusion of accents helped to develop and improve the scene considerably.
Another thing that we had to alter was the emotion in our voice. In initial run throughs, we felt that certain moments lacked substance as we were reading the script but we weren't putting emphasis on the emotion of the words. We felt that these events are horrible and painful and that needed to be reflected in our voices.