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For the style of our piece, our intentions were for it to be based off of naturalism with a hint of abstract. Abstract is relating to or denoting art that does not attempt to represent external reality, but rather seeks to achieve its effect using shapes, colours, and textures. we used this in the scene when Ben and Mitchell moved the bed around because of Bens character (Finn) feeling like it looks better on the opposite side of the room from where it was, also because Finn found it easier to get things and created more space in the room.
Naturalism refers back to theatre to create an illusion of real life through a range of dramatic and theatrical strategies. We used this throughout our devised piece because we wanted to make the audience believe that what they were watching was real.

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After our first attempt at our devised performance, we are allowed to have our performances resubmitted by the 20th of June. Because of this, we as a group decided to change the doctor and father scene to make the duration and information longer.
We decided to devise a new scene with the father and doctor discussing what is wrong with Finn and the way forward with his recovery. We also sorted out what Finn was going to say and how the doctor would respond. For example:
Finn: "Wheres Amy? Hasn't she picked her jacket up?"
*Points to empty table, doctor directs his attention to said table"
Doctor: "Finn, there's nothing there."
From this example, me and Ben decided that we would include Finn asking more questions relating back to the other characters in the previous scenes like: Amy, Sarah and Jake.
As a group, we worked collaboratively without any problems. We all knew what our improvements were and how we were going to achieve them to make the 2nd attempt of our piece more professional. For example: with the doctor scene, my improvement was to speak slower and calmer to give the impression that I was trying to understand Finn and to give the impression that i was an actual doctor as they are very calm with pacients.
Target for 20th June: learn the basic diologue for the doctor talking to the father about Finn and also better transition when doctor goes in the round and all other characters except Finn go off.

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Our performance went well however we did not use our full concentration which made our performance lack in professionalism therefor we did not achieve the grades that were expected from us. This is because my group has had little time to rehearse with the reason being: scripted work. We have been working more on our script then on the proper task which was to rehearse and block the scenes in our piece. Another factor is the lack of concentration and commitment. In our group, we all were more focused on the script and we all tried to find the time to come into college or like today use our free lesson to rehearse however we thought that no one would bother to turn up and begin to use the script to block all the scenes, so no one really asked if anyone wanted to rehearse.

My personal reflection is that I know the storyline well and have contributed to writing up the scene for the doctor and Finn. However, because we rehearsed so little (which was all our faults, more mine because I never asked anyone) I did not understand our ‘new scene’ that was given to me today (13th June). I recognised the doctor and Finns scene as a duologue of the doctor asking questions to Finn while Finn makes no sense and begins to talk about things from our piece (aka. Amy, Sarah, Jake etc.) which I wrote up with help from Mungo. On the day of the 1st  performance, Mitchell gave me a new script which cut the doctors questions and convocations with Finn and also added the character Sarah in the scene. This is one of the reasons I didn't act out this scene well because with the new version of the script, I didn’t know any of the movements that I had to include because the group didn't really discuss it with me and also I had to learn new lines and remember the queues for when I had to say a certain line.

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http://www.dennissevershouse.co.uk/ : Dennis Severs’ House at 18 Folgate Street, Spitalfields is more than just a time capsule. It is both a breathtaking and an intimate portrait of the lives of a family of Huguenot silk-weavers from 1724 to the dawn of the 20th Century. As you follow their fortunes through the generations, the sights, smells and sounds of the house take you into their lives. It was Dennis Severs’ intention that as you enter his house it is as if you have passed through the surface of a painting, exploring with your senses and imagination a meticulously crafted 18th Century world.

When visiting Dennis severs' house, the only thing I knew about the exhibit was that every room was designed and portrayed as if the family living there had just left the house. This belief was also supported by the use of audio tapes which made it sound like the family who was living in the house had already left due to the sound of a horse and carriage leaving outside.
I noticed that every floor inside changed, by the decades of the 19th century. From the basement to the top floor, I had noticed how each floor had a different style to it. For example, the upper floors seemed in poor condition while the lower floors were the opposite (except for the basement which was in a similar condition to the top floor). My theory is that servants lived on the higher floors while the house owners lived on the more luxurious lower floors of the house.

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21st of February. Introduction to unit and chair duets

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21st of February. Introduction to unit and chair duets

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Today, we started a new unit in our storytelling sessions. This unit is based around devising our very own play.
However in today's session,  we warmed up by using Colombian hypnosis. Columbian Hypnosis involves students working in pairs to lead one another through a space as one participant follows another participant’s hand. This activity requires trust, awareness, and non-verbal communication as students work together to move safely through the space.
Then for our main activity which was called 'chair duets'. The exercise presents a very physical scene of touches, embraces, flirtations and rejections all played at an mesmerising speed. We were asked to get into pairs. I was with Chloe which was lucky as we had both experienced this exercise. Because we knew what the exercise had to include, we started with rejection and touches before including embraces and flirtations.

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_in_the_round
The stage is always in the centre with the audience arranged on all sides, and is most commonly rectangular, circular, diamond, or triangular. Actors may enter and exit through the audience from different directions or from below the stage. The stage is usually on an even level with or below the audience in a "pit" or "arena" formation.

This configuration lends itself to high-energy productions and anything that requires audience participation. It is favoured by producers of classical theatre. it has continued as a creative alternative to the more common proscenium format.

In effect, theatre-in-the-round removes the fourth wall and brings the actor into the same space as the audience. This is often problematic for proscenium or end stage trained actors who are taught that they must never turn their backs to the audience, something that is unavoidable in this format. However, it allows for strong and direct engagement with the audience.

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Divide the full group–or lets the group divide itself–into pairs. Each pair decides who is Player A and Player B in their small group. Have partners check in with each other about any physical needs or limitations they might have today (e.g. “Getting up and down off the ground is hard for me”). Set space parameters so students know where they can move in the activity to keep their partners safe. Then, ask Player A to hold the palm of his or her hand about six inches from Player B’s face. Ask Player B to imagine that her or his partner’s hand has hypnotized him/her and that s/he has to follow it anywhere it goes, keeping the same distance between her/his face and the palm at all times. As Player A moves around the room, Player B follows. After a set time, switch and let B’s lead.

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Frantic Assembly https://prezi.com/m/kzkqmwhbjgwa/frantic-assembly-intro-and-chair-duets/

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB-9LERsyY8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ_9Eaog2yw

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I made my song a coat
Covered in embroideries
Out of old mythology
From heel to throat
But the fools caught it
Wore it in the worlds eye
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.

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In this session, we began to learn about bunraku puppets. Bunraku puppets are about one-half life size and each is operated by three performers: a principal operator and two assistants. Strings are not used, but rather the puppeteers co-operate to maneuver the limbs, eyelids, eyeballs, eyebrows and mouths of the puppets, thereby producing life-like actions and facial expressions. The puppeteers are in full view of the audience, but are dressed in black to symbolize that they are to be taken as "invisible".We created our puppets from newspaper, I was with Louise and Alex. We decided that we should take turns on each body part, for example; Louise had the legs to operate, I had the left arm and head to control and Alex had the right arm to control. We started to practise movements by walking our puppet round the space of the studio while trying to make it look life-like. After practising how to make our puppet seem real, we started to include reactions and more movements into our puppet, for example; we showed our puppet sitting down by crossing both of his legs and resting his head on his right arm.
How to work together to make the puppet come alive.
In our next few sessions we developed a little scene with another group so we could have our puppets interact like theyre real people. The challenges with this was trying to find something that was simple and effective at the same time. In the end our group decided on a scene where two puppets would be on date and then the other third puppet would come along to beat the male puppet up but would end up losing. The first thing that didn’t really work was our puppet because the arm kept falling off and the legs were too thin so we had to put more effort than usual into our puppet which in turn made it more of a challenge to try to move him around effectively. Another thing that could have improved was our story because it was almost too straight forward and wasn’t naturalistc enough, it was more melodramatic. Of course there is only so much character development and story develpment that you can do with a puppet so it’s a little irrelevent but its still something we could have looked at. I believe that in doing this I developed my awareness of physicality as by taking the time to watch different people and how they move when doing simple things actually helped me take note of these things for when I have to portray a particular character.

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We began rehearsals on the 25th of April 2017 and continued til' the 20th of June 2017.
For our devised performance, I had to work with Mungo, Alice, Ben, Jacob and Mitchell. For our first rehearsal lesson, we began to decide on ideas on what our synopsis to our piece was going to be. We wanted our performance to be focused on a boy who had imaginary friends which was because of his mental disorder that is not discovered until later on in the piece. We have been told that our devised piece had to be 15-30 minutes long. The type of staging that we would be using is known as "theatre in the round". After being told this we began to work on ideas for what we could include in the devised storyline:
-Dark humour.
-imaginary friend- guilty conscience to real friend he lashed out on and lost (my idea)
-No reason why the boy cant leave.
The points up above and the first ideas that originally came to mind about what we could base our piece about.
the first idea/plot for our 'devising project' was: Sanity and mentality, a boy shuts himself away from the world, imaginary friends with him. All a hallucination as he has been in a mental hospital all this time. He has no reason to why he has the motivation to keep himself hidden. We decided to get rid of my idea about the imaginary friend symbolising guilt because the group thought it would be better to let the boy have a imaginary friend without there being any causes for it but his mental state.
On the 26th of April we began to create our scenes for our piece of theatre.
Our first scene we created was about Finn moving his bed to a different part of the room, to symbolise change. Jake is also with him moving the bed back to where it first was.
Our second scene was when Sarah visits Finn, in this scene they are just talking and Finn wants to tell her how he feels about her yet she just wants to be friends and after she leaves, Jake is around to comfort him.
The third scene included the dad, him and his dad began to fight and Finn begins to bring up his mum which his dad begins to get angry about and before leaving let's fin know that Amy will be visiting to pick up her jacket.

The fourth scene is involving Amy and Finn talking about their feelings and Amy feelings for Finn before Sarah walks in and soon a fight starts between her and Amy. Then the dad walks in and starts to shout at Jake before Finn screams “no” and everyone leaves while the doctor comes on.

The fifth and final scene is the doctor examining Finn, Finn finds himself in a mental hospital and begins to ask where Amy and Sarah are before saying that Jake is in the room which the doctor admits that no one is there. After the doctor leaves, Jake says goodbye to Finn, the doctor talks to Finns father before the dad takes Finn home.

Then from the 2nd of may to the 16th of may, me and my group began to write up our scripts for the scenes. I was given the task to write up the doctor and finns scene. When writing up this scene, I was told that for the doctor, I was suppose to ask Finn questions to whatever he had to say to show my characters professionalismv.

I’ve contributed ideas on what we can do for  certain scenes and I’ve helped others by writing the script. Its important to have a script written because that way you have a structure to follow and lines you can learn so that your performance is not improvised and messy. I’ve also contributed to our group by suggesting a way to make our piece better because when we showed off the doctors scene to the class, we found it wasn’t quite structured in the way that we spoke over each other and that it didn’t show off our true potential. I suggested that the character Finn should ask about Sarah, Amy and Jake (in that order) while the doctor asks about them and takes down notes. I also suggested that the doctor and father should have a scene, the doctor explaining to the father about Finn and his mental diagnosis. This was much more successful and actually ended up being more understandable than our last one which was good because this linked to our intention.

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We were put into groups of 6 and was given a poem. This poem was our stimulus to a short devised performance. Our main plot was based on people's opinions and feelings. At the start of the piece, Alex is known as the song who begins to reveal his feelings to me (the guard). However the guard, media and god forbids the song from expressing how he feels and makes sure that no one hears him. However at the end, the song helps everyone express their feelings and changes everything the opposite to what it was at the start.
In rehearsals, I was given the character known as the guard. The guard is friendly at first. However, he instantly doesn't agree with listening to the songs feelings which implies that the guard knows it wrong to express feelings.
Then at the end of the piece, The guard has changed his ways and agrees to the song opening up about his feelings yet the song doesn't admit to feeling happy or sad.