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We prepared the material for our performance by essentially gathering as much information about Chelsie Manning's story - this was after having decided to have a major case about gender that happened in the recent years be the 'narrative string' that held our performance together - we then divided all the interesting/noteworthy aspects into either short monologue type sections, or as individual scenes (For an example; the two mirror scenes at the beginning and near the end, I devised as I felt it represented the monotonous cyclical nature Chelsie must feel like she's in - what with all the appeals made by her - and also would be useful in giving our piece a clear start and finish).

Personally, I believe as actors we all performed to the best of our ability, however for me the actual piece that my group had to show was ultimately lacking. It lacked the energy we had all grown accustomed too from our previous performances/workshops, and as such, for me, it felt like it wasn't as enticing for the audience (An example being the lack of large body language in our piece led to quite small, limited characters being portrayed, and as such would lead to a less engaged audience). However given the seriousness of our topic it would have been rather hard to come up with these 'larger than life' characters for a topic like gender as, without being offensive in anyway, it is VERY easy to make one small misstep and end up offending an entire gender just for making one character slightly too 'larger than life'.
In regards to how well our piece catered to its intended target audience - that being EVERYONE - I got the impression it went quite well, as we kept everything simplified (refer back to my "AUDIENCE" section for a full explanation of how it catered to the piece's target audience).
The audience's responses surprised me. We received a surprising amount of laughs during interview sections, which looking back on makes a degree of sense, as the awkwardness of watching someone imitate another individual you perhaps even know - especially if done well - can be quite a comedic experience. One major response we got, was from one of Kelly's friends was how "Mature" our piece was and that it was a very "Mature form of storytelling". This I believe was needed amongst our group as before getting this feedback we had considered our piece a failure for not competing with the liveliness of the other groups performance, however after receiving this news we all began to take a more positive stance towards our "Adult" piece.
The main storytelling techniques used personally by me were; dramatic pauses, comedic timings, physical theatre (To a small degree), manipulating my voice (In order to cast either a creepy, sinister mood on a scene, or to portray a timid character just trying to please the audience/interviewer - this is referring to Alex's sister whose interview I based my verbatim monologue around)  and monologues.
In my eyes the strongest aspect of our performance was the solo monologues. Without sounding big-headed each of us tasked with a monologue brought it to life, each in their own way; Louise by embodying the individuality that was prominent throughout Kelly's interview, Alex by becoming this individual completely unlike his usual friendly and smiling persona, and in my own monologue I feel I couldn't have created a character who had a better balance between wanting to please others whilst showing how nervous they were to be on the spot without going completely into the realms of a 'Melodramatic' performance.
In contrasts to this, the one improvement I would make is a simple one...More interaction in the solo monologues. Even though I fully believe they were the strongest aspect, with just a bit of interaction from other members of our group during them (Like what me and Jacob did during Louise's part) would have done wonders for how engaging our piece was.
Skills I personally will endeavour to hold onto for future theatrical practices, will almost certainly be the ability blend real-life text - be that in any form; newspaper, interviews, speeches etc. - into future devising projects. This is because it affords the piece a sense of legitimacy and realism, not easily found elsewhere (This would be especially useful if the piece I was attempting to devise was to be political in nature, or trying to send a message/convince people, as the more legitimate something is, the more people take note of it).

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The script for our performance was sorted out relatively quickly...Once the previous trials had been overcome (I.e. Gathering our interviews, as we focused on obtaining the parts that actually made our piece in the style of 'Verbatim' before even thinking about how we'd order and format everything).
Once we began designing our script we quickly established that we wanted a sort of 'cyclical nature' to be present, as I personally felt that it allowed the audience to have a very clear understanding of the beginning and ending of our piece (Hence the repeating of the mirror scene at the start and near the end, to show the progression and journey of Chelsie Manning's fight to become a woman).
In between these two mirror scenes consisted scenes of varying styles (E.G The court scene which initially was going to be a simple naturalistic scene, however we this was when we then decided on our alternating scene styles idea as we felt it allowed for a better more diverse show for the audience), and after each of these scenes there would be a monologue created from one of the interviews. We chose this format as we felt it meant the audience wouldn't have a bombardment of long monologues, and instead would have the information/facts about Chelsie Manning's case interspersed with all the other scenes in a nice cohesive manner.

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The target audience was never really a big concern of ours, as we felt the issue of 'gender' was of importance to those of all walks of life and as such we decided to not limit ourselves as we believed everyone could learn a few things from our performance (In terms of the injustices still committed against those who wish to change gender), and as such our target audience really became everyone.
Our piece never used any obscene language, nor did it ever put across anything I believe could have been construed as 'offensive' in nature. Our aim was to create a piece without anything too abstract/much physical-theatre in nature, causing our piece to be easy to comprehend for ages 10+, as by keeping things mostly naturalistic it means less effort has to be given by the audience in order to understand it.

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In terms of characters our piece only really had the two portrayals of Bradley/Chelsie Manning, whilst everyone else really just potrayed 'neutral' characters - by that I mean we all created very bland characters that were almost always in a neutral position, except for when the circumstance dictated we change an aspect about ourselves (An example being the physical theatre scene, where we altered our voice and made slight changes to our body language in order to cast an intimidating presence).
The two potrayals of Chelsie Manning were created to allow us to show all the kinds of thoughts/emotions that would be running through her mind; i.e. Chloe (the representation of Chelsie Manning's female side) was always calm and very concerned with the future as opposed to the present, whereas Tom (The male side) was very frantic and almost always shown in a state of panic or fear. We chose to devise these two respective characters this way, as we felt that as Bradley Manning ultimately wanted to become a woman it would make more sense to make the 'female side' the side that seemed most 'with-it', and as such we tried to glorify this side as much as we could.
The other characters in our performance were our representations of thise we interviewed. As such this was quite a personal undertaking for each of us tasked with turning an interview into a monologue, thus I can only really talk about my own experiences and challenges. The only real challenge I faced was learning the speech pattern of Alex's sister (My interviewee), as she often stumbled with her words (E.G Often repeating parts of sentences, using language like "Umm's" and "err's" when she couldn't think of an appropriate answer. However after overcoming this barrier, the whole process of bringing this character to life became relatively simple.

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In terms of the interviews that we got for the piece there was an initial problem; that we had all been fairly unlucky in finding suitable people willing to give an interview, but more importantly willing to have it be recreated on stage. Once we had managed to find interviewee's who fulfilled our specifications we then had to compare them all to find out if they came from varying lives; for example we managed to get hold of a Teacher, a young female adult, and a two teens, we did this as to afford our piece more validity as obtaining views from people of different walks of life offered our piece the chance to showcase a multitude of views on Gender.
This however was not the case.
During the process of typing up the interviews which we had all gathered we came to realise that none of them contained a particularly 'Conflicting' view on Gender - By that i mean no one offered a negative view on Gender as an issue/topic - and as such there was initially a struggle to create a piece on a topic like Gender showcasing it in essentially a purely positive light, not allowing any form of controversy or conflict to be apparent in my groups piece. There was obvious trials which we had to overcome throughout the entire process of obtaining/rehearsing our interviews and fitting them into our piece, and if i were to have done one thing differently it would've been to incorporate them into our piece in a more seemless way, perhaps incorporating other people in our group in someone else's monologue i.e. What me and Jacob did in Louise's monologue, as I feel this added more liveliness in our relatively slow-paced performance.

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Our early ideas were of a whole piece being based around the journey of Chelsie Manning, all the way from the beginning including his time as Bradley Manning. However after considering this idea we quickly realised that there would be a lot of 'dead air' in scenes, as a large majority of his life (The part of his life we would be focusing on, in terms of gender) was essentially just waiting around for the repercussions of his actions (Leaking classified American military) and as such would not prove that enjoyable of a viewing experience for the majority of those who would come to watch the performance.
Another of our ideas was to incorporate some sort of 'mirroring' idea; having two actors represent Bradley, and Chelsie respectively. We felt this would be an effective way of showing the sort of inner crisis (Both mentally, and emotionally) those who are thinking about Gender reassignment commonly go through.

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All dramatic workshops we completed in the sessions leading up to our rehearsal and final performance of the piece, were mainly geared towards developing our skills used in verbatim i.e. The ability to imitate another individuals persona, ability to conduct interviews correctly, how to incorporate interviews/pieces of real life text correctly in order to make a true Verbatim piece etc.
There were also the occasional exercises/workshops to prepare us for the sessions e.g. We created large scoundscapes in order to tell a story, again, showing ways in which our skills and 'Theatrical toolset' were expanded before our final performance. All these workshops allowed us to be fully warmed-up for the rehearsing/devising that would be following them, as well as encouraging individuality in our groups (When we were to made to come up with, or organise our own workshops/warm-ups).

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My groups research was mainly focused on finding some kind of issue going on at least semi-recently, this was to give our audience something they'd all be relatively familiar with, as with a topic such as Gender we found it was very important to make certain that our piece was 'current' and 'relevant' as with controversial topics such as this (which hold a plethora of varying opinions and voices on it) it could be very easy to miss out key information  - E.G. If we were to have completely accidentally misused a certain term for a random gender group, possibly because none of our group may have identified with said gender group - and as such our piece could come across as horribly offensive/ignorant, the complete opposite our Verbatim piece was intended to be.
After conducting our research we settled upon the Case of: Chelsie Elizabeth (Formerly Bradley) Manning, to base our entire piece on as this was a current issue that we felt highlighted some blatantly backwards views some today still hold about Gender as a whole.
The pictures below/to the right showcase our research into Chelsie Manning, and consists of; the letter he wrote former President Obama during his presidency, an interview conducted with him and just general information on him and his life.
The photo top the right of the one about the letter he wrote to Obama, shows the consent form we got each person we interviewed to sign; this was in order to avoid any complications with those we interview (For example making sure they understood that we will be recreating them on stage).