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This lesson, we split our work and partly did research and were brainstorming for better ideas. Maitreyee, who was the news reporter spent her time doing research and finsing a news report which she can just copy of. This would make it easy for everyone and there will be suffficient information of the attack.
I was thinking of some new ideas along the way and we decided to remove the scene of the civilians conversing with the terrorists. We decided to do so, because in london the trains are very busy and nobody has the time to talk to anyone. Instead we planned on projecting video clips of the civilians that survived from the attack so the audience gains a further understanding of the situation. For the shady room I also thought that we should develop the scene further and make it look more realistic. Usually in movies where people plan and attack, they have many maps and a huge pin board with many pictures. We thought to have this interpretation in the shady room scene so the audience can understand what is going on in the terrorists minds easily. We also thought to add another scene where the audience gets an introduction of the sleeper cells who were part of the attack. After we did our research we found out that there were 4 sleepercells with regular jobs who were suicide bombers in the london attack. To give a visual representation, we planned on showing these 4 sleepercells when sharnika shouts out 'sleepercells activated'. This will be an interesting scene to have so the audience will know more about how thr attack was put into place.

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Feedback (2nd performance: to the groups)

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Feedback (2nd performance: to the groups)

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From this lesson we got even more feedback which in turn complicated our performance even more. For this lesson decided to perform our whole performance which we assumed was complete and ready.
Overview of the performance so far:
-News report of london attack from 10 years ago
-Two terrorists planning attack in a shady room
-Sleepercells were activated by terrorists
-Audience asks: what are sleeper cells(alienation)
-Still image of sleeper cells making bombs
-Terrorists enter bus and train
-They bump into civilians
-London bridge nursery rhyme
- Explosion

Feedback given:
-shady room didnt give much info and terrorist dont interact like that
-news report could give more info
-civilians dont interact in london train
-good synchronization
-do more research
-can give info about civilians who survivied
-can look into lives of the civilians in the attack
-more development and info needed
-news report needs to be clearer (transition to next ep)

The feedback given this lesson was a lot more dissapointing and eye opening because as the days progressed, our performance was only getting worse. We clearly needed to improve our performance on that so we spent the rest of the lesson brainstorming and trying to find things to improve on.
We decided to remove the scene of the interaction between terrorists and civilians and planned to change that scene the next lesson. We also planned to do more research on this topic and develop our news report the next lesson.

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Improving and further development of scenes

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Improving and further development of scenes

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For this following week we decided to focus on the last episode which was the main london attack and also tried to work on the feedback.
The london attack scene: For another alientation effect we decided to make a nursery rhyme relating to the london attack by following the london bridge song. We were brainstorming and trying to come up with the lyrics for our rhyme and worked throguh our creativity to make it as relevant to our performance as possible.
This is the lyrics for the nursery rhyme:
London town is falling down
Civilians dying , people crying
London town is terrabound
cause you deserve it
Break it down with peroxide bombs,
in a train, in a bus
we dont care about what we have done
cause you deserve it
To follow with the nursery rhyme, we decided to have a choreography with it to follow another alienation effect: coral movement.

Weo also worked on the attack scene where the terrorists would bump into the civilians and have a conversation in 3rd person narration. We decided to involve the civilians so that they can ask questions that would deepen the understanding of the attack to the audience and also so the terrorist can ask generic questions like 'which stop is this?' or 'what time is it?'. This is so the audience knows more aout the location and the time the bombing took place.

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Feedback recieved from groups (incomplete performance)

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Feedback recieved from groups (incomplete performance)

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For the feedback session we decided to show the first two episodes of our performance.
Overview of the performance so far:
-News report of london attack from 10 years ago
-Two terrorists planning attack in a shady room
-Sleepercells were activated by terrorists
-Audience asks: what are sleeper cells(alienation)
-Still image of sleeper cells making bombs

Feedback recieved:
We recieved a lot of feedback which really helped us shape our performance and understand what we were missing
- more info needed on the attack in the news report scene
-clearer transition frome ep 1 to 2 (must improve)
-good shady terrorist planning
-good involving audience/asking questions
-clear split screen
-sharnika should be louder when she says Sleeper cells activated

From the feedback recieced we learnt that we needed to do more research on the attack and have more information in order to make it a successful didactic performance.

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The shady room scene: In the brainstorm session we just were starting to think about this idea. Then we slowly started to develop it further and we were coming across many creative and fun ideas to have in our performance. For this scene we decided to have two terrosits sit down and talk through their plan of attacck. To give a visual representation of what goes on in their mind, we thought it will be more interesting to have people follow our instructions as we speak. For example if the terorist says 'lets plant a peroxide bomb', the people in the front will be making those bombs. We were still working through these ideas and also decided to include sleepercells to our scene. We also thought to include alientation in the scene by involving the audience by asking them questions and answering theirs. But later we came to a conclusion on having a freeze frame/ still image of sleepercells following our instructions instead of having people act out the brain of the terrorists.
News report scene: We decided to start our performance with a news scene where we are talking aout the london attack 10 years later. This will easily provide a lot of facts and info. about the attack and we can clearly start the performance from this. We decided to develop this episode as though we were in the set of the news scene. We would have maitreyee play the reporter and the other people would either be camera men or set producers. To alienate the audience we decided to have the camera men yawn and be bored of the news and at the end of the report we would reflect on why we were talking about an attack that took place 10 years ago.
Split of the terrorist attack and 3rd person narration: For this scene which would be our last episode and where the actual attack would take place, we decided to have a split scene which would show the attack on a bus and a train. The scene would take place in the middle of the stage and the two situations would be divided by a board. The bus will have a terrorist and the train will have another, and they both will converse with a passenger in 3rd person to alienate the audience. We thought this alienation technique would be effective so that the audience wouldn't get to emotional at the scene of the attack but would still understand what is happening in the scene.

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For this performance, we as a group were able to come up with many ideas. We started off by thinking about having a narrator that acts as the brain of the terrorists. This could be used to alienate the audience and allow them to gain an understanding towards the thoughts of the terrorist without gaining any emotional connection. We also thought about using placards to show the terrorists and the civilians. Another idea that passed through our brains, was the involvement of puppets and to use them to control the civilians who were part of the attack. While sitting down and thinking about ideas we went through many of them an above is the sheet of paper that shows all the ideas we all agreed to do. A few other ideas included the use of a news reporter. We thought having a news reporter would give us a great oppurtunity to give more information on the attack and start of the performance. The ideas we were having were all spaced out through the performance as we did not force ourselves to think episodically just yet. We just randomly put our brainstorming ideas on another piece of paper before agreeing to all the ideas stated above.
Some ideas that we did not go through was the introduction and perspectives of the civilians that were attacked. One of us thought that it would be very interesting to present the point of views of the different civilians that were part of the attack so the audience can gain information from a creative way. But we ended up not going through with this idea as we came to a conclusion that this will force an emotional connection between the audience and the characters and would not be informative. We also thought it would be interesting to have the narrator play the brain of the terrorists, controlling them and telling them what to do. We did not go through with this idea either because it was to creative and rather hard to portray it in a didactic performance.
A few of the bigger ideas we had that shaped our performance was the involvement of a shady room where the terrorists plan their attack. From this idea we really started to shape our performance. The shady room would be a great way to show the development of the terrorist's thoughts and the ideas they had when they were planning the attack. We could also involve the audience and create great basis for alienation. We also passed through the idea of having a split scene of a train and a bus to show two situations in just one scene. We thought this would be very climactic and also provide visual information as to how the attack was performed.

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For this unit of epic theatre, I formed a group along with 5 other people:
Caroline
Celeste
Sharnika
Lily
Maitreyee
We all decided to do a performance on the London Bombing that occured in 2005. Choosing such a tragic event, will allow us to provide the audience with a didactic performance. On our first lesson we started of with the brainstorming and were already able to gather many ideas as to how we will do our performance. Above is a sheet of paper with all of our brainstorming and information about the bombing and that is what we were able to conclude from this day.
My artistic intention for this unit is to inform the audience about the London bombing that occured in 2005 with the use of varied Brechtian techniques in order to alienate the audience.