Week 4 -

Week 4 -
We met up on Monday after school for extra rehearsals for our comapny to polish our bathroom scenes.
Me and Ffion developed ours significantly and had much more ideas due to the information and research I had found from older people in the school about our site.
We are going to enter the bathroom anxiously, as planned last week, checking our apperance in the mirror and fussing over our body shape as this is something girls typically do. After doing this for a while we both sigh together and start saying our "Loves me" (my line) and "Loves me not" (FFion's line) that we prepared last week and build this in intensity. We had a converstaion with the boys after school previuosly and decided that as there are four of us, two guys and two girls and we are exploring the themes of relationships, Will and I will play a couple and Ffion and Seamus will be the other. In each pairing there shall be one very disturbed and desperate person with stalker like behaviour (which me and Seamus are playing) and a relatively normal and naturalistic one (played by Will and Seamus).We feel this will allow us to inteact more later on in our piece, despite our scenes being currently in different bathrooms, and show the complex dynamic of a relationship. I felt although I am playing the more psychotic character than Will and FFion I still wanted my character to be relatable and have meaning and some naturalism to it. As a result, I came up with a background story for my character. I have been happily in a relationship with Will's character for a while but become mentally effected neagtively when I find i've become accidently pregnant making me paranoid and startled by the news and acting irrationally due to it, accusing him of cheating on me. I think this is far more effective and relaistic and will have a depper meaning to the audience as there will be more of a back story to our perofrmance explaining any unanswered questions they may have.
As a consequence of this character development I am going to draw my attention towards my stomach and show worry to communiacte this. The more abstarct element of mine and FFion's bathroom performance is that we reflect eachother as she is sane and saying "loves me not" with belief that she has moved on from a past relationship for the right reasons and is ready to date again as she gets ready. I reflect another more concerned and fearful side of human nature and our gender as news of my pregnancy frightnes me and causes me to say "loves me" in desperation as I am trying to convince myself that all will be okay and my partner won't leave me due to my unplanned pregnancy. This repition of these lines is going to be spoken over the top of quiet romantic background music to set the scene and contrast our complex emotions. As i become more and more wound up Ffion enters a cubicle and begins chucking out underwear into the audience to symbolise her getting ready to meet someone and portray that she has fully moved on. I think this will startle the audience as we shall chose to take the opposite sex from the audience into their opposing toilet to push them from their comfort zone and show them the other side of the sex's concerns which they may not have seen, understood or experienced before. I will continue to build in intenisty until Ffion pushes me onto the floor making me stop telling me to "get a grip!" to break the tension and show the frustration we both feel. She will turn off the music and lights as we want to make the audience partially share the feelings of our characters and experience our performance through different senses. We will then briskly touch them and play with lighting by lighting a lighter in front of ourselves in the mirror to show release as cigarettes and various other addictions relax people. We also want the audience to see that the warmth of the flame close to our face is a settling comfort and will see it reflected several times due to the reflection in the mirror. We recieved positive and startled feedback to all of this - particularly in response to the bras and underwear - from the boys which is what we wanted. Their feedback was to slow down our timing and creat longer pauses which we agree with to enhance the effctiveness of this. After all company members sharing our ideasthe boys and girls of our company have made different pieces with strong similarities between the two as we both show tension and anxiety and push the audience. I am glad we've this extra rehearsal and feel relieved that now we have cemented it in our heads with feedback so that we can move onto other sections.


In the class we just had we spent all of the time going over our opening and most of all devised a short piece of physical theatre after accusing the audience of cheating on us and our partner.
 To show differences in our relationship and someone stalking another we portrayed the less-mentally stable person as clingy and drew upon stalker like behaviour that we had read of in newspaper articles such as extreme closeness and incessive clinginess. We feel that when you become an active stalker you use a lot of physical ways to get close to people such as grabbing and grasping them. This is why we want to show this physically and with facial expressions rather than using diolouge. We would tell this part of our circle without words as it is not needed. I run up and do a lift where I wrap my legs around Will as he is standing as tries to push me away. This is repeated three times and then we exits into the lift and me ans Seamus retreat back to the toilets. Will and FFion outside on the balcony introducing themsleves and this is the end of our piece. We feel this is appropriate as a strong stimulus for our work has been cirlce and their nerver-ending continuos spage which have been found numerously at our site. This shows the complete cycle as we foreshadow as although they meet seemingly normal andstable this is not necessarily the case as the cycle may also repeat itself it the performance were to continue.