Devising

We started to devise our first piece in 413 because at the time we couldn't rehearse in the loft due to weather conditions. When we were devising we kept on referring back to "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" for ideas as this was our stimulus. In the piece we decided that me, Holly, Nina and Sophie should be mental patients and Jack was our Doctor. Tom and Zach were people interested in buying us for an experiment.

We talked about what we thought we should do in our scene and then we would start and see where the scene would go. If we hit any bumps or someone didn't understand anything we would stop and re-look at what we had just done. It was a lot harder trying to devise this piece as we didn't have the site around to take from and explore. Our first devising process was very linear as we all felt like we were just devising a normal piece of theatre because we couldn’t see, hear or smell what our site was like.

When we transferred our piece up to the loft we realised that it didn’t fit into the space. We also realised that we hadn’t taken into consideration the aspects of our site. We went back to looking at our site and realised that we could still use the theme of hiding but we could look at it from a different angle. People keep things in the loft and the loft contains a lot of memories. We noticed the four beams and I felt like it looked like a lane with four different houses. We then developed this further by having different memories in the different houses. I then looked at the hanging wire and thought it looked like a washing line, we developed it and thought about putting personal photos of our past up, to link further into the theme of memories.

During the rehearsal process if we had an idea we talked about it and then we would try it out, to see what it looked like. Some of us wrote a scene and we walked through it, with the person who's scene it was being the director. We worked out the transitions between each of our scenes through "going with the flow". We all thought about how we could move it on naturally and fluidly. This was especially important as our site was quite restricting in the movement side of things and we had to remember to be as simple as possible so as not to harm us or others. Our devising process the second time was a lot more group based.