Group Piece
Look for themes that wont change no matter what the context is e.g. Oppression Mood board Bring ideas to discuss and expand on Make like 3 different ideas Condense and expel ideas what we do and dont like Include colour scheme Themes, historical context etc
Clays solo on the housing crisis
came up with words to inspire movement
Breathe in and out three times
On the last out breath fall to the floor
communicate/have conversations through our bodies whilst seated (like a family unit - small squabbles turn into discontent - needs to find own home)
Run out and reach out trying to grab onto something that isn't there (but home is behind us now - hope diminishes into hopelessness)
Stagger back like a building falling falling down
Build self up again whilst fighting each other to get where we're going (competition, animalistic battle)
crumble again
Kids play tower game (building homes) i crush the building (repeat 3 times)
Stand up over the broken buildings
I start four stylised politician gesture sequence
Others try to understand and copy
Daniel: Four Million New Homes (driven home by sticking to repeating one gestures)
All slowly go from the sequence into the one gesture saying "Four Million New Homes"
Tatenda: "365 thousand empty ones?" (as if heard from an audience member)
Shanay: "365 thousand opportunities" (in response to the question)
All agree, learn and then copy
Stop, consider self actions, disperse and walk off
We looked at current social political events likely to effect the youth of generations and future generations before coming up with the housing crisis. I didn't know too much about it going into it which is part of the problem, it isn't discussed with and by the people it'll be effecting much like Brexit the housing crisis is an issue that will be dealt with and caused by people it probably won't effect. As well as the living cost rising so are the housing prices and it's slowly becoming seemingly possible for young people to move out and support themselves.
We set up a group chat and discussed the issues surrounding it before coming up with some key ideas to start devising from. We took these ideas and condensed them into actions so that they could be used to inform movement from DV8s use of physical intentions and fluidity. We wanted to contrast visceral connected movement with this shallow and satirically comedic gesture to represent the relationship between the people the decisions affect and the people making them.
Comfort - Love - Crumble - Destroy - Rebuild (we experimented with these words seeing how it effected our bodies in relation to eachother, shifting dynamics levels and proxemics
We came up with the Building and crumbling motif and used these as transition between scenes (e.g. one where a young couple are trying to find a house to start a family, they're real and natural whilst the landlord character is like the garden of Eden snake luring them into debt and the furniture is personified.) We tried and tested a number of ideas for the scenes but decided that it wasn't necessary to our piece and felt like a matter of "we should" rather than something that came up naturally.
We wanted to take the issue and condense it down to something simple and decided to use the anecdote of nursery school bullies knocking down a sandcastle that their peers had built. This was a comment on gentrification and the destruction of London council flats to build unaffordable trendy flats. The bully then stands up and starts the politician gesture sequence. This second half of the piece is the juxtaposition devised through a more Frantic like approach heavy in broad gestures from the naturalistic world, we also used frantic-esque choreography in the beginning with the counterbalance using points of contact to find routes to the floor. The movements here were more difficult to learn and transition in and out of whilst maintaining unison, we found ourselves having to compromise pace for form which i feel would've changed with more organisation and extra rehearsal time.
In terms of building character we looked to stimuli in the form of a Royal Court piece for the stylised movement and for character work i looked at houses of parliament videos to capture the naturally grotesque body language, it really didn't need much re working for the stage. The development style was more Brechtian than anything, playing a politician or child archetype rather than a detailed character, use of gestus and breaking the fourth wall. This piece wasn't about making nice theatre, enjoyable theatre for the audience to gaze at in satisfaction but more to provoke thought and plant the seed of thought for change in the audience, these techniques aided in achieving this striving for theatre as a "vehicle for didacticism".
