Day: May 2, 2016

Our initial response to our rehearsal process was to improvise scenes. Our director set up a premise and we were asked to create our own characters and run with it. This caused problems as everyone opted for a similar kind of character, which limited our progression within the scene.
Upon re-grouping our directing team decided to delegate specific characters for us to play around with. This meant we all had a different personality or character trait and the improvisation ran relatively smoothly.
After this scene, we re-grouped again and the directing team swapped our characters about. This was done tactically to see what kind of roles each actor would fit. Our directing team noted down the outcomes for each different character played by each different actor and noted this back to us when we re-grouped to discuss our experiment.
We eventually settled on a group of characters that we wanted within our piece and our directing team identified who would play each role. This meant that we were delegated our characters ready for our next rehearsal.

Our next rehearsal consisted of a similar theme, we tried to improvise but this time as our characters. We already had the basis of a scene and so we followed this idea carefully, ensuring we didn’t stray too far away from the intention. This idea failed and we re-grouped to discuss what was going wrong. We decided we didn’t have enough background knowledge of our characters and so ideas were crossing and getting confusing. Our directing team asked us to write down a short paragraph about each of our characters to try and give ourselves some names and basis in terms of intention and motive,
We each took turns to discuss our characters with the group and think of ways to connect our characters backstories. We created an interesting web of characters that connected well and so we went back into improvisation. Even after this character work our improvisation was heading nowhere and we collectively decided that we needed a script to work with.

Our next rehearsal was a small meet up to talk about and clarify plot points. As we had a script writing team, it was important that our script writers had the same understanding of the characters and where they were heading. This meeting also co-incised with a meeting about our production title and the re-draft of our logo. Our photographer Iona came to take some company shots and we managed to organise who was writing which bit of script.

Coming back to our rehearsal with a full script meant that we were able to section off and work on individual scenes. We grouped our rehearsal schedule into scene aims and worked hard upon these scenes in the time we had. Firstly we discussed exits and entrances for each scene as this is vital in terms of staging and set design. Once this was decided and noted by our production team, we set to work blocking through our first scene. Initially this drew up problems with lines and some edits had to be made to the script. It was good that we caught this early as it meant we could quickly fix this issue. Once we had blocked through our first scene, we moved on to blocking through the second scene. This scene contains props such as tables, chairs, sofas and edible food. We noted down as we worked through the scene what props would be needed so that we had a definitive list. We left this first scripted rehearsal feeling positive about what was to come with our piece.

In our next rehearsal we re-capped and polished scenes one and two ready for our feedback session in the upcoming week. We had decided to only show scenes one, two and four as these contained the majority of actors and our feedback could contain information for all characters. Scene four proved difficult to rehearse as it is a split stage performance. We struggled to work without our actors being off script as this scene contained much more movement and gesture than the previous two. We blocked through it roughly and moved on to scene three. We all acted as critics and advised in terms of blocking and movement throughout this rehearsal, this meant our scene had a well rounded view and we worked collaboratively as a group.

Feedback week came around and we viewed and gave feedback to Full Frontal as they performed some scenes from their work. Unfortunately we could not feedback this week as one member of our group was unable to attend due to illness but it was good to get some insight into what the other company were doing.

Our company name derived from our aims in terms of target audience. We wanted to play to an age that we knew the most about, this would make it easier for us in terms of devising. The immediate direction was to go with those aged between eighteen and twenty one as this is primarily the age for students attending University. However, we felt that limiting ourselves to adults only left little room for creativity. Upon reflection, we decided to go with those aged between sixteen and twenty one. This gave us a wider bracket to work within and opened up doors to different themes.
Along with this age range, we needed a company name that reflected our choices. Being a company based within Lincoln, we vocally discussed all the ideas that typically relate to Lincoln. One common theme was that of the train barriers, as these seem to cause many citizens complications. We took this idea of the train line and quickly linked that with the idea of the railcard. Students aged sixteen to twenty one are usually issued with a student railcard, and as this tied in with our location and target audience, our company name was born.
Deciding upon the concept for our show proved a difficult task as we all had very different ideas on the direction in which our performance should go. One way to solve this problem was to see what our target audience wanted from us. We each conducted a short survey and gathered answers from people within our target audience. A common theme was comedy, naturally this was the direction in which our group chose to go. As individual members we had already expressed our interest in comedy and light-hearted themes in comparison to dark themes, so this was a clear direction for us. Another theme that became apparent from our survey was that our audience wanted to be presented with relatable issues. One common theme that most sixteen to twenty one year olds have is that of education. Mostly the fear of moving on from education or leaving education.
Upon conducting further research we discovered that a good majority of graduates aim to go on to teaching. It seemed natural to take this step forward and work with a comedy script about teaching, combining our survey answers together.
We wanted our story to focus around a main character that would be our primary post graduate teacher. After brainstorming some ideas about where this storyline could take us, we developed characters and a basic plot structure which we then improvised scenes around. After a couple of improvisation sessions, it became clear that this was not aiding our creative process. We scrapped these sessions in aid of writing a full script and coming back to the rehearsal process with a scripted piece.
Within this comedic script, we also needed an element of drama to contrast with the themes. We chose to look closely at a forbidden relationship between the Headmaster and another teacher, although this provides an element of seriousness within our piece, it also helped to add further comedic lines when the other teachers discuss this relationship. This only furthered our comedic exploration.
One comedic scene within our piece is when our protagonist character has to lead a parents evening. We asked teachers we knew for any horror stories about parents evening that they could share with us. To our surprise, there were loads, the primary theme being that of argumentative parents. This gave inspiration of a comedic scene between our main teacher and a set of parents. These teachers that we spoke to also gave us some tips on how to deal with argumentative parents, which we later turned into comedic lines within our piece.