11|9|13 - 'War Child Project'

We have been commissioned to create a piece of drama for the charity 'War Child' to raise awareness of the conflict in Syria. The piece will be a Theatre in Education performance that we will tour around schools in Sheffield. The piece aims to raise the question 'what would you do if the child were at your door?' We are unsure whether it will be aimed for primary or secondary schools, so we have decided to aim it at secondary schools for the desired target audience, and then we can alter it to suit a change if necessary. We raise the problem that we don't do anything about the problem of children in war crime because it's not happening at our door, and therefore don't feel it is necessary. 

We started off the lesson in the dark, stood in a space. We had to imagine a door of our choice, and then create a room in our head. My room had the basics of a bed, a desk, a chair and bedside table. It also had a door to the bathroom, but I didn't create that image. We then were told to get in pairs and discuss our layouts, and then alter so we knew were all our objects were in the room. We physically moved ourselves around the space so we had a spatial awareness of our shared we room. 

Then, sir asked us to create a small scene where we were given the characters or journalist and photographer. We had to show sir through a small performance the layout of our room. To highlight objects in our room we..
-Got a drink from the bedside table

-Emily went into the bathroom

-I asked for where my papers were, which were in the desk

-I sat on the chair

-Emily went in the wardrobe

By labeling things and knowing ourselves where things would be, it helps to give the audience a clear idea on the room and they can begin to create the set in their own head. For the purpose of devising it was good to get a sense of what we both thought the room should look like and we could then have the starting setting sorted.

We then added character interactions - we were told the room was set as a hotel in Syria. We'd been creating a story for a few weeks and the room was damaged. We also had to incorporate the war zone that was happening outside the room. One idea that I had in my head was to make sure that the characters had a sense of history. So I added in lines such as 'where did you put my papers?' and 'do you want to use the bathroom first today?' to give an indication the relationship. Accusing of moving the papers creates a careless character for the photographer as well as tension between the two. 

We then decided that this bedroom would be the set for the entire piece. He removed one of the rooms and we discussed that with target audience of teenagers, we want to get them engaged by starting the performance with humor. We brainstormed idea's that we'd find funny such as:
-ceiling falling in (we decided too impractical) 
-loud bang shocking the person (gives too much away) 
-toliet related
  -poo
    - not having any toliet paper.  (We chose this)

We then each split off and worked with our pairs to create a scene where one of the characters would walk in with the trousers around their ankles looking for toliet paper. This humor says something about the way they were living and also implies a lot about the relationship between the photographer and journalist. We each created our own conversations from this in our pairs and then performed them to each other. By doing this, we were given an opportunity to see what worked and what might not. By discussing the best bits from each others we decided on the best outcome scene possible. As we want the piece to stay focused on the serious topic of the conflict we didn't want to make the scene to long as it would be hard to get the audience on track for the serious discussions that are to follow. We set the dialogue as:

Journalist: Morning
Photographer: Morning, good sleep?
J: sure, what are you doing?
P: looking for some toliet paper
J: that's a magazine...
P: erm yeh.. have you got anything more absorbent? 
J: well i've got my handkerchief but..
P: that'll be great, i've really gotta wipe
J: sure
(photographer leaves through the door with trousers still down) 

This short scene has the potential to engage the audience with the humor which will make them feel more comfortable with the cast as we are making the piece interactive. The fact that the photographer is looking for loo roll suggests that they have been there a while or have found it hard to have basic items so it subtly suggests facts that they're away from home and are somewhere that is not well off.

This way of devising allows us to consider a variety of idea's and collect the ones that work the best. It's a nice way of being flexible as we created the scenes very quickly and naturally so it was okay if some things didn't work because we blended all the best bits from each performance.