We started the workshop by entering a set created by Mr Chipp that had exam desks turns over, a white sheet hanging down. On one of the desks there was a basket, and on the floor next to another a blanket. There was also a suitcase half closed, a jacket, pair of shoes, a hat. Another crate had a gun on top with a soldiers boot next to it. On the crate behind that there was a snow globe and a empty bottle of vodka.
We were told to think about where the set was from, and who had been there. I picked out the items of a man and a child and thought of father and daughter, the soldiers items made me feel they had been impacted by a war or conflict explaining the overturned desks. He chose three of us separately to investigate on one item only. Chris looked at the jacket at it was shown there was a tiny jacket inside the pocket. I decided to look in the suitcase, and all there was white sheets. Emily looked through the basket, discovering only mucky blankets.
We were then told that two people could enter the space and we improvised the feelings. I went first, I used a piece of paper as if it were a note to assure me this was where I was meant to be. The objects in the place were almost completely familiar to me, apart from the gun. The jacket made me feel as it was someone close to me, sniffing it to remember them. I then saw the blanket and wrapped myself in it as if I had been missing it, this was then Matt entered, the scene progressively became more intense, as every time he touched something I felt he shouldn't so attempted to pull it away from him. This resulted in him pointing the gun towards me and this is where we ended the scene. We then. in pairs, had to create to lines which could fit to the scene. Myself and Matt decided on 'It's his' and 'Come on then'. I liked how we could develop the scene without creating it. I thought it was interesting to see everyone's interpretations of the same scene.
We then developed discussion thinking about characters that may be there, I was still very certain of a family hiding from the conflict. When talking to Chris and Richard, this idea developed into the conflict slowly infecting the home life. We were told to create a short scene. We decided that the father did not want to let go of his children, his son having to leave to join the army, and his daughter replacing the motherly figure but still longing to keep her as her little girl. The father filled the suitcase with sheets hoping that if his son didn't check his case before he went he wouldn't be able to fight. The father takes great pride in what he did before the conflict arose, so Chris took great care of his shoes and jacket. As I go as the daughter to exit off stage, Chris puts the child's hat on my head, and as I walk off I take it off dropping it on the ground to show I reject the idea of my childhood.
When sir told us it was resembling a refugee camp that was in a school, the set made a lot of sense. We thought ours would still fit in this description and we had the thought in our head that this wasn't our home and that we'd had to leave ours because the conflict had caused a need for an evacuation.
N2C
Using the same set there was a similar introduction. We were then to play around with the idea of puppetry, in my group there was myself, Emily, Alex, Med and Matt. We were given the objects of a crate, a soldiers jacket, a single boot and the gun. We had to create the image of a person and give it life without using any of body to be visual parts of soldiers body, only to create the illusion that is was a body. We started off with working as a team to get the breathing of the head (the crate) the jacket and the gun all moving in synchrony. Once we had this, we attempted walking keeping the same height and layering the breathing over the top. We then created a scene of him walking down a corridor, turning, spotting someone then shooting. We had to practice this, using the shoulders of the jacket as a cue for the breathing speed and motion.
We were then told to add dialogue over the top. We decided that if we started all the props on a chair flat, and just the shoe tapping on the floor we could use it as post traumatic stress of a soldier who didn't want to shoot someone. We layered speech over the movement, showing the distress of how he didn't want too and that he was just following training. I found this exercise really challenging as keeping in time with everyone else required coordination, and then it increased difficulty when we had to add speech as we had to still remain in time with each other. With focus we were able to create a short moving piece that I feel was successful and also an enjoyable process.
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