making the performance

our performance space:

1st April
Today we worked with Polly from Gruff theatre company, we told her about our idea to use the pillar to create a performance piece around the shopping experience over the past 100 years.
She suggested we started by walking around the courtyard square by our shop unit, at first it was just natural we looked at each other when walking past but had no emotions, she then said that we should try and ignore each other and not come into contact with each other at all, after this we did the opposite we had to smile and greet each other when passing. From doing this exercise it made us think about the change in communication and community over the past 100 years, how we act now compared to how people acted then towards their fellow shoppers.
From this exercise Amber discovered that from certain points in the courtyard you were shielded from view, thus making blind spots the most predominate one was standing behind the white pillars at the top of the courtyard, here no one could be seen or see anyone. From this we played a game where you had to hide from everyone else using the blind spots. Although this was fun I am not sure if the audience would totally understand the underlying meaning of playing such a game.
We also wanted to look at the different types of people you see in Croydon, also inspired by the picture of the people in 2012 and the people in the 40's and the way people dress to shop- in the 20,40 and even 60's people dressed up in dresses, suits and even Sunday best to go to the shops where as now many of the people in the photo were wearing jeans, hoodies, tracksuit bottoms, and trainers.
We had the idea of having large pieces of clothing such as a large laminated/cardboard tie and people walking around the courtyard acting as that person however because Emma said she would like us to incorporate post-it notes into our performances I suggested we drew the clothing onto post-it notes which the audience pick up and stick to their chest, the idea of clothing developed further and we came up with the idea of them having emotions and ways of walking as well as the clothing on the post-it notes which the audience can pick off the plinth and then walk around the courtyard doing. we tried this activity out and it was actually really fun, I had a tie which I associated with business man, then I had the word 'staggering' so I decided to act drunk which other groups found very funny.
our plan:

• audience walk around the courtyard, they have to just walk how they natural would
• the audience are then asked the following questions by us: what did you do? how did you feel? 
• we then write their answers on post-it notes and stick it on the block, there will also be some post-it notes already on the block that have emotions, props, costume and ways to walk.
• the audience all receive a post-it note and have to walk around again but this time doing what their post-it note says.
• we will then all come back to the plinth and have a discussion about the activity: questions we will ask:

1. did you feel more like a community/ more together the first time or the second time you walked around?
2. did your post-it note RULE affect the pace of your walk?
3. did your RULE make you see things you didn't see the first time?
4. how do you think the shopping experience has changed over the past 100 years?

• we will then give them some facts about the change of the shopping experience over the past 100 years
• as an extra extension to our piece we will have a board with the pictures we are using as stimulus for our piece and have some post-it notes available for our audience to leave their response to our picture.

things we will need:

• post-it notes
• big sheets of white paper to cover boards
• pens
• stimulus pictures
• large display board

 

8th April
Today we filled out a risk assessment for our site specific performance, it was quite interesting doing a risk assessment on our space because there are actually quite a lot of hazards even though most of them are only medium or low risk and most risk to the performers rather than the audience. My group were not very interested in filling out the risk assessment because they wanted to get on with creating the performance therefore I felt like it was left to me to fill out the sheet and then discuss it with them, gathering their opinions on whether a risk was high or medium or low and what it changed to when we put prevention measures in place.


15th April
Today we discussed what we had worked on with Polly previously and what pieces we wanted to use and what more we wanted to do.

Between last Tuesday and today we have all been discussing our performance because we feel that after seeing the other two groups amazing "performance" pieces we felt that ours felt a bit too workshop based and it didn't totally fit with the idea of Shannon reading the poem in-between scenes therefore we started to discuss our original idea of having each of us dressed up (in costume) in a different era/ time period. I suggested the following plan:
We all start in front of the pillar and pretend we are shopping in our era and then we take the audience on a walk each in our eras and get each audience group (split audience into 4 groups) to go on two era walks and write down on post-it notes the difference, and as we finish each era walk we have a little monologue each about shopping in our era. then we go on to a discussion session between ourselves and the audience.


Although my group quite liked the idea of dressing up and pretending to be olden days people they were not quite sure what we would speak about so we spent the beginning of the lesson discussing how we could merge both what we did with GRUFF Theatre and the dressing up idea.
we decided that we should use a spokenword/poem as a way of getting our message across about old vs new Croydon and linking it to Shannon's poem about the new Croydon.
the poem:
did people use to greet each other as they passed,
well come on now did you really think that was going to last,
but when was the exact moment in society when everything went wrong,
maybe when communities forgot to be strong,
they exchange a look barely a glance,
today's society doesn't stand a chance.

originally we added dialogue between myself and Hannah as the olden days characters that walked around the pillar and greeted each other however GRUFF theatre said that they thought it needed to be less static and move around and also that we needed to interact with our audience more, therefore we decided that we should change it by having myself and Maria as the olden days people as part of the audience and that we start having a disagreement with the poets. To make it less static we also decided to include a tour of the courtyard area were myself and Maria talk to the audience about how the shopping experience and fashion has changed over the last 100 years, especially post WW2.
Shona has also joined our group, so we needed to add her in, whilst we have already set the poem and the tours, we decided that we needed an end speech to close the piece so this is what Shona is going to devise and perform.

plan:
poem
tours
shona speech

Shannon's poem:
The Croydon Facelift
'It's a bit shit really, isn't it?' my friend mumbles as we sit on a
park bench huddled close together underneath my umbrella shielding
ourselves from the soft pitter patter of the rain.
And I look, and then I look again, trying to see the place I call my
'home' from inside my friend's brain.
Grey. Like the colour of the malnourished, admittedly quite tatty
looking pigeons who at this moment are pecking at a leftover
McDonald's chip lying sodden in a puddle. And I'll admit that it must
be a struggle to see that beauty lies within this concrete jungle.
'I mean, look, someone's graffitied 'tits' on the wall, used their
right to freedom of expression in a way that's definitely not
beneficial. But that's Croydon for you, bit dingy - just the way I
recall.' And I look over the writing emblazoned with a statement about
the female anatomy and see that actually underneath it someone's
scribbled 'Jenny 4 Matty' in a black ink biro - and I see it. I see
that the place in which I'm sat with my friend complaining was at one
point a place where love was claiming the hearts of those two people.
Not, as it is now, a spot for the downright miserable.
The saddest part is that as my friend rants on about how this place is
cold and bleak and how its' people brush past each other without
acknowledgement even though we're all cheek to cheek - I realise that
her opinion is representative. It's representative of a community
that's falling rapidly out of love with their surroundings, drowning
in corporate businesses, marbled flooring and monochrome colour
schemes abounding.
The cracked pavements that I walk across every day come to symbolise
to me that jagged structure of Croydon's insular world of outward
sighs and dismay. The wind echoing the whispers if a community
desperate to bask in the warmth of a collective spirit again.
It's undeniably fragile.
But fragility is underrated in a society that glorifies a faster pace
of life. One that doesn't allow for an inhalation of Millies Cookies
freshly baking, or stopping to pause and listen to the sound of the
Surrey Street market stall holders and the human vocal orchestra of
'bananas for a pound!' that they're creating.
Croydon has become the broken heart within the body of London. A heart
that those with the power believed can be fixed with a materialistic
'investment shower'. Or maybe even a heart transplant, surgically
removing the little tiny details that make this place who we are and
what it is, replacing it consumerist bliss - Croydon's very own face
lift.
We're a place continuously evolving, problem solving, trying to keep
up with the rapid revolving doors of Social Change. We're not a heart
that needs to be fixed with stitches of construction, or a triple
bypass of new cutting edge shopping centres, transport systems and
destruction.
We're a heart that needs to be reminded that it's okay to have broken,
because surrey as we heal we recognise that beauty that's oozing from
our home town. It's there in the monthly food markets celebrating the
rich and diverse cultures that peacefully coincide, in the first dates
that take place within the walls of Grants Cinema, in local people
flogging down buses for breathless mums pushing buggies with their
babies, food shopping bags and pureed baby-food jars.
Because when we pay close attention, we can see Croydon has soul.
Thousands of stories cling to the exterior, desperate to be heard -
desperate to be told.
So look around you and see the traces of our history, a jumble sale of
memories, a flea market of hopes and dreams, in a transitional period
where no-one's sure it will lead.
And although a period of change is edging its way closer still, we
cannot allow our community to topple backwards downhill.
Instead, we must clutch onto the delicate strings that hold it all
together, a silent understanding between us all that Croydon will
remain strong under the pressure. We will continue to thrive, and we
will get better.


22nd April
We rehearsed the plan we created last week however when we performed it to different GRUFF theatre members they said that it still felt a bit spaced out and that we needed to work on transitions.
We had the idea of my character coming down the escalator going crazy at the "moving stairs" as the escalators are a fairly modern product as they were only introduced to the centre in 1968, however we also needed a way of engaging the audience into this so we used Shona as a market trader to gather the audience and exit up the escalators as my character came down. To link the poem section to the tours we decided as a group to talk about the audiences "bad" and "modern" clothing and critique them on their clothing chooses and then take them around the shops as a way of showing them how to actually dress yet when we do tour we are actually appalled by what we see in the shops we pass.

28th April
We spent the time today rehearsing and putting the final little elements into our performance, As my group thought that we were pretty stable on what we were doing for the performance we believed that we just needed to run it a few times to ensure that it worked effectively however once Gruff and Emma had watched it and given their feedback we realised that it needed quite a bit of work on it because we had lost the reason behind the action and what we were trying to portray to the audience seemed to have drifted away between our initial plan and today's rehearsal, we were also given the feedback that it needed to be exaggerated a lot more and that I in particular needed to commit more to my character and to what I was actually trying to say to the audience when taking them on the journey around the courtyard area and whilst coming down the escalator. I took this feedback on and really tried to work on my entire performance however I found it rather frustrating at times because members of my team were not as enthusiastic about the performance as they could have been which prevented us from all fully putting all our effort into the rehearsals. We next worked on Shannon's poem and each group was given a verse from the poem to transform into a performance the verse my group was given was:
We're a place continuously evolving, problem solving, trying to keep
up with the rapid revolving doors of Social Change. We're not a heart
that needs to be fixed with stitches of construction, or a triple
bypass of new cutting edge shopping centres, transport systems and
destruction.
we decided that we would repeat certain words within the verse that stood out to us and we broke the verse down into lines each:
shona: We're a place continuously evolving, problem solving
all: evolving problem solving
Maria: trying to keep up with the rapid revolving doors of Social Change.
all: change
Hannah: We're not a heart that needs to be fixed with stitches of construction
all: construction
Rebekah: or a triple
bypass of new cutting edge shopping centres, transport systems and destruction.
all: destruction, destruction, destruction, destruction

we added small movements to each repeat however Gruff theatre said that they didn't think it was engaging enough and that they thought it needed to include more of a site specific base behind it, we decided to spread out in the shop and play with interacting with the audience this seemed more effective however we wanted to show that we were all one in Croydon so we all came together at the end and played with different ways of saying destruction and construction working on the difference between the meaning of these words.

whilst today was difficult in terms of peoples lack of enthusiasm I am looking forward to performing tomorrow especially after rehearsing all day today.

risk assessment (extra risk)
hazard- escalator
risk- Rebekah: falling down , getting caught
L,M,H?- High
measure put in place already: big red stop buttons at top and bottom of escalator, bannister attached to escalator
measure put in place by us: Maria stood at bottom and shona will reach top of escalator as Rebekah comes down so they are there to press button if needed. warn security staff that we will be acting so they don't worry about Rebekah screaming for help! Rebekah will wear flat shoes
LMH?- L