10.11.14

3 days until performance....

This is the poster
for our performance made
by Heta

Today my group and I rehearsed in our performance space, and made progress on our piece and have added more movement into our piece. The pieces should be between 5-10 minutes long, Sav helped us out by timing our performance, and it is about 4 minutes long. We are aiming for 7-8 minutes, as we have not quite finished our piece and we are currently creating a group monologue to end our performance. It should be around 7-8 minutes when it is completed. We are thinking about using parts of poems we have found in our research as our group monologue, as I have found some quite inspiring poems for our piece.

Start where you stand and never mind the past;
The past won't help you in beginning new,
If you have left it all behind at last
Why that's enough, you're done with it, you're through;

This is another chapter in the book,
This is another race that you have planned,
Don't give the vanished days a backwards look,
Start where you stand.

What has been has been; yesterday is dead
And by it, you are neither blessed or banned;
Take courage, man, be brave and drive ahead,
Start where you stand.

I found this poem on a website called "behappyzone.com" It is called " Start where you stand" by Berton Braley.
I really like this poem and as I found it I messaged Max and Jade to see if they agree, and they both really like it. I took verses from the whole poem and put them together as the original poem is VERY long and we would not be able to learn it in 2-3 days, but I feel the parts I picked out apply to our performance the best.
I am visualising myself, max and jade all standing in the middle of our space, facing each other and each of us saying a 4 lines from the poem, looking at each other as we say it, as though we are talking to each other. As throughout our piece we do not interact with each other through dialouge, so I feel this would be nice to end with all 3 of us coming together as a team and uniting. It gives a positive vibe to the audience, and shows that even though life is full of tough times and sad emotions, you will get through it as life simply goes on, and what was done yesterday is done forever. We want our piece to hightlight the contrasts in life and how some situations can be so awful you feel you are trapped and stuck, but then we want to portray how there are people who care about you, and you will come out of a dark place in the end and there is hope for every single person.
The movement we created today happens after my monologue, the last line is "Tell me, am I living?" when I say this we all move backwards towards the middle, as though the walls are closing in on us, we come together all back to back and link arms. Each of us one at time struggles and lunges forward, portraying how we are trapped and are trying to escape. It is very physical and looks effective, Max breaks free first and then myself and Jade are still stuck. We will break free as Max begins his monologue, or we will stay stuck and struggling whilst he is performing, we are not too sure yet, we will have to try out both ideas and see which works best.

Progress we made today....

• Created a short group movement piece after I finish my monologue.
• Found a poem that we all agree on, and will use as our ending group monologue
• Have emailed Adam the music we would like to have playing in the background throughout the piece
• Max and myself have created a movement when Jade finishes her monologue and we both push her back down to the floor
• Timed our piece so we know exactly how long it is and how long we want it to be
• WE ALL KNOW OUR LINES!!!