Fairytale

Our first scene was born from the idea of looking at remakes of Red Riding hood to educate poeple in the huge numbers of kidnapping's and murders each year. We liked this idea of portraying horrific crime in an exaggerated melodramatic way that was more enjoyable and light hearted for an audience that will also allow us to include physical theatre. 

Being lucky enough to have a 5 hour workshop with Frantic Assembly teaching us a range of lifts, we were adament as a group we wanted to involve these in our piece. We started by writting text portraying Jon and Robert as brave knights who went on a conquest to kill a horrible creature, the over exaggeration of our voices and our movements help make the scene almost child friendly. However the scene ends with the narrator saying "and that concludes the telling of the horrific murder of two year old James Bulger" setting the scene for the rest of the piece. 

We decided to split the scene into two parts, ending the scene with Katie and Rory about to kill Abbie, using a transition we then move to the interrogation scene, the Newspaper scene, the Carosle scene and then back to the fairytale scene where this time instead of holding weapons the boys are holding roses which they drop onto a grave and repeat the quote mentioned before "I killed him, will you tell his mum I'm sorry" to help end the piece on an empathetic tone that leaves the audience to decide for themselves their emotions towards the two boys.  

Carosle

Being inspired from Rory's workshop developing ideas from newspapers and media we decided to include something similar in our final piece. We understand that research and realistic information is important to our piece to make it as powerful as possible to an an audience and help them empathise with the sensitivity of the situation. However we thought it would be interesting to look at the information from the publics point of view. To stick with the theme of our piece (abstract) we decided to portray the information in a Carosle after watching a past Year 12's performance. By standing in a circle, facing forwards towards the audience we take it in turns to play either an interviewer or an interviewee, we ask questions to the mother of Robert Thompson, the physicstrist who worked on the case, the mother of James Bulger 20 years on from the murder and a range of other people. This helped us to teach the audience a wider understanding of opinions on the case through different ages and members of society. It also helped us to become different characters exercising our voices and showing a more diverse range. 

Our main aim from this scene is to help the audience understand information that otherwise they wouldn't necessarily understand. We want them to leave our performance being as educated on the situation as possible to really help show them the extreme violence of the crime. 

The importance of research:

Research now more than ever plays a crucial part in our piece, the amount of knowledge and understanding we have gathered by carefully reading and analysing what we have found on the event has created our piece. Below are some link of work and research we have looked at to help inspire our piece:

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2009/may/06/monsters-james-bulger-arcola-niklas-radstrom - this allowed us to see the interpretation of the play 'Monsters' from the playwright's point of view.

http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/young/bulger/5.html - the novel allowed us to get most of our quotes to make our piece as realistic as possible.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Monsters-Radstrom-Nikla-NEW-Paperback-1-May-2009-/361078121450?pt=Non_Fiction&hash=item5411eee3ea - a link to the play (available to buy)

Series of links used for verbatim and backgrounds for our scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-u9pIf04l2U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm5w7tdTmvM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0OLg7OrLKw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upiTb6ZfJa0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI0FSkEVWOo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfWWKot2qUY

News articles:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/real-life-stories/james-bulger-murder-20-years-1594811
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1254971/James-Bulger-Jon-Venables-Robert-Thompson-kidnapping-timeline.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2273769/Jon-Venables-lawyer-recalls-killers-angelic-face-James-Bulgers-brutal-murder.html

Interrigation: PART 2

After learning what we had about the mother's last lesson we knew it was an important character to have, we swapped the attorney for one character who would change their body language to adapt to one of the mums. We then began to script write. We knew from prior results that using verbatim and research would produce the most effective scene so taking lines from both 'Monsters' and the novel we began to re write the scene keeping only the staging. The result shown below was much more heart wrenching and the portrayal of the boys attitudes and behaviour was much more realistic. We also decided to add in a flash back, showing a short scene of Robert persuading Jon to throw a brick at the "baby" as Robert was named the more "manipulative" of the two. After we'd added a sound scape to the scene with a nursery rhyme, and the screaming of James we were happy with the scene.

The sensitive portrayal of the story is the most important factor of our piece. As a group we wish to educate the audience of the horrific event and to tell it with the up most respect we possibly can as we understand that Robert, Jon and James were all children, friends and family to someone.

Interrogation

After realising that we were lucky enough o have a Frantic Assembly workshop in less than 2 weeks we left the Fairy-tale scene and moved onto the next one. This is where the research really played it's part. After looking at our last interrogation scene we realised how much of an importance staging is and we decided to lay it out by using stools. We started with the Detective, Jon and Robert, and an attorney for the both of them. We asked questions such as "How often do you attend school" and when Robert didn't answer to get the attorney to reveal the details to try and engage the audience with the boy's personality. However looking back on this scene we realised it was flat and the reason this was, was because it lacked revealing information to shock the audience much like we had been shocked when looking at verbatim.

Therefore we went away and researched further. This lead to the finding of the novel: which revealed so many detailing's about the murder and the interrogation process that we were able to create a much more realistic scene. Learning that until Jon's mother reassured Jon she would love him no matter what he refused to reveal any information and that in the end it was Jon that admitted the murder "I killed him. What about his mum will you tell her I'm sorry." Throughout the whole novel you understand the importance of the mothers and we decided instead of an attorney this was an important character we needed to work in.

"After more hours of Robert's denials and eventual admissions, his mother Ann tells her son that it will be easier if he just tells the truth. Robert has been sobbing.
Robert Thompson:Jon threw a brick in his face.
Ann Thompson: Why?
Robert Thompson: I don't know.
Detective Roberts: Right, try to think. Right, let's see what we've got, we're getting there, aren't we? We're getting to the truth now.
Robert Thompson: Yeah, well, I'm going to end up getting all the blame 'cause I've got blood on me.
Robert goes on to describe Jon in an out-of-control killing frenzy. He claimed Jon threw more bricks at the baby, and then hit him with a "big metal thing with holes in it." Then Jon hit James with a stick. James was lying there, still, eyes open, across the tracks. Jon had the batteries and threw one of them at James's face. All the time Robert said he was trying to pull Jon away, screaming at him to stop.
Astounded, the detectives asked, "Why did Jon do all this?" Robert didn't know. "I only pinched," he said. When investigators tell Robert they think he hit James too, he replied, "Well, that's what you think"


The link to the novel can be found below:

http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/young/bulger/1.html

The Idea

After looking at 'Monsters' last lesson it was clear to the group that the play had sparked the most interest out of the workshops we had looked at. We decided to research for the event for verbatim, news articles, interviews, book articles and anything else we could find to broaden our knowledge on an event that happened before any of us were born. The information we turned up was shocking but also engrossing and interesting in the same way.

As a group we decided it would be interesting to look at the idea of starting our piece with a Fairy-tale scene that would confuse and sugar coat the event. We wanted to retell the event using Knight's and Witches, to make the 10 year old boys seem as if they were saving "a far away village" and then at the end of the scene drop upon them the fact they had just watched a retelling of the brutal murder of 2 year old James Bugler.

We started by playing the roles of narrators writing a script that without too much context would be suitable and funny for an audience of 6 year olds, but due to the deeper underlying narrative would have a much more shocking event on the audience. (The finished narration can be seen to the side.)

We decided we wanted the scene to be told with elements of physical theatre to make the violence stand out more and therefore make the Knights seem more 'noble' and 'brave. However when it came to actioning this we had many problems as our knowledge of physical theatre wasn't very extensive.

Workshop 4: 'Monsters'

Workshop 4: Workshop 4 was ran by Abbie and saw us looking at the start of the play 'Monsters' written by Niklas Rådström, a Swedish lady. The play follows the horrific event in 1993when Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, both 10, abducted two-year-old James Bulger from a Merseyside shopping centre, took him on a circuitous walk to a railway cutting and murdered him.
The play is performed by four adult actors who take multiple roles - as children, as parents, as investigators and as a chorus. With its emotive name and subject matter, Monsters might seem to be simply fuelling the tabloid hysteria that surrounds cases such as Bulger's death.
It immediately struck as a group as something we wanted to look further into, the retake of such a shocking event struck so many ideas in our head and we began to brainstorm idea's of we could remodel such a fantastic play and make it our own. We looked at the scene following the denial of 36 bystanders and began to action using "lanes" something we had looked at before in drama. It was interesting to see how such an abstract play revealed so much information and we set a homework to go away and research more thoroughly on the event.


"I thought long and hard," says Rådström. "I thought for five or six years. There is no new information in the play; everything is on public record. If the media can give it miles of column inches, why shouldn't theatre deal with it? But I was cautious: if you deal with such a thing, then you must do it responsibly - although I'm not sure the British courts or the tabloids dealt with it in a responsible way." He is referring to the fact that Venables and Thompson were tried in an adult court. "With every word I wrote, I tried to imagine how it might be if the parents of James Bulger, or the parents of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, were in the audience. Theatre is unique in the way that it brings artists and audiences together in a room and enables them to have a conversation."

Workshop 3: Interrogations

Workshop 3: Running workshop 4 myself I decided to look at Detective's interrogations for the conflict or wrong and right and our punishment system. We quickly created characters:

• Lucy Campbell, a girl aged 17, on her way home from her sister's after a visit whilst at university, mysteriously goes missing,
• Her sister Sarah Campbell, 23 years old never had a very good relationship with her sister and has just given birth to her first child Ava,
• Sarah's husband Daryn who often helps Lucy with her university dissertations and gives her lift from university to home.

When we had created these characters, we set up a scene around a table and asked appropriate questions such as "when did you last see your sister" to try and prompt improvised responses. Although we enjoyed running this scene it was boring to watch as an audience and it helped us to understand the importance of staging to involve and interest the audience more. Furthermore it helped us to understand the importance of understanding a case and researching appropriate articles/books etc. to build our knowledge to make it more gripping and interesting.

How has research effected our project so far?

Research has played a big part in inspiring us as a group, not only have the workshops we've created involved research to play a part as a stimulus, but our best work has involved a basis of research, for example the trial scene we created would of been unrealistic if we didn't have a knowledge about the understanding of how it worked. Furthermore research also helped us find a name and our main idea that we wanted to give the audience. We researched mental disorders, race discrimination and homosexuality acceptance through different periods to try and inspire us to create a scene through the eyes of one of the people and how they would of been treated in the 1900's compared to 2014 although this scene didn't particularly grab us the research again helped us move on to a different stronger idea that without research wouldn't of happened.

It has been proven that our best work is born when we look further into detail about the subject we are creating, weather we watch past students work, look at TV or news articles, or find videos and interviews online, they all work as stimulus' that inspire us to create pieces that are more realistic for our audience and would therefore help "force our audience to care about the content" something very important to us as a devising group.

Workshop 2: Verbatim and family life

Workshop 2: Ran by Katie, started with us watching a interview about a daughter not being allowed to see a boy because her father was strict and rather protective, we were asked to pick out 3 movements from the video (verbatim) and mimic them till we felt they were perfected, we then again split into groups of two and asked questions about the father and tried to involve the movements from the interview to create a realistic portrayal of the character we had watched.

After creating a more in depth character we decided to bring it further to life and use forum theatre to create 3 different scenes, intervening when we thought necessary to improve or experiment with a new idea, we first did the awkward "meet the parents for the first time" we played the boyfriend as different characters, respectful and hardworking, a college drop out, and a nervous shy character. We then moved on to the car scene on the way home from meeting the boyfriend the first time, the interrogation of who, where what etc. we again experimented with the characters, the mother being controlling, the father being care free, the teenager being stubborn or naïve after experimenting we had 2 scenes that fitted well together with a sense of comedy and family conflict either between mother and father or daughter and father. This was interesting to do as we saw that conflict didn't need to be dark or sad and that conflict could be expressed in a comical fashion that could add some relief to our piece.

Workshop 1: Newspapers and the media

Workshop 1: Ran by Rory, he started with a warm up getting us to start in a small circle and saying controversial topics to try and get opinions differentiating within the group, for example, abortion on the NHS, the adoption of critically ill children and the bombing of ISIS, this helped us get our brains thinking about how their was a differentiation between 4 people let alone countries and how topics have to be handled sensitivity as it can untimely result in wars etc. He then gave us two different news articles, one from Social Worker and one from The Times, we analysed the content and how the two news websites worded and presented things differently, it was interesting to see the biased opinions pushed upon the audience in the social worker compared to the reporter, fact and figure style of The Times. After spending 15 minutes talking about the language, the proposed views and our opinions on them we moved on to split into two groups one taking Social Worker and the other taking the news report from The Times.

Me and Abbie had Social Worker, we did slight research and worked out that Social Worker are always filmed talking on the streets, "socially immersed" in what ever event is going on and are very biased in their opinions. We went through the extract and picked the best points e.g "going to war will kill innocent civilians, accidents happen" and we then tried to report in the style of two Social Worker reporters to show their style and way of work compared to the very strict, "behind a desk" factual portray of The Times.

"Immersion"

Simple to say, devising in a group of opinionated females, and Rory, with a difference in nearly every situation isn't the easiest thing to achieve. After using several stimuli, we settled on a favourite "The Trail" by a theatre company using immersive theatre, the idea of involving the audience to any level immediately fascinated us all, and became the first thing we agreed on. We played around with improvisation trying to create characters from the idea of missing girl "Lucy Campbell" stemming from the idea of morally objective crimes, something for our audience to feel in conflict about, who was or wasn't guilty? But, again due to a difference of opinions everything we created was put to the "back of the draw" due to a difference of opinions. However keeping the idea of immersive theatre was something the whole group were passionate about and hence the group name "Immersion" was born.

"Immersion - deep mental involvement in something. Our aim is to smash the complacency out of the audience. We wish to force our audience to care about the content of our performance. We hope that they remain alert to our message long after the performance has finished."

 

Which as a group is exactly what we want our audience to feel, we went back to the idea of the trials and after doing research on the conditions of trials, what judges say, and the process of how defenders, witness and the accused are treated we had a wide understanding on the topic, we tried t create a scene but nothing amazing was born and again we put it to the "back of the draw" and focused on Frantic Assembly's attitude to working, "always forward never back" and continued with experimentation. After much debating about a wide range of topics we decided that until half term we are going to each create a workshop, either relevant to our previous ideas or maybe just a current event that interested us to try and create scenes and ideas that we can later stitch together. Whether this will work or not is yet to be determined but Immersion are going to give it a go.



Pathways - Composition Viewpoints

Although I am slightly late in talking about composition viewpoints (8 weeks to be exact) it is still something that has helped our devising, for something so simple. The aim was to get into groups, half of us would watch and the other half would participate, we were given a number 1-3 and told which order to enter the stage, dramatic music was picked and played and we had to walk around in without communicating, reacting of each other using only 4 simple movements, walk, jump, stop and sit, however the overall composition created was an intense, dramatic, silent yet hectic piece of theatre that told a story completely out of nothing, with no organisation or previous planning. It was interesting to see and feel how different movements and music could create a stunning 3 minute piece of drama that didn't take any configuration, this will be incredibly helpful for when the inevitable happens and we reach dead ends in our devising pieces, by simply playing music that fits our theme of conflict we could easily create either a new scene or at very least the stimulus for a new scene.

"Anne"

We started the lesson by picking a scene from the ones we had read last week, we decided on Scene 12. We then had to walk around the space asking our self questions, where are you? who are you with? how old are you? etc. these were to help us with characterisation. We then did a short hot seating, where one person from each group (both groups picked different scenes) asked questions about their characters, this was really useful as it allowed us to see the different stages of "Anne" and not only that but the questions we asked we could relate the answers back to ourselves and help us to build our character further. We were then told to create a monologue in 3 minutes about how us as our character was feeling, this again was really useful as it allowed us to help shape and form a character that we can definitely develop further.

"I am alone, more often than not in my life I am alone, the city I live in, the city I grew up in is not really a city anymore but for some reason I still head to the airport, it's difficult the road I take is no longer a road, but, my car will protect me, and if I get to the airport I can protect my daughter. My daughter is lost, well parts of my daughter are lost but that's not important, I can fix my daughter as long as I get to the airport. I am not alone anymore, there are men with guns, and they are stopping me"

 Within our monologue we then highlighted 2-3 key sentences and then actioned them to represent how our characters would play them. I played my version of the character very on edge and isolated, as if no one else opinion could inflict her thought process.

"The Enemy" - Using Verbatim

Last lesson we were given a sample of the script, "The Enemy"

"Freedom to think, freedom to act, the rule of law, intellectual development, equality of opportunity, eradication of corruption, a free market, freedom to worship freedom to express your opinion if it does not inhibit other opinions, equality of men, equality of women, regardless of gender, race, sexuality, the separation of church and state, the ability of every citizen to vote in free and fair elections to decide their own government, these thing's don't come free, these things have to be earned with war and blood, it's the only price. They said my sister was killed by the blast as the plane hit the building, they think she died quickly and I don't know I won't ever know for sure about that, but what I do know is that the man who ordered my sisters death did not want anything I could give him. I know that he was, according to the criteria I've laid out for you the enemy. He was the enemy of everything that allows you to do your job and everything that keeps you safe and gives you life. He ordered the attack as a retaliation, yes, but not against the bombs or bullets but against music, and movies and sports and life. And my sister loves those things. I didn't kill him because he killed my sister, I didn't kill him because of the country he came from or what he believed, I killed him because I know what the enemy looks like and it had his face."

The play was interesting when working on verbatim because the whole play used last phone calls, letters, witness reports, accounts from loved ones, of the events of 9/11, making it more realistic. As a group of 5 we read through the monologue and decided on lines that we thought we're important and then each took a line. We brainstormed several ideas, including re-creating a scene from inside and outside the building in a split screen fashion, we played with the idea of creating a bomb using physical theatre and then focused on terrorism and stereotypes, this linked us to the London bombings, something closer to home for all of us, and the idea that for the months after this people were very wary of people expressing their religion, or wearing rucksacks.

We decided to go with the judgement of people wearing rucksacks and set it on a tube, we each took different characters, I played a child with my mother to show how children can be so easily influenced by their parents opinions, a business man, and a commuter. We decided to use the practioner Artaud and involve the audience. Because it was on the tube we created spare seats that we we're going to push the audience into to create the busy hustle and bustle of a morning commuter train. At the "next stop" Rory entered the train, playing the victim, wearing a rucksack. As he entered the carriage we immediately spun our attention to him and moved towards him saying "I know that the enemy looks like and it had his face" we choose this line because it's extremely powerful and helped to excel the sterotypes further, we repeated this line 3 times until Rory removed his bag, the we returned to our starting postions and repeated a line about freedom (mine is highlighted above) to convince the victim he was free to express in any way he wanted. When Rory put the bag back on we repeated the process twice, until the final time where we gathered round Rory to hide his body from the audience a made a shooting noise to represent the fact that either we killed him, or  he eventually killed himself. We immediately turn around and add the extra words "I killed him" to add more intensive intensive power and return back to our seats, at the next stop Jack steps on wearing a rucksack and we turn our attention to him as if to signify that the whole process will continue to repeat itself and then the scene ends.


I was particularly proud of the way we worked together as a group and produced this piece of work, I think it linked well to the stimulus we were given, it represented conflict, inner and global and is defiantly something I would use in my final piece. 

Viewpoints 2

After giving up P.E at GCSE I never realised how much I would regret this decision when starting viewpoints at A2 Drama. There is the never ending urge from your body to give up and lay on the floor, especially as the summer weather decided to be kind for once. Viewpoints in a nutshell is all about silencing your voice, something easier said than done in a room full of Drama Students. Again we start with the series of yoga moves "Salutation to the Sun" always being told yoga was a "relaxing inner body experience" has taught me to not always believe what people say. The movements push your body to it's very maximums, and although amongst sweat, persistence and tears it helped to focus my mind and clear the thoughts or irrelevant things from my head.

As a group we also tried 12,6,4, a series of repetitive movements, being jumps, stops, and changes of direction, with the aim to bring the group together in a collaborative way, the first 4 times we failed miserably, but as the weeks passed it is very obvious to see the improvement that even if we say we can't, we can actually work together as a team if we focus our minds to it.

Then to make sure we were fully exhausted and couldn't move to full potential the next day, another exercise was introduced. At first this was simple enough, experimenting with a particular movement before it became boring and as drama students we felt the need to change the direction, tempo, or levels, however there is nothing simple about dragging your body slowly across the floor just because your attempt at regaining your breath and walking slowly backfired and you even eventually got bored of it. Overall though it helped us to see that on stage an audience can become bored of seeing you standing and walking slowly and that a piece of work will benefit much more from experimentation rather than familiarity.

Viewpoints

In class we've been focusing on viewpoints, we started by learning "salutation to the sun" a series off yoga moves, you start by standing in a circle, this allows you to use your provisional vision and makes the class move in a synchronised fashion helping the group work better together. It also heightens your levels off concentration and teaches you to push your body to it's limits.

Movements for "Salutation to the sun" 

After this we use "4,6,12" this means we run round in a circle, and have to include 4 stops, 6, jumps and 12 changes of direction, however the main objective is to make sure that the whole group makes the changes at the same time again to the group move and think together.

Finally, imagining there's graph paper on the floor we focus on using different tempo's ranging from very slow, too very fast, the aim is too experiment with speeds until we get bored with them and see how speed can change the actions of a piece.

These ideas have really helped me for my devised piece as it's allowed me to see several things, that working as a team is important and that focusing your concentration on an idea will allow you to push your body further and overall you'll be able to work harder and achieve better results.

Max Stafford Clark

Max Stafford-Clark was born in 19 94 . He attended Trinity College Dublin and his directing career began when he graduated in 966. He became Associate Director and then Artistic Director at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh.

Max has been a keen supporter and user of verbatim theatre. Verbatim theatre involves interviewing many people connected with the idea and then perform their actions and works in verbatim. Max directed his first verbatim play with Joint Stock, The Permanent Way, Talking to Terrorists, A State Affair and Mixed Up North.

Taken from "The Permanent Way" 

The Permanent way is a play about the privatisation of Britain’s railways. He read the book, ‘The Crash That Stopped Britain’ by Ian Jack, that talked about the Hatfield train crash of 2000 in which four people died. Max approached David Hare about making it into a play.
A workshop was organised with Max, David, and a group of actors. They interviewed people related to the train crash including union bosses, a survivors group, a victim support group, relations of people who died in the crash, the head of Rail Track Gerald Corbett, and Richard Branson. Actors also went out and interviewed people in pairs or groups. Instead of recording the interviews they returned to the rehearsal room and assumed the role of the interviewee while the rest of the group asked them questions. "Using this Stanislavskian technique of observation, improvisations would emerge and characters were developed. Two of the actors went so far as to get jobs in the railway for a few months to immerse themselves in the industry."

"A workshop isn't exactly rehearsal, nor is it journalistic investigation, nor is it academic research and yet it contains elements of all three of these.” 

Conflict Devising Project

We have been given the task to create "an informative piece of educational theatre (TIE)." Working in a group of 5, we spent the hour choosing a target audience (teenagers) and devising 3 questions to ask peers in interviews that would act as our verbatim. Our 3 questions were:

• Have you ever misplaced your trust in someone?
• Have you ever had to keep a secret from your friend/friends?
• Do you hold conversational opinions you can't air in public? 

We choose these questions as we believed they would allow our peers to connect with previous moments in their lives and therefore allowing us to receive more in depth responses giving us the best stimulus for our piece. 

Verbatim is a technique used by Max Stafford Clarke, it means "in exactly the same words, word for word, exact to the original source" you take people's body language, voice, "the way they tell a story" and emulate it in your own work, in more simper terms, there story telling and body language becomes a stimulus for your work and should be reflected perfectly within your own piece. 

Complictie

On searching Complictie, it became very obvious that they were a very successful drama group due to the extensive amount of positive critic reviews on their work but it also was very difficult to pinpoint a particular style/process of the work due to the fact Complictie, only continues one method throughout history, this being, that everything changes. Each production is different from the last, just as each rehearsal is different from the day before.

From the production "The Master and
Margarita" 

Some things could be described as being more or less consistent, for example they have a principle of working collaboratively and there's a strong emphasis on the performers body, even when starting with an existing play, rehearsals will involve lots of games and physical improvisation and exploration. When looking
at images of their work it also seems that the lighting is similar throughout each production, dark, with spotlights focused on the most important areas giving a very dramatic, impending sense to their work.

Many of their members trained at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris, and they say that this training is the heart of their teaching workshops, which reach over 2000 people in schools. These workshops include the techniques Complictie use in the rehearsal room, for example the neutral mask, clowning or story telling.

From the production of "The Elephant Vanishes" 

HOIPOLLOI

Hoipolloi "attempts to celebrate people's imagination", taking the audience's mind into "fantastical worlds and blurring the line between reality and fantasy." Their work is playful, theatrical, physical and shows elements of humour.

Since 2005, Hoipolloi has been producing the work off emerging Welsh artist Hugh Hughes. In the last few years Hoipolloi’s artistic focus has been producing the work of Hugh Hughes. This year we’re helping Hugh, his brother Derywn and sister Delyth bring Stories from an Invisible Town to life. They rely solely on funding and receive funding from many projects such as, Arts Council Arts, The British Council and the National Lottery Arts Project and through the donations of the general public.

There work reaches behind the stage in a very real way and engages audiences directly through a mixture off live performance and online digital context, there main objective is to tell joyful stories which entertain audiences whilst playfully challenging their sense of reality.

Hoipolloi was set up in 1994 by Shon Dale-Jones and Stefanie Mueller, they are based in Cambridge and have produced 17 new theatre shows, a film, and a range of online content, they are big promoters off community life and recently were seen with this street recruitment campaign.

Tension

In class today we focused on the 7 levels of tension, starting on 1 with complete exhaustion, feeling as if our whole body was melting into the floor and it was an effort to produce vocal sounds, up to level 7, (full timeline added below) which meant we focused on having tension throughout the whole body, starting in the feet to the head, to the point of shaking with elements of madness and paranoia, making anyone watching feel uncomfortable. This is a useful technique when thinking about the stimulus of "conflict" because it perfectly describes how different people react to conflict and being able to push our bodies to these absolute maximums will help us to create a more believable on stage performance, and not only that but allow us to connect more with our own characters.

 "Timeline of the 7 levels of tension"

We took the script "The Exam" and took the first 8 opening lines between 5 characters. Focusing on the practitioner Artaud as he focuses more on noises and movement as opposed to speech, we also decided to change the scene from naturalistic abstract. We stood in a triangle formation and on the opening line stepped forward with our left foot and leaned in as if intruding the watchers personal space.

Conflict

Our given theme for Unit 3 this year is "Conflict," Google's definition of Conflict is:

"To come into collision or disagreement; be contradictory, at variance, or in opposition; to clash"

Conflict is the essence of dramatic story telling, conflict may manifest as external or internal, but it is without a doubt that somewhere within a storyline, play, book or film there is conflict of some nature.  In story telling there is always a villain or the "bad guy", out to cause trouble usually due to the opposing ideas of the hero, this type of conflict can be intriguing, however to me, inner conflict is much more compelling. Internal conflict is the struggle that is seen in the mind of a character. The hero against himself. The psychology of conflict.

The word "clash" from the Google definition helped to act as a stimuli, the word clash to me, seems hectic and uncontrollable and therefore the idea of Physical Theatre really appeals to me for our given Unit 3 theme "Conflict." As Physical Theatre is very energetic and unforgettable it achieves the dramatic side you'd expect to see in an argument.

Frantic Assembly

Frantic Assembly creates thrilling, energetic and unforgettable theatre. The company aims to attract new and young audiences with work that is modern. Frantic Assembly's unique physical style combines movement, design, music and text.

Frantic Assembly is lead by director Scott Graham. Scott created the company with Steven Hoggett and Vicki Middleton in 1994 and strives to collaborate with many of today's most inspiring artists. Frantic Assembly has built a strong reputation as one of the most exciting companies in the country. The company has also performed, created and collaborated in 30 different countries across the world. 

"It's really hard to shock and surprise a theatre audience these days. Unless you are in the gifted hands of Frantic Assemby"
"A play that will stay in your head and your heart long after the curtain comes down, due to it's originality"
Western Morning News 

The idea of Physical Theatre really appeals to me for our given Unit 3 theme "Conflict." As Physical Theatre is very energetic and unforgettable it achieves the dramatic side you expect to see when you think of conflict.

Choreography for the "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time" 

Frantic Assembly will be beneficial for us as a group when thinking about devising a piece of work with the stimulus "Conflict" in mind. We as a drama group were lucky enough to see their performance of "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time" their stunning use of portraying emotions through movement created a very memorable capturing piece of work. To use something similar to this in our own work would hopefully allow us to create similar tones for the audience maybe in a more striking way when using it to portray conflict. 

The "franticness" of it (excuse the pun) could make the audience feel very on edge if the conflict was something they could relate too as some of the movements are so difficult to keep track off the audience could almost end up feeling very involved in a performance.