Chasing pavements- Evaluation

Evaluation

Developing ideas

When we started the process some ideas come up what member of our group really liked. There was the idea of the 1930’s gangs in America and a solider ideas and these were developed before we had done any research. These ideas were strong and pushed forward a lot but they could have been made better by research. We did lots of research off of the song chasing pavements. We did this by looking at other Adele songs. This helped us to come up with some ideas but none of these ideas were developed further which would have given us more different paths we could have gone with our performance. Each member of the group should have taken everyone’s ideas into account and this could have developed our final idea more. If we had developed more ideas we could have work shopped more ideas and made sure we made the right decisions about the themes. We could have developed and work shopped ideas if we had a longer time period to produce our devised piece. We finally decided to go with the ideas of the 1930’s gang. Through research of the song chasing pavements we discussed how the people who were in it looked as if they were puppets being controlled when they danced so we decided to use this technique throughout our performance making it like an author is telling a story.

Devising

Throughout the devising period we worked with lots of different idea and we worked well together. We Researched lots of different themes to develop our idea this included costumes, the great depression, the dust bowl, the Wall Street crash. We tried to research in detail about all the problems in 1920’s/30’s America so we could develop our characters in the correct way. While we devised we changed ideas all the time so we could make them fit the time period correctly. The time period we decided on was very unique and different this made it more interesting for the audience to watch as it was out of the ordinary. We wanted to make sure that we used as many techniques as we could to make it look creative we included cross cutting, unison, movement, mime and lots more. When we were contributing ideas some people didn’t give as many ideas as others and if they didn’t like an idea they didn’t suggest a solution. This made it difficult to find solutions to our problems. We should have tried to block the scenes quicker so we could have polished this would have made our piece quicker and mean we didn’t leave lighting and the silhouette to last minute. We also worked on particular scenes to much which caused us to waste time in developing more scenes. One scene I think we worked on too much was the argument scene it did look effective but I think it was too long and worked on too much.

Performance

In our performance most of it went really well but there were things that we could improve on. Firstly we should have practised the blood in the short time we had to put it on in the performance as it looked like it was painted on my face rather than me actually bleeding so it ruined the effect of me being beaten up. We also could have improved on our accents as we all used similar accents even thought we were all from different parts of America this could have been by having a more country/farm tone to our voice. We found that our composite set worked nicely for us as it saved us from doing many scene changes and there were very simple to do. Even though we had easy set changes we should have had more practice with our costume changes because we didn’t realise how long they would take and during the performance we had to do some improvising to cover costumes changes.  Our stage combat also looked very effective as it looked realistic we made sure that each punch looked as if they actually hit the other person. The attack scene was very effective with the drumming as it made the atmosphere and the tension build which caused the audience to be more attentive to the action and what is going to happen. However throughout the performance it was very slick. It also made the audience think and get there head round how each of the endings have changed and we could have made this easier to understand if we added more time changes on our projection between the authors time and the time of the story he was writing. Another thing we could have done is developed Stan and Franks Character more by developing their relationship and how their friendship was so strong. One of the big questions asked by the audience was why were Stan and frank split in the attack scene this was the only way we could get Stan of to play the drums but we should have tried to make this clear to the audience. One of the movement pieces we included in our performance was stylised apart from the middle this needed to be improved as it ruined the effect that the movement piece had on the audience. We could have improved it by making the whole bit movement based rather than using stage combat as well. Even though the storyline worked it could have worked better if we had a longer time to perform it in as it was very condensed into a shorter amount of time. The audience said all our themes were hard hitting and made them think about these situations and feel sorry for the characters and what they were going through. They also said that all our ideas held together well however they though the scene changed could have flowed smoother as there were certain changed which weren’t done and had to be changed mid scene.