Devising- Monday 16th November

In today's lesson we started by looking at Augusto Boal who is a practitioner we learnt about his different techniques. He helped to develope the theatre of the oppressed. Boal had 3 main techniques we learnt about the first was invisible theater which is where a scene takes place in front of an audience that is unaware that it is acting and believe it is real therefore any audience member who joins in become part of the scene. I like this idea as it would be very good to see the audiences reacting however in devising this will be extremely hard as our audience has been invited to watch. however if we did use this it could seem to the audience that were coming out of the character. Image theatre is showing short scenes of images which the audience to understand and it is a way of condensing it but expressing a specific image quickly. This would be a good idea in a scene to produce lots of small images so that to condense our point in one scene for example we could do this in our suffragettes scene as there were many issues back then that we could show in short images to get the point across. Forum theatre is another that he created and this is a type of theatrical game where a problem is shown in an unresolved form the audience can then suggest a solution. this is then continued until a solution is found.
We then decided that we were going to do some forum theatre to find the weaknesses in each of our scenes that we had recently produced from either group. So we performed our arranged marriage piece. Our first point we were given was that Dan needs to be more serious as he is acting like it is a joke however he needs to make it seem more like a business transaction. We then got the comment that Dom needed better posture when sitting in the chair and when we walk of Dom needs to make his glare at me bigger so the audience notices and I take a bigger step back.  When Kai had his scene with Freya he needed to turn his chair so his body language is open to her as they are friends and making the scene change obvious by them both crossing their legs at the same time. We also got the comment of when Dom is being horrible to Freya he needs to be more patronising and horrible to her making what he says very disjointed and spelling it out to her. Tom in the final scene needs to be more aggressive as he is angry that Freya has disrespected her son. Dans character also has to be very controlling as he is pushing Freya into this.
We then got into pairs with someone from the other group I got with Dan. We then told each other positvie and negatives about our performance. Dan told me that my performance really showed a controlled women who had little power. This is because my posture is low and my arms are crossed.
I think that next time we do this scene we need to work on these things to enable the scene to have the best effect it can on the audience.