Developing ideas- day 3

 In today's lesson we split into groups again and had to think of another idea which would work in one part of the tunnel. Due to having many ideas to do with tours we thought about how the tour could go from the outside of the tunnel to the inside. I came up with the ideas that we could use walkie talkies as this could make it creepy due to the fact you may not know whos on the other end or it may become cracky. While coming up with this idea we decided that the person doing the tour could end up going off and someone else takes the tour over and this person isn't quite right and they go to evacuate but they cant as this person has looked the gate behind them and as they try and get out the other way they are unable to due to things happening through out the tunnel. The other groups during this time come up with other ideas such as a night at Fort Amherst which involved our audience thinking it was a night to celebrate our achievements when really things began to go wrong. after this we sat down and wrote all our ideas we had down in order to know which ones could be worked on and which ones couldn't. The ideas that we liked most was our idea we created this lesson, the Jordan idea and the night at Fort Amherst. After we had decided on this we looked at elements from the other ideas that we liked but would have been hard to show. An example of this was the idea of people with mental problems being drawn to the Fort for a specific reason however we excluded that as we felt that it was clique. 

Developing idea- Day 2

In this lesson we started off by doing research on our location in order to be able to create a piece which had some relevance to the history that Fort Amherst has due to it being site specific it needed to be relevant to the location otherwise the point of it being specific to where we are performing is lost. My research that I got:

In 1667 the Dutch raided the River Medway and attacked Chatham’s Royal Dockyard.  During the devastating attack, thirteen ships were destroyed and two were taken including the flagship of the fleet, the ‘Royal Charles’.  At that point in time there were no defences protecting the Dockyard against a land based attack; and the raid by the Dutch led to a review of the defences protecting this important site.  As well as improved defence of the River Medway, the review included proposals to protect the landward side of the Dockyard which would also serve to disrupt an invasion party heading towards London.  This is where the story of Fort Amherst and Chatham Lines begins. 

In 1708 plans were beginning to be drawn up to construct a fortification to protect the Royal Dockyard from a land based attack.  In 1714 land was bought for the construction of the fortifications but work did not start until 1755.  The fortifications were to be built on the ditch and rampart principle; this was a common method of fortification construction during this period.

Part of the site chosen included a chalk pit with a number of caves.  These caves were extended between 1776 and 1805 to provide an underground labyrinth of tunnels, protected underground gun positions and protection in the event of a siege.  The tunnels contain many interesting and important features including a well, privies, loopholed defences, cannon positions and defendable gateways.

To ensure the protection of the Dockyard, three defendable gateways were constructed to control and defend access into the area protected by the Chatham Lines.  One of these gateways, the Upper Barrier Guardhouse, can be found within the lower portion of Fort Amherst.  The guardhouse housed a small garrison to defend the route from Chatham town by the use of a drawbridge, loopholed walls and a set of three heavy gates.  The barrack rooms within this building have been restored for your enjoyment.

Although Fort Amherst and the Chatham Lines were never put to the test, we can see from its design it would have made a formidable defence against any invasion force.  In 1820 the defences were declared obsolete due to better artillery equipment with a greater firing range.  The whole of the fortifications were used as a training ground during the Victorian period and the practice sieges were so popular that thousands of people came to Chatham to watch them.  VIPs were given seating areas upon the Casemated Barracks that once stood in the Lower Lines and also upon Prince William’s Barracks within Fort Amherst.  One of these sieges is described by Charles Dickens in his book ‘Pickwick Papers’.

During WWII the tunnels were utilised by the Anti-Invasion Planning Unit and Civil Defence, who used a section as their headquarters.  This is where Civil Defence was co-ordinated for the North Kent area in the event of bombing as well as support and assistance to the general public after such an incident.  A section of the tunnels has been reconstructed into the Civil Defence HQ as it was in 1939.

In the late 1970’s a group of enthusiasts were given permission by the Ministry of Defence to start tidying up the site, with the intention of restoring Fort Amherst.  In 1980 the Fort was purchased from the MoD by the Fort Amherst and Lines Trust and public open days began.  In subsequent years additional areas of the Fort were purchased and the Fort Amherst Heritage Trust now owns and manages 20 acres of the fortifications.  Half of this land has been carefully restored and further areas will be restored over time.

Fort Amherst remains the most intricate part of the Chatham Lines.  The underground works, complicated gun batteries, Haxo Casemates, Grand Magazine and the important defensive Guardhouse are just some of the many fascinating features on this site that visitors can explore.  Fort Amherst has been described Britain’s largest Napoleonic fortress.

By doing this research we saw that is was used for communication and for defence so this could be a good thing to look at. It also helped us look at how the tunnels were used in conjunction with the dockyard in order to defende Medway from any invasion. This research was a crucial part of what we looked at when creating our piece however it did not need to be a historic story it just needed to include elements. In this lesson we went on to discuss as a group all the different ideas we had so far and how they could be changed to be made relevant to the story and what we could do in order to improve scenes.

Developing our ideas- Day 1

When we first decided on the location we had to decide if we were going to do a scripted piece or devising. However this was a struggle because as a company we are better at scripted pieces however we have a number in our company that made it hard to select a play which would accommodate us and out location. We needed to make sure we thought of as many ideas as we could in order to create a diversity and make sure our idea was as good and developed as we could make it. So we started by getting more pictures to look at my group got the picture on the left of the bridge. We wanted to create a different idea from what anyone had created before. So we made the scene that we put together futuristic. We thought about really major consequences of leaving the EU and what we could lose from it. So we spoke about power sources and  how we would be without power and the currency would no longer be money it would be batteries or some sort of capsule with a energy source inside. Our scene developed into a place where someone has this power and each of us are drown to this place to get this power source and we need it in order to survive. When creating this idea i came up with the idea that we could act like the audience isn't there for the beginning of it and then when we enter the tunnels from the outside the audience become part of the story. During this lesson there was a war idea also created as Fort Amherst was a military base. 

Site specific- choosing a location

When deciding on our location for site specific we started by getting into groups and we put together lots of different locations in the area and put them into a massive spider diagram. The first idea that our group looked into was the dockyard and looked at the different places within the dockyard as we thought it had an old and weird feel to it. Each of the different places within the dockside could have been used for very different ideas as they all had different looks to them. For example the court yard has a very old look so could have been set in the distance past but the boat house has a very modern abandon warehouse feel so could be set in modern day. When we discussed the ideas with the other groups we all had some similar idea e.g fort Amherst, Upnor/Rochester castle, tap'n'tin and others including an orchard near where we live. The next lesson we came in and started to talk about what we wanted from our performance. One of the things we wanted most from our performance is that we wanted it to be a promenade. We also wanted it to be creepy and play with your mind however we didn't want it to fall into the trap of being like a horror maze or being clique. Once we had done discussing we had to get into our groups again and had to pick one location and discuss one idea that we had for the location. Our group decided to pick Fort Amherst and thought about how this would fit what we wanted from the our performance and we thought that it could be a really good if we went down the idea of having a mental hospital within the tunnels. However when we shared the idea we discussed how it would have to be as if the patients were drawn to the prison for a reason because Fort Amherst from our knowledge wasn't a mental asylum. In the next lesson we were given a picture of Fort Amherst tunnel in order to create an idea from and we decided to continue to pursue the mental hospital idea and began creating a movement piece. We decided at this point that we could notice the audience and involve them in our movement piece. We also decided that we had a Doctor who was constantly changing through out the performance so you would never know who the doctor is. We then created this movement piece with involved the song seven devils as the song is jumpy and has a creepy feel to it. It starts with us in chairs and at each sharp bet we has sharp movements and we continued to develop but we didn't get to finish it. We then shared our ideas with the other group who had the idea of a boat house and them trying to get a boat in order to escape a post apocalyptic world. We went on to discuss the ideas and how we could work on them and what we liked and didn't like about them. In the next lesson we went on to look at an outside picture on Fort Amherst and developed our idea more by looking at it from a therapeutic point of view and how the patients within this asylum we have created are calmed and controlled. However by creating this we decided that our idea become to fall short as it became hard to create something with very little substance behind it so we needed to have a more concrete story and characters in order to make it more effective. In the next lesson we sat down and choose the places which we all liked the most then did a vote to choose the location. The vote came out as Fort Amherst was where we were going to perform so now we need to settle on our idea.