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.