Performing In Class

Today in class we carried on a piece that we'd started devising in class last week. We took lines from the play  and we used these lines to devise a piece of Theatre. The piece could be linked to the play or it could be completely different. We were allowed to repeat them but not change them. My lines were:
Battering you
He's a psycho 
Yes you have, I've seen you
Who's first then
Oh my God
A metal door
Imagine
Screaming

We could only use these lines which was an interesting scenario to have as it meant I had to use my body as well as my words if I wanted to put expression into the performance. My story was about a house that no one went in as they feared a psycho lived there (imagine.) Two of the characters ventured into the house (who's first then.) The door was metal and they found the man banging his head against the door (a metal door.) Then the man starts scratching the metal door making a horrible sound (oh my God, he's a psycho.) He then jumps on one of the girls and starts beating her to death (battering you.) The other friend after witnessing this runs out screaming (screaming.) We repeated phrases like 'Oh my God' and 'He's a psycho' to emphasize the fact that the man was crazy and potentially dangerous. We also repeated the phrase 'imagine' before every other phrase. We did this because the scene was very graphic and contained a lot of detail and for this to be effective the audience had to imagine a real scene and not just what they saw in front of them.

We used a mix of end on and immersive for our performance. We used this because when we used the word 'imagine' it was effective for the person to be in the audience almost encouraging them to imagine the scene unfolding before them. We used end on because most of the performance was side on and it wouldn't have been affective in any other shape because we wouldn't have as much space to work and we wouldn't have been able to show the audience in as much detail.

I thought the exercise was effective and useful because the performance we devised links closely to the play Blackout. In the play all lines are very short and contain very little words creating tension and an edgy feeling. This was similar to our performance because we had a limited amount of words meaning that we couldn't go into too much detail. This made us use our bodies more than our words which is something we will do in the play.