We are approaching the final weeks running up to our first performance, and as a group we decided it might be the perfect opportunity to show our tutor and peers our work so far. Initially I was very apprehensive about the work in progress, particularly because we were showing our tutor our work for the first time since our week seven work in progress. However I couldn’t have been more wrong to doubt our performance, as our audience emotionally engaged with the piece as well as our tutor who gave constructive criticism that would only strengthen the show we already have. We had already devised a scene in which our choreographer had created a chair duet piece between the man and wife set up in a hospital waiting room. Our tutor didn’t understand why so little of us where in the scene when our strength was working as an ensemble. We took his feedback on board and in our next rehearsal we created a waiting room through the addition of two more pairs. We took inspiration from Frantic Assembly’s chair duets, adding a new element to our multidisciplinary style.
Once we were aware of the rules in devising chair duets we broke a lot of the them to put our own spin on a well known sequence. Typically traditional chair duets do not tell a story they are just a series of movements left to the viewers own interpretation, however our adaptation continued to tell the story of the man and wife’s struggle of finding out about his condition. To emphasize these haunting moments of discovery between the pair, we slowed down parts of the the man’s actions to juxtapose with the frenetic energy of the wife. This was to illustrate the different routes of emotion taken between the couple in the same scenario. Exposing the Man in this way allowed for the attention to be solely on him having to come to terms with such devastating news. This was contrasting to Frantic Assembly’s routines that are ‘played at quite a mesmerising speed’ (Graham and Hoggett, 2009, 141). Our adaptation of chair duets still incorporated a similar delivery of “touches, embraces, flirtations, rejections” (Graham and Hoggett, 2009, 141) however contradictory to Frantic Assembly we chose to perform in silence so the attention was on the movement and the story it was aiming to portray.
Works Cited:
Crow, P. (2015) The Man Whose Memories Fell Out [Taken] 20th May.
Dale, A. (2015) Chair duet [Taken] 16th April.
Graham, S. and Hoggett, S. (2009) The Frantic Assembly Book of Devising Theatre. London: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
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