Evaluation

The final performances went very well and though the audience number was smaller than the other common ground shows but I feel the smaller audience was better for this kind of performance  because the intimacy and individual attention we could give to our audience was something we couldn't do in our other shows.

I think we could have spent more time rehearsing and devising this piece to have made it stronger and bring more to it. Though it evoked emotion and told the story we intended to, I feel that it wasn't as physical as I had hoped. I thought, at the beginning of devising it, we would have more ensemble pieces and dynamic movement sections that would really work your bodies and make you sweat but I felt that we could have worked harder on it. The rehearsals themselves could have been so much more productive if we had all focused but unfortunately, focus wasn't there. In the end, not much was affected and we were all confident in the performance but we could have done more had we just been cooperative in the first place.

On the whole, I think we did justice to those who went through world war one and we explored the different kinds of people and showed not only the soldier's views but showed the audience other sides as well. The typical images that came into my head when somewone says World War 1 are soldiers and battlefronts. But after this piece, I also think of what happened to those left behind and the countries that had to pick up the pieces of a broken society.

Putting it Together

When it came to putting all three pieces together in our last few rehearsals, it required a lot of patience and self-composure. Focus was not there at the beginning and it would take a very long time to finish going over just one section and some of us worried about how the performance would go because if we couldn't get through one rehearsal without having to wait for silence and focus, we can't rehearse the whole piece and be confident in what we were doing.

Watching the other two sections was interesting because they represented how differently everyone was affected by the war, Soldiers went through the journey of bravery and thinking war was going to be a breeze, to doubting themselves to breaking down, dying or going back home and being scarred for life.
The couples represented the bond between husband and wife/boyfriend and girlfriend with a lot of movement. It was just intimacy and watching the individual couples together was sweet because they'd put aside personal lives and worked on making their duets/group piece believable.

When it came to doing dress and tech runs, the focus had started to show it's face again as it was taken slightly more serious by some but there was joking around backstage, a loss of focus by those on the rostra and some parts were forgotten on confused with others. But as the performance came closer, the piece naturally came together and some faith was restored.

First Performance

We had a very small audience for our first performance but I suppose it wasn't too much of a bad thing because we were more comfortable with this and in a way we were more able to connect with the audience.

The performance went well because everyone did everything on cue and we were all focused. We also managed to avoid the problem with running and being obvious backstage.
The set was simple but beautiful with canvases of pictures of the war hanging from the ceiling and the rostra at the back. Compared to our other shows it was quite bare but it's essential for a physical theatre show because we need al the space we can get to be able to move around properly.

From watching the audience react, I could see that they were engaged in what was happening on stage and they understood each part. Some of them got a bit emotional at the parts we expected them to and even some of us got emotional at parts too. For example, in the women's section when we drop the jackets and look at Catherine waltzing, I genuinelyt felt sad because her husband was alive and all the rest of our's were dead. I understand that in real life, none of us have partners who have died in the war, but understanding that this happened to real women and feeling it made it realistic.

During the rehearsal process, I worried that the quality of the performance wouldn't be very good due to the concentration from some people but the performance proved to me that there was nothing to worry about. They knew what they were doing and were on it for the whole thing. I think for everyone rehearsing it was just rehearsing but when we put it in front of an audience, we began to feel as well. We emoted with the characters we were playing too which made our performance even better.

For our next two (final) performances, I hope that we have a bigger audience and give more energy.

Dance Lesson

In the box section after the soldiers have taken the boxes and we are left with the jackets, Simon wanted for us form a circle and begin to waltz with our empty jackets or with the ghosts of the men we once had. I think it's a beautiful idea and everyone else agrees. I think it pulls at the heartstrings a bit because these women have just received their husbands belongings and are grieving. Death is a hard thing to come to terms with and can take years to finish mourning. We have something that still has their smell and proof that they wore them, their jackets. They're roughly the size of our men and it's almost like they're there if we tried hard enough to picture them. In the 20s, waltzing was something couples would do or something you would do on a date and that's where the idea of waltzing in this section came from. We're all waltzing with these empty jackets then after we've done a full circle we come to a gradual stop and just hold the jackets, look up at Catherine who is still waltzing, drop the jackets and leave. We watch Catherine and are upset because her husband is alive and ours have died. We feel jealous and cheated but that is the point where it hits us that's they're not coming back.

To help us grasp the basics of waltzing, we had a teacher from the dance department come in for an hour and teach us how to waltz. I present you with a video that covers what we learnt:

Everyone worked this out in their own time and some of us understood it quicker than others. We started off by doing it in our own spaces then we moved into the circle formation that we would be doing it in the performance. Ah, that was painful. As we had all been doing it at our own paces some of us went straight into it and carried on swiftly whilst others stopped and started again. So we all started bumping into each other and got confused when we so much as looked at each other's feet. It was easier to understand if you had some background in dancing though because I do ballet and there are similar foot movements but I still got confused if I thought too much about what I was doing. This section will come together in it';s own time if we practise a little bit in our own time.

Boxes

Talk about the relevance of this and how many women had the belongings of their deceased men sent back to them. Do some research on what would have been inside, what the boxes looked like, how the women coped after, etc.

This box section is the part we do after the soldiers die and it contains other sections I have mentioned on my blog. The boxes contained belongings of our men who were no more and it was routine to send these boxes back to soldier's family. In this box would be their jacket and other items that could be recovered that they held dear to them. Soldiers would keep a box of their belongings when they were on the front and if this box was still in a reasonable condition, it would be sent back or belongings and the jacket would be moved into a new box and sent home.

This is how the box section (just the boxes) goes like this:

1. Hesitantly open the box
2. Slowly pick up the jacket inside (this will be at the top) and just hold it, smell it, embrace it. You can smell him on this so you treasure this item.
3. Put the jacket on yourself or on your shoulders
4. If you have another item such as a ring or a necklace, look at this and put it on.
5. You find a pile of letters that were sent to him. You look through them hoping that one might be addressed to you, an unsent letter. You can't find anything yet so you look through them quicker and get frustrated then you finally find an envelope addressed to you. Put all the letters down and open your envelope.
6. We do the letter section where we have our own lines we chose from real letters soldiers wrote. We start this  off by one person saying "Dear Vivian" then we all say our names. We close this similarly by saying "love from Jacob" and we all said our men's names.
7. The men came back on and took off our boxes, we were left with the jackets and the waltz section begins.

Women at work

When all the men started going off to the war, the women had to start going to work in order to support themselves and their families. This was an unusual role in society for women to do as society was quite patriachal in those days so the men were the ones who went out to work and the women were to stay at home, cook, clean and look after the children.
The Suffragettes movement had started fighting for the women's rights to vote in the late 19th century so for the women fighting for this, it was a chance to prove what women were capable of.

We devised a section separate from our box section and it begun with short movement pieces dedicated to showing the work women would undertake such as manual labour and office work such as newspaper printing and call centres. We used a part of Liyah and Brit's duet where they had physicalised the work women did at home and at their jobs and how it affected them.

Figure Outline

This part has been taken from Molly and Georgia's duet. We chose to include this in our piece because we find it signifies the absence of their men and missing them.
It is done in counts of four.

• The first counts of four we walk toward them
• The second counts of four we raise our hands so they rest on top of their head
• The thirds counts of four we outline their figure
• The fourth counts of four we mime rolling tape on our hands and bring our hands up to their chests
• The fifth count of four our hands go down their chests which is us taking any cat hair or dust off their uniforms
• The sixth count of four we put our hands in our apron pouches and hold poppies in them then bring our hands up to adjust their ties or jackets
• The seventh count of four we sprinkle poppies
• The eighth count of four we walk away from them

For convenience purposes, we have decide it be best not to use poppies in this section as it would be a mess and the show would still be going on after so people would get poppies stuck to their feet. Not a good look. We won't be having any of the men in this section but I think it's better this way. For our section, the men are ghosts of the past, or rather we don't know whether they're alive or dead and this section tells the story of constantly thinking about them so much to the point that we can see them clearly in our heads and hold last memories of them so close because it's all we have left of them.

In this particular instance we are remembering helping them get ready to leave for the war. We savoured those last moments the most because they're the freshest, at that moment in time you were both so uncertain about his fate but he had a brave face and you did too. But sometimes feeling of fear were suppressed because you could bring some sort of bad luck.