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.

Women's section

To begin the process of creating our physical theatre piece, we have been divided into three groups: couples, soldiers and the women. We were split into these groups based on the themes of our physical theatre duets and if you had a mix of the themes, you could choose a group to be in. Mine and Rachel's was a mix of soldiers and women but I (Rachel was absent on this day) chose to be in the women's group because I felt our piece had some relevant parts that we could contribute when it came to devising. Also the soldiers' group was all boys and it was a large group.

Simon is the director of our group and to start the process,he had made a list of his favourite duets and the parts he was interested in using. He also had ideas which he came up with himself that weren't in anybody's pieces. We looked over the sections and selected the parts we thought had potential in making our section powerful, emotional and put across WW1 from the women's perspectives.

What I want to achieve from our section is to show our audience that though the soldiers suffered so much, risked and lost their lives, went through emotional and physical pain to serve and protect our country, the women also had some pain and difficulties adjusting to the absence of their partners.
For the women the four years of WW1 was constant worrying about how their men were coping and fear of the fateful news that they wouldn't be coming back home alive as hoped. They also had to come to terms with supporting their families and themselves and went to work, which was unusual of women at the time but there was no other way.

Everyone's initial response to our ideas for the section is excitement. After we had been told how Simon wanted the piece to go and look, we all agreed with him and loved his ideas because just listening to the ideas made us feel slightly emotional. But this really happened to thousands of real women not just in Britain, but in all the other countries too so we have a duty to do them justice. This also goes for all the other sections. This is to commemorate the 100 year anniversary of WW1 in which people suffered, these people a lot closer to home than usual and we shouldn't make a mockery of this piece or do it half-heartedly because it would be dishonour to every person who suffered and who we are representing.

Performance and Evaluation.

We did our performance to most of our strand and overall it went well. Neither of us forgot our words or movements but there was room for improvement.

I think things that could have gone better were:

• Smoother movements. Although we knew the movements and what we were meant to be doing, I feel they could have been more elegant and we could have been more supple.
• Made it more central: I noticed that we were moving over to one side in our performance and I think it's because of transitions going to the left too much. In rehearsals I don't think we noticed that but it would have been helpful if we did. When we noticed this during our performance, we both moved to the centre in our final part. We weren't in the very centre but we were close enough.
• Length: I feel the piece was a bit too short. Everyone else had pieces of about 3 minutes or more and ours was probably just 2 minutes. If we had more rehearsals or concentrated more in the ones we had, we could have come up with more material but I'm still happy with what we had because if we added in more movements and words for the sake of it, it wouldn't have had the same meaning and it we would have lost the point in our performance. It was short but we had put in what we wanted.

If I were to do this again, I would have pushed myself and Rachel to work more with levels and challenge ourselves with experimental movements. I feel what we had was good but I'm disappointed by how simple it was.

Rehearsals

Rehearsals for me and Rachel were quite stressful because at first, we weren't very good with coming up with material. We found it hard and we tried having someone read out our verses for us in hope that we would come with movements, but we still had nothing.

When we had our solid verses, I found it easier to come up with movements for each verse, Rachel didn't. I knew that I wanted to use different things that we had learnt during our time learning physical theatre. I wanted to use the distribution of weight, mirroring, the power of touch and what can be said through it but I didn't want for it to be too far from naturalism. I wanted for it to be clear that this is themed on the war and Rachel used to be an army cadet and she knew what was shouted as they prepared to attack, so I decided it would make a nice transition. We used that.
Rachel wanted to show relationships and the way different people were affected by the war so the verses we would recite were carefully selected to tailor that. I chose two verses from To Tony because I knew that most of the performances would be exploring relationships between the soldiers and their wives or soldiers and soldiers or soldiers and themselves but none of them would touch on a mother having to explain to her child why his father is no more and what he died for. In general I feel that of all things spoken about in the war, that subject is rarely spoken about because nobody pays attention to it. I thought that this section could end the piece and it wouldn't be any complicated movements, it's a moment of love and closeness and I felt that the exploration of closeness could be used in this part.
The paper planes at the beginning came from a spontaneous idea I had. Paper planes are things you build as children and as Rachel wanted to use the idea of people being affected by the war. This part was fun, not too serious and playful but at the end when the planes crash, we rip them to show destruction and the end of fun. The soldiers thought war was going to be fun and a memorable thing but they were either killed or left physically or mentally damaged. I thought that having some words written on the like "faith" and "bravery" so when we tore the paper, they were gone too.

The progress of the piece took it's time because Rachel had difficulty getting to grips with speaking and moving at the same time but the more we practised, the more she got used to it. I found that speaking and moving was quite different to what I thought because when you're doing both at the same time, you can't to too much movement or you can hear the loss of breath in your speech. For example, if you fall back and land on the floor or lift someone, you can  hear it when they talk. Rachel and I took this into consideration when devising so our movements couldn't be massive but we had to use words and movement together effectively.

Final verses

The final verses we're using are the following in this order:

1. Verse 3 from For The Fallen by Robert Laurence Binyon.
"They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe"

2.First three lines of verse 7 from Dead Man's Dump by Isaac Rosenberg
"The air is loud with death,
The dark air spurts with fire
The explosions ceaseless are."

3. Verse 2 from Dead Man's Dump
"The wheels lurched over the sprawled dead
But pained them not, though their bones crunched,
Their shut mouths made no moan,
They lie there huddles, friend and foeman,
man born of man and born of woman,
And shells go crying over them
From night till night and now."

4. Last verse from For The Fallen
"As the stars that are bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end they remain."

5.Last two verses from To Tony (aged 3) by Marjorie Wilson
"And when across the peaceful English land,
Unhurt by war, the light is growing dim,
And you remember by your bed
All those-the brave-you must remember him.

And know it was for you who bear him name
And such as you that all his joy he gave -
His love of quiet fields, his youth, his life,
To win that heritage of peace you have."

We felt that those were the verses that gave us the most meaning and material to work with. They went well together and we felt something when we read them. We got emotions from all the poems I picked out but these were the parts that we felt could sum up our message of remembering the soldiers and what they went through.

Routine

This is our finalised routine for our piece. It lasts about 2 minutes instead of the 3-6 minutes but it really just depends on how quickly we go through things and whether we have to stop for words or not. It may change on the day.

Warm-ups

To help us in our devising process, we have done a series of warm-ups. Some of the ones we did are:

1. Travelling down the room: the class was divided into two lines lined up lengthwise on the side of the room. There would be one person at the top of each line and they would come in and travel down the room in a certain way. To start with, we just walked down the room and found a natural rhythm between us without saying anything. After we got the hang of it, Simon put on Hung Up by Madonna and we had to travel down the room to that song. We naturally walked down in sync to the song and it started to look like a catwalk which wasn't meant to happen, but it did. We then had to changed walking down the room to doing a crab-like walk still in time to each other. We were starting to get quite sweaty, but it was physically demanding and that helped. Then when we got halfway across the room, we had to turn over and crawl but backwards. That was quite tricky for some because you had to think quick but it was fun, it got your energy up and gave you a workout. I don't think that this is something Rachel and I would use for our performance piece but it's a warm up I would definitely do in the future.
2. Response to music: Simon told us to sit in the space on our own and respond to three different pieces of music but in a certain fashion. We did this to three different pieces of music and they were movements such as "broken" or "shattered" or "melting". With these movements I could see them in my head for example a shattered mirror or melting wax, but to physicalise it was something else. Melting wasn't that hard because you could just lose control of your body and be supple with your movements but broken and shattered were quite hard because the movements were quite jerky, it looked funny too so people laughed a bit but I think it was mainly because we were unsure of what we were doing. Eventually I learnt that I could just have one part of me that was broken and I could try to move with that broken part of me. This was a beneficial exercise because when you pick out the themes for your piece, the movements have to grow from them so if we're given a word and some music, we can improvise things from it.
3. Creating a character from music: This is similar to the other exercise apart from  we started off by laying on the floor and listened to a song. Based on the feelings and themes we picked up from the songs, we created a character. For the first song, most of the class came up with characters doing mundane tasks but with something in their mind. I was a librarian thinking about what she could have been and how differently her life could have been. The second one was just dreary and I came up with a character who was just sat there staring into space and drinking tea. She was going through a low point in life. Perhaps because things weren't working out as she had predicted or money problems. She also had a cat who she occasionally shoved aside. The last song was so so depressing. I didn't have the will to move. Nobody had the will to move we were all just so down. some people got up and tried to bring some movement to the room by walking over to a window and staring out or hugging their knees, but eventually they just sat back down again. This would have helped people who's pieces are heavily based around music and need to come up with things from it. The characters and the movements come from what the music makes you feel. Though for Rachel and I, this won't be something we will use because we are using spoken word for our piece. Though we could have someone read out the words and we improvise movements from that.

Stimuli

Rachel and I are using a selection of different poems and some images as our stimuli for our duet, the document should be attached to this post

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pbbOscXXAKEc4D69RoBteCTguEHBnrc1uplhPLFEd1w/edit

In the first lesson, we looked at our sources and discussed them and how they could be used in our performance. I wanted to choose one poem then we'd learn every other verse and recite it during our piece. Rachel disagreed and thought this would be "boring" and suggested that instead we pick 3-5 of our favourite verses, recite those instead of one poem and devise movements from that. I didn't complain and agreed.
I chose:

For the Fallen

"They went with songs to the battle,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were straunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe"
"As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain"

Dead Man's Dump

"The wheels lurched over the sprawled dead
but pained them not, though their bones crunched,
Their shut mouths made no moan,
They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,
Man born of man, and born of woman,
And shells go crying over them
From night till night and now."

To a Soldier in Hospital

"Greybeard philosophy has sought in books
and argument this truth,
That man is greater than his pain, but you
Have learnt it in your youth.
You know the wisdom taught by Calvary
At twenty-three"

To Tony

"And when across the peaceful English land,
Unhurt by war, the light is growing dim,
And those you remember by your shadowed bed
All those-the brave - your must remember him

And know that it was for your who bear his name
And such as you that all his joy he gave -
His love of quiet fields, his youth, his life,
To win that heritage of peace you have"


I chose these in particular because I these are the verses that made me feel more than the others. There were others that made me feel too, but these were the ones I'd be happier to learn and the ones I feel we would get the most material out of.

Basics

Our duets and solos are based on different aspects of the war and this can be the rise of women's independence, shell shock, deaths, remembrance, etc. We're going to perform these in front of our year group and teachers (these will also be video recorded) who will grade them and use different performances for our final piece, though most of it will be devised.

I'm doing a duet with Rachel and we're using poems of the war as our stimulus.