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.