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.