Devising

Our devising play is based on a crime scene murder investigation. Two officers who get promoted to detective are sent on a mission to America to help solve a murder. Mary from forensics and their new intern go along with them. However, a few days later, Mary dies and everyone is suspicious of each other. We thought of ending our performance with a life audience interaction; they would have to guess which character is the killer and the majority of hands up will be chosen. We were inspired with the theme of crime from some of our favourite movies and tv-shows such as Black Mirror, Sherlock Holmes, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Luther. As a group we decided on roles, my role was to do some research of murder crimes and to be on top of transport and how to get to the school. In this case, we were going to Stephanie’s secondary school which was in East London. The title of our performance is ‘American Noire’ however our company name is called ‘The Stage’. Dulce did a great job writing the script for us as we all managed to memorise it just in time.

When we first performed our devising piece to our class and the level 3’s, it didn’t go very well because we felt unorganised and very slow. I accidentally skipped a scene however everyone managed to improvise their way to their places on stage. Not having time to set up and be more prepared made us anxious because we knew we weren’t performing to our best ability although it was a quick run-through. This led to Dulce having a break down which I didn’t blame her for. We then got given the time to test out our workshop with level 3 students and it went really well although all three groups went over time. We were given the task to do a 20-25 minutes’ workshop so we had to come up with some games and activities. The leader of the workshop was Tarkan who was in charge of making sure the workshop goes well and remembering the orders and Dulce was the time keeper. To start off the workshop, we decided to add a physical warm up so the students feel energised and ready, this was lead by Marion. Then, we had Isaiah do a clap game going around the circle to try and go round the whole circle before one second is up and also film it. Next, I was the leader of the game Wink Murder and I added a little twist to it which was for the students to have the most dramatic death ever to make it more fun. After that, Tarkan started off with an activity which got the students to be creative. He came up with a movie game and to play this game one person from each group must step out the classroom and Tarkan will give each group a blockbuster movie and a famous actor and they must act it out with no speaking, only mime. Lastly, Dulce led the last activity which was a freeze frame of a death such as stabbing, suicide, poisoning etc. In order to gain experience for what it is like to do a workshop with students, we had another test run but this time on our class mates. Although our class is more mature considering we’re college students, when we were told that we have to do our workshop for two Year 9 classes combined, we knew that it’s going to be hard but we were up for the challenge. We managed to film the whole workshop with our class to see how it went and what we can improve on.

It was the day of the devising show and we all managed to get to the school on time. After we got into the theatre space at the school we set up all the props and placed them on each side of the stage for us to easily get. We did a quick headcount of the students in the theatre and introduced ourselves. There were 29 students which was quite a lot for us to handle compared to the amount of people in our class at college. It started off really well as we got the students to get up and form a circle but there was quite a lot of noise so it was hard for us to explain our games and activities. The first two activities were easily done however when it came to the game of wink murder, everyone knew how to play but when the game started nobody would wall to the ground. Only two or three people died during the game which was quite annoying because we had to tell them twice to die to make the game faster and that’s never happened to me before. I think the students were a bit shy and didn’t feel comfortable doing it. So we moved onto the next activity and we each stood by a group to help them out when they needed, Tarkan’s game managed to do very well because all the students seemed intrigued with the movie titles and actors they were given. For Dulce’s activity we tried splitting them up into different groups but they wanted to stay in their friendship groups so she improved and gave each other them a number to form their group with and to create a still image of a type of death.

One thing that went well with the workshop was that we all kept our calm and remembered our cues however a few things that didn’t go so well was time keeping and the students were too loud and wouldn’t be silent so we had to get their teacher to get them to be quiet. I think that if I was to do the workshop again, I’d prefer if we had older, mature and a smaller number of students because although there were six of us in the group, it was quite hard to maintain them all and keep them focused. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to be given feedback because we had to move onto our performance.

I believe that our performance went better than any other time we’ve done it however a few minor mistakes happened which weren’t noticeable to the audience but noticeable to us. We had forgotten to put a white cloth over Dulce to show she is dead however we improvised and I think the audience understood that she was dead. In addition, whilst the lift was happening, Marion’s character’s monologue wasn’t playing and I’m not sure why because we had it all set up but again that wasn’t noticeable to the audience. Throughout the performance, everything went well and the ending really got the students thinking who the murderer is and they managed to guess right which was fun for them. I feel like we all did a really good job, we all managed to remember our lines. Although it was quite stressful, we managed to work through it and I’m proud of my group for that. One thing I would improve on is our steps during the lift, I feel like it was quite messy and it felt like we were just walking at different times. Another thing I’d improve on is being more organised with speeches, props in the play and timing.

Overall, this was a great experience for us all to work with younger students and to share our work with them. In addition, I feel like I've gotten better with my leadership skills, telling the students what to do and leading the workshop. In the future, I would like to work more on workshops and performances at schools with older students.