Working on schizophrenia movement piece

Today as a group we continued to work on and improve our schizophrenia piece, We still needed to finish this piece from the other lesson as we hadn't made it to the end and we also changed some of the stuff from the piece as some members didn't feel as if it was symbolic enough for schizophrenia. So everyone went over the piece to adjust it so that it can be more symbolic, a lot of the changes made were to show a more drastic transition between orderly to chaotic inside Carl's head, it was also change to focus more on the side that Carl is being beaten down and then control by his other personalities. The new finished piece helps give a better understanding other Carl's character and how tortured he is over his other personalities as well as having no other way to cope with these problem. We have now officially set everything we need to do for the performance so we had now done a full run of the performance to time it and work out that the performance would be about 32 minutes long, added to the time taken to walk around the tunnels the whole performance should be about 40 minutes long. We have decided to charge £4 per ticket for our audience and have them only enter the performance in groups of 15 for the performance with 2 productions, one at 5:30pm and the other at 7:00pm to give us a small break between showing to clear up and reset for the next performance.
I am feeling very confident about this performance because as a group we have managed to create some very stylistic movement pieces that should be able to intise the audience as well having well developed dialogue between all characters to help develop the plot of our performance as well dropping little hints throughout the performance about our twist ending of the doctor being an actual patient their.

Health and Safety Plan

This is our health and safety plan for our performance in Fort Amherst to prove that we are safe to perform in this location and that our audience is well looked after

My scene

I started to work on my scene today involving me and Dom were he would have like a interview with me to determine how bad my damage is and if it can be coped with so I can go back into the world. the scene would simply start with Dan introducing me before taking freya and leaving Dom with me, The purpose of this will be to give me and Dom a strong intimate scene that could delve deep into the mind of a damaged individual, The scene would start with Dom asking me simple questions to test my basic brain functions after a couple of question i would try and figure out who he is because my character would be uncomfortable with not knowing who dom is, Dom would exchange a couple of details about who he is to me so that i would feel comfortable with him. After this Dom will try and talk to me about how I received my brain damage, what was the incident that caused it, so with this Dom would already know what had caused my brain damage but this would be a test to see if could tell him. I would tell him a very simple version of a story involving me getting mugged down an alleyway having one of the muggers stamping on my head which caused severe injury. Dom would then reveal to me that I had actually received my brain damage as a ten year old who almost drowned because he couldn't swim but suffered without oxygen long enough to kill a lot of his brain cells. My character would be shocked by this and would then say that I actually got my brain damage from falling down and smacking my head on a rock. Dom would then say that my damage is very severe as I proved to have terrible memory issue, Dom would highlight this by asking me questions about himself and id be unable to say his name or anything he had told me a few minutes ago at the start proving i was suffering with a lot of memory problems.

Today we went back and worked on this scene as I had to change this scene not to use Dom in as we need to focus more on characters who hadn't been as used as much, So I now had Kyle and Toby to use for this scene so I started to change the scene. So we'd still start the same way with Dan introducing us but then when he leaves he will take Dom with him this time, The scene would work to explain Kyle's character a bit more as Kyle writes a message for me but i can't read it so he storms off leading to a conversation between me and toby starting about Kyle and working its way towards me before we'd then head off to the next scene. This new version of the scene I struggled to think of what to do in ti as it was only me a character who doesn't talk and Toby's character who we weren't sure what he was any more.

7 Devils

Today we worked on our ending movement piece which we had created back when we started site specific but we wanted to work on it and put others into it. The purpose of this was because we really liked this piece and thought is would be a good movement piece to end on, we went over what we had created before and just added to it further focusing on the idea of demonic movement. For this we watch the video for the song seven devils by florence and the machine which helped inspire a lot of our movement we then created for this piece, like previously said a lot of the movement is very demonic using twitches and claws scratching upwards. We had worked on ways to make this piece unsettling and we have done this by wanting our audience to be all around our performance space so they feel unnerved by being surrounded by us. We expanded upon this with the idea of not being stuck to our chairs by at one point getting up and walking through the audience around us to remove their feeling of safety, this is effective because our piece should naturally be seen as unsettling as it's a tour of a mental asylum so this movement piece will help to kick this up a level before the end so that the audience comes away with a bigger impression on the piece focusing on the obscurity of it all that made it unsettling.

We had a talk about costumes we should wear in the asylum for each character, whether we should all be themed of identical to each other. We simply agreed that the doctor and nurse should be dressed like a doctor and nurse even though the two of them actually are patients. The psychiatrist we decided should be dressed very smart as he actually would be very smart from a rich upbringing so would be dressed like a upper class person. For the boy patients, pale colour were agreed on to wear like grey, light blur ext, plimsolls or slippers and something like a white top to go with, The girl patients would be simply dressed in nighties because these clothes would be era appropriate for the 60's.

Amherst plan

Today we were missing about 4 members of our group due to exams so we thought we'd use this time
to lay out plan for the whole performance showing everything we had done and would like to do in the performance. Each scene we need to create was a scene or piece to help develop each of our mental characters. My characters scene will involve me and Dom as the psychiatrists, this would have Dom questioning my character to find out and understand my brain damage. This would be a very static but dark piece of drama as it's a chance to delve deep into the mind and ideas of brain damage as well as the many possibilities of my characters receiving brain damage.

 

I have done some research into ways my character could have got brain damage and their is a wide range of ways to receive brain damage from illnesses and injuries:

Hypoxia(shortage of Oxygen)

Poisoning by teratogens (including alcohol) 

Infection

Neurological illness

Brain tumours can cause damage. 

Common causes of focal or localized brain damage are physical trauma (traumatic brain injury, Stroke, Aneurysm, Surgery, other neurological disorder). Vascular disorders of the brain disrupt the flow of blood to the brain, resulting in a lesion called an infarct. Vascular disorders of the brain include Thrombosis (is the formation of a blood clot inside a blood vessel, obstructing the flow of blood through the circulatory system), embolisms (is the lodging of a mass, which may be a blood clot, fat globule, gas bubble or foreign material, in the bloodstream), aneurysms (is a localized, blood-filled balloon-like bulge in the wall of a blood vessel) and cerebral arteriosclerosis (is the thickening, hardening and loss of elasticity of the walls of arteries).

The effects of brain damage are that the victim experiences Delusion, speech impediments, movement problems (either struggle of movement or spasms), memory loss, Personality changes and and effect on basic knowledge like common sense. 

Schizophrenia movement piece

Today we split into groups, Dan M, Freya, Dom and Ellie went off to work on a scene for Ellie's character while the rest of us created a movement piece based around Carl's character who has Schizophrenia. For the movement piece we thought about what we wanted to show using. We obviously wanted to show his multiple personalities but we an idea came across to either create and show personalities of Carl or have it that his personalities have adapted around our characters so he has a part of everyone in the asylum in him. The movement piece is to help the battle inside his head of the different personalities, everyone in the movement primarily gets a go at controlling Carl to show the personalities controlling him, the control ranges from just moving him to puppetry over him. In this movement piece we have a constant swap between chaotic and synchronized movement to show the imbalance of Carl's characters head, one second were all pushing ourselves in on him and then the next we move back into a line showing that although Carl's Schizophrenia isn't good he still has moments of self control even if it's only for s brief second. This is an effective piece as it will help differ from a very dialogue lead performance at the moment, this new piece as well will we be an effective way to showcase Carl's character as well as provide a break for our recurring characters of the physiatrist, Doctor and Nurse. 

We still need to finish the movement piece and put a few more people into it to help show the chaoticness of the multiple personalities. For the start of the movement piece we are going to use a soundscape, we thought this will help isolate Carl as the sole individual onstage hearing voice as the rest of us won't be seen till were on. Carl is going to play a video at the start which says a load of rules that people should follow when with a Schizophrenic, The main rule stated is to "Never look a schizophrenic in the eye" after this is said the soundscape starts. Each one of our characters speaks a phrase over this which builds up the soundscape, Each of what our character says is related to them, My character is brain damaged so at first i wan't sure what to say but as a class last lesson we had previously discussed giving clues to our audience about the doctor and nurse not being real, Inspired by this my characters say "Their not real, their lies", This is a nice subtle clue as it's being said under the loads of dialogue and it would be considered as vague until the audience sees the twist at the end.

Amherst asylum

Continuing to struggle with coming up with our concept for the ideas we liked in the lesson before. So we went back to thinking about ideas we could use where me and Dan M suggested an idea we had thought up before the lesson. Me and Dan were thinking about the mental asylum idea we had a few lessons ago because we both were very fond of this idea and managed to come with away we could turn it into a whole performance, Me and Dan came up with introducing a physiatrist to the mental asylum to evaluate the workings of it but the doctor there would be a very dodgy one who mistreats patients. Everyone like the suggestion enough to look into it further by coming up with their own ideas for patients in the list (look at picture).
Me and Dom both wanted to be the psychiatrist so everyone said we will be tried out next lesson for it. Overall I feel very confident about site specific now as we gave managed to agree on our concept for Fort Amherst so we can now move on to making it. The collection of characters we have will make a very interesting display of mental illnesses and some more realistic ones. We are going to set this in the 60's as it will help us create our dodgy asylum as the knowledge know about the mind was far less back then and what asylums could do was a lot less strict which gives us more creative room to use our deranged collection of characters forced into the asylum together. The asylum idea works with Fort amherst as we have heard other forts in Medway and the country have been turned into temporary asylums before. So our asylum will be a part of a changed history where the fort was converted to the asylum but never back as the asylum was a useful place for storing the deranged people.