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. 

Voting on idea

Today we came up with three new concepts to use for Fort amherst involving a murder mystery dinner, A tour of the Fort and a war museum based on if the Nazi's had won the war.
After discussing this we wrote them all down on a sheet with all other ideas we've had and talked 

about what ideas we still like or wanted to use for the piece.

As you can see in the photo a lot of our votes went towards the "No power idea", A Night at Fort amherst" and "The Tour" with a couple of thoughts towards the "Ghost tour". I personally am not a big fan of most of these ideas, I like the "No power" idea but after thinking about it for a few days I can't think of where we can go with this idea for the story because i like our start but i'm not sure how we could end it in an effective way without making it either cheesy by having power restored or a bit pointless with nothing changing, still having the power problem. I don't like the other ideas we voted on because I don't see the purpose of them or where they could go in terms of development in narrative. The "Tour of Fort amherst" idea isn't really an idea it's just the opening of a show having someone lead the group in getting a radio call telling them to leave. I personally don't think this is very good because it doesn't set up anything of what it to come later in the performance as well as kind of stopping the performance still by leaving our audience and not being sure what will happen.

The idea of "A night at Fort amherst" I also think isn't a good idea because I feel this piece will be difficult to do effectively as having a murder mystery with our audience all around us and interacting with us will be very difficult to do effectively as we will find t difficult to control our audience to do what we want as well as carry on with our narrative. Their were other ideas on this sheet that I thought would be able to be performed with great effect in the Fort. My actual favourite idea on the sheet is still the mental asylum idea as I see this having a lot of potential in narrative, physical pieces, dialogue and to use our ensemble as a collective as I feel this is my main concern with the ideas we've had, that they have been more character driven instead on ensemble, so in these ideas if you're not one of those characters you won't have a lot to do.

Inspiration from Fort Amherst

Today we were given Three photos of Fort Amherst and split into groups, my group was me, Tom, Dan M and Ellie, we were given the photo below as our inspiration for a new idea to use for site specific.



We struggled at first to come up with ideas for this picture but we then came up with an idea of performing under the bridge and having a dead body fall off of it. My first idea inspired by this was a gang themed idea were two groups had met at this location and were starting to argue over like a drug or smuggling operation, things would get more hostile until suddenly a dead body from above would fall down. I thought this would be a good opening as it would be able to hook an audience's attention and get them involved in the story but i'm not sure what we could follow this idea with in terms of location as the idea of drug smuggling doesn't work that well with Fort amhurst for inspiration of furthering the idea.
Another impression I got from having the body fall was having a group of kidnapped people interacting with each other who are scared and confused about where they are and why their here, as tensions rise the body would fall with a note on it saying they will have to traverse the Fort. I like this idea at first but then thought it was a bit movie like similar to the concept of the "Saw" films so I decide to scrap this idea for it being to much like a film.
The third concept I came up with was to have our first bit of the performance on the bridge and our audience looking up seeing a meet up between three guys who start arguing about a conspiracy ending with one of them going over the bridge. The other two coming down deciding to hide the body and keep it secret. I thought this was a cool idea that had a lot of potential to become a very unique performance but my only downside to this would be the idea is very ensamble friendly and more main character driven so if we were going to do this idea we would need to spend sometime on coming up with how we could use our whole cast in an effective way.
Our final idea we came up with for this was of a distant future that has lost almost all forms of power causing the development of the planet to stop still. Several people receive a call informing them to meet below the bridge to collect a new form of power to use. Upon arriving they all see they weren't the only person informed about this offer, a phone suddenly rings which hasn't happened in years due to the power issue, They answer to hear a voice claiming to be a person called Jordan telling them they will get their power but first instructing them to look up, when they do this they see the body fall in front of them.
As a group we presented our power idea to the others to be used as the site specfic idea for Fort amhurst.

Runaways

I have been thinking of my own idea i'd like to do for site specific because at the moment I don't feel like we have enough idea to chose from as a collective. I have called my idea Runaways:

A group of youths have taken refuge at Fort Amherst from a disaster in the outside world (no one knows what has caused this or what the problem is but they know they can't leave the fort). No one knows how long the world has been like this. There's one group of youths who are already taking refuge in the fort and have been since the start when another group of outsiders sneak their way in. The new group start to cause problem by spread rumour s and paranoia threw the Fort of a monster/ghost. Because most of them are naturally youths their imagination gets the best of them and they start to believe in their being a monster/ghost. 

I feel this idea can create good opportunity for physical theatre pieces inspired by Hunting the monster or a bit on the groups despair and losing faith. It also grants equal chance for strong dialogue driven scenes with either one on one scenes and groups scenes would work just as well in this piece.

My idea was inspired by these sources:

• Lord of the flies (Book)
• Revolution (TV)
• The 100 (TV)
• Aftermath (the general concept of what life is like after a disaster)

Choosing Locations

Today we sat down voted on our choice of location from 4 options:

• Fort Amherst

• Upnor castle

• Orchid

• Dockside

As a group we voted and by the end of the vote. We had chosen that For Amherst would be our chosen performance space.

We we're then given our first picture of Fort Amherst taken from outside, so this picture gave us a new range of possibility we could use for the piece. This time we were in three groups, mine was me, Toby, Tom and Theo. The four of us were discussing and wanted to create a new idea that no group had previously thought of. We went through a few ideas like a future revolution or a prisoner story. We put the two ideas together to create a piece that was in a prison with captured members of the revolution. We tried to create this as a dialogue lead scene but struggled to create due to not knowing where we wanted to go in this scene and what should happen that would keep it interesting.

One of the groups had struggled just like we had this lesson to develop an idea that could keep an audience's attention. The last group had created a piece that further develops an idea from last lesson which was the mental asylum idea. They had done it like it was a garden for the patients where doctor walked around describing the problems of the patients.

I like the idea of using a mental asylum and I think that the location provides a brilliant atmosphere for this piece. my only problem with this is i feel a lot of us have already decided on this idea but we don't have a lot of other good ideas to choose from for the piece.