Evaluation of our work - Welcome to West

I believe our group were successful in creating a piece which was truthful to its site and its features and created a piece with a strong message. The strongest part of our piece was our sensitivity to the architecture, by using lights to catch the curves of the walls and highlight moments of physical work from the actors. In addition i believe we had a bold ending with the baby projection which allowed our audience to question wether Fred and Rose West were evil from birth? Was it their childhood that caused them to commit their crimes? Does it stem from when they were babies? and many more questions. 

However i believe our physical work could have been stronger. Although we had moments that we devised that were effective, i think we could have played with levels more by doing physical work on the ceiling, floors or pushing, pulling and climbing on each other. I also feel we could have studied neurones in the brain more closely and taking on the physicality of that in our movements as this would have created a more brain like feel to the experience and added a different dynamic to our movements.

I also believe we could have made the information walls more interactive. For example allowing the audience to open pockets, letters or getting them to write on the walls would have further allowed the audience to feel like they were exploring and investigating which was two key things we wanted the audience to feel like they were doing.

Overall i believe our group worked really well together by having the same vision, communicating what we wanted to piece to say and most of all having fun creating the piece i think was really important, we enjoyed the process which allowed us to be creative and free.

Evaluation of others work

Today i saw a piece performed in the hut by Jasper's group. Initially i liked the idea of splitting the audience up, talking some round the back of the building and some through the front as it automatically created a feel of uncertainly and mystery as you were wondering where you were going and where your friends were being taken. Once inside the space i liked the use of the divider between the room, because it was a large space it was nice to have sections where the audience could look into or move through. However the piece in itself didn't have a real back story and no one really knew what they were doing which meant i was highly confused as to what the piece was about, where i was supposed to be going and what the actors were supposed to be doing. 

My advice to this group would be to work better as a team and ensemble knowing what each persons role is and what everyone wants to get out of the piece, as to me it seemed like Jasper was leading the whole piece and the others weren't on board. However i do like the concept of the class room teaching and was interesting to see how the audience went back into being naughty school children playing up to the teacher and how everyone interacted with each other.

Staging plan

Here i drew out a visual areal view of the corridor. 

This helped me plan and understand what each section of the space is going to look like and where each person was going to be placed.

We also wanted to use string to divide the space into sections. The first section for exploring information and visual memories, the second to experience brain movement and audio memories (breathing) and the third section to see the baby projection to draw the whole piece back to the birth of Fred and Rose asking the question were they evil from birth?

We also are going to use key words along the corridor to con jour up thoughts in the audiences mind about the emotions and feelings of Fred and Rose and their victims.

Can you be evil from birth?

Can you be evil from birth was a question in which our group ask ourselves when it came to Fred and Rose West. We wanted to find the answer to wether the couple were born evil or wether it was the circumstances in which they were raised in that then later caused them to commit the violent crimes they did. In a discussion as a group i strongly felt that Fred and Rose West committed their crimes because of their dysfunctional up brining, after doing research and finding out the both Fred and rose had been abused as children, i began to understand why their moral code was broken. For example Rose's father sexually abused her when she was younger and was often a customer to her prostitute services when she was older, this twisted dynamic clearly changed Rose's perception of wrong and right and disturbed her mentally, i believed this could be a huge factor in to why she both was unloved in and allowed Fred to commit sexual acts on younger girls.

 In addition i don't necessarily like this saying but history does repeat it self and in some ways because of the couples troubled and painful upbringing, perhaps they were projecting that pain onto their victims, inflicting the same pain in which they went though sub-consciously. The questions that we had talked about together like childhood, birth and parenting, we wanted to ask our audience the same questions. However we didn't want this to be a straight up question, we talked about how we could subconsciously ask they question. We then talked about how we could have a projection of a baby scan at the end of the journey to pinned the whole experience back to birth and asks the questions. 


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/11195840/Are-some-humans-born-evil.html

This article helped me understand how children who are mis treated from an early age have a lack of empathy which can cause later issues. “We think it’s one of the early markers of how readily you develop empathy.” A lack of empathy is one of the key signs of psychopathy, and increases the likelihood of committing harmful crimes.

“If you look at the history of people committing anti-social acts, breaking the law and hurting other people, there are strong environmental factors that predict that growing up in an environment of criminality is one big factor, as is early neglect and abuse – those purely emotional factors.” says Baron-Cohen.

Playing with ascetics

 Today we really looked at the curves of the walls and how we could place ourselves in ways that would visually created a distorted and surreal look.
As you can see from the first picture we places Romy just behind the curve of wall, reviling the side of her body, this created a surreal feel because you were only seeing half of her and the more you walked through the space the more began to reveal.

You can from the second picture
that the further you walked towards Romy the more you began to see her and ascetically it looked great again the plain walls. It created an air of mystery and discovery which is what we wanted to achieve.

Walk through

Today we were exploring how we are going to take the audience on the journey. We discussed using Fred or Rose West as a guide to lead the audience through the space,showing the audience the information walls and giving some back story as they travelled through the space. I then suggested we try it out, so Josh took me around as the guide whilst Tyler, Alice and Romy moved in space, as we were going along i felt like it was too much having a guide and after a discussion we were in agreeance that we wanted our piece to be more of an experience and journey in which the audience can explore and investigate on their own accord.

This idea fitted better with what we as a company of people wanted to achieve, we wanted to give more freedom to the audience and let them feel like they are walking into the a surreal world and having a guide broke that sense of surrealism for us and took the focus away from the sounds and visuals of the space. Exploring ideas helped us find what we really wanted to do with the space and the way we wanted the audience to feel.

Another discovery which we found through improvisation was using our breath throughout the piece. As we were improvising Tyler began using his breath heavily in a pattern, this then caused all of us to begin repeating this pattern of breathing and discovered it was really effective. After our improvisation we discussed how we could use our breath effectilvy and what it meant to us, i suggested that it remind me of the sickening sounds of sex and the others agreed. We felt like the breathing sounds were echoing in their minds and we could imagine that if you had committed such crimes like Fred and Rose West did these sounds and images would often be repeated in your mind and thats how we discovered using this.

Welcome to west visual ideas

In the our space we wanted their to be a be a section where the audience can search and explore information walls which will reveal the thought patterns and memories of Fred and Rose west, we also wanted to inform the audience with background information which will help them understand their journey through the space.

Here i have created some ideas of what i want some of the walls to look like.