26.5.15

The flower arrangement I made 

Coffin idea for scene 14, which is Mr Dullfeets funeral after being murdered by Ui and his gang. We are going to use the 1st years prop for our coffin, as our show is after theirs so they will not need it anymore.

In today's lesson we began devising Scene 12, and we particularly focused on the choreography for the flowers in this scene, which act as a wall for the characters, as the characters in this scene are hidden by the flowers, and then followed by the flowers as well.We wanted to portray how Givola's flower shop may look beautiful and colourful, but it is dark and dangerous, and wants to trap Betty and Mr Dullfeet. I have gone into more detail about this scene in my scenes blog, but in this blog I want to share the idea's we had for the flower shop choreography and the idea's we tried out, and how we all worked together as a team to create the flower arrangements with the bamboo sticks. 

All together we  came up with the idea of having flowers attached to the bamboo sticks, so it looks like walls of flowers moving around and following the characters. We did not have a way of using the flowers without having them attached to the bamboo sticks, as we would all just be holding bunches of flowers which would not look as stylised or effective as using the bamboo sticks. I also think binding the flowers around the sticks looks much more creative  and we all worked together in our extra rehearsals to create the flower arrangements. 

We are going to have 8 people using the bamboo sticks, which means we will have to make 4 more flower arrangements, we are going to have a group of 4 people with the bamboo sticks on one side of the stage, who will follow and hide Betty(myself) and Ui(Liam) and then the other group of 4 on the other side of the stage with Dullfeet(Yunusa) and Givola(Sophie)

We have not decided whether to do this on the staging or on the floor, but I think doing this on the floor will be a lot better as the staging we have made is quite restricting for this movement piece as there is a lot of walking and changing direction, so doing this on the floor will allow everyone to be more free  and open.

The choreography is very simple, as we did not want to take the effect away from the rhymes the characters say in canon, as this is a clever part of the play and we want the audience to pay attention to what the characters are saying, rather than to focus on the movement of the flowers.

The choreography is simply the 4 people holding the sticks will follow the 2 characters and will trap them after they have said their last rhyming line. For example, Givola and Dullfeet are first to begin the rhyming and they end on "They say the wicked don't like flowers" and when Dulfeet says this line, the flowers will trap the two characters and they will be hidden from the audience, so the flower groups are forming a wall around the 2 characters. And then the same will happen in the next rhyming verse, which is myself and Liam. There are 8 disappearing /appearing stage directions in this scene, so the flower movements will happen 8 times, and will be the same every time. It looks really effective, and with more rehearsals it will look really sharp. We also wanted the movements to be flowing and soft, as we want to portray flowers. At first the movements were looking very robotic and stiff, but this does not portray flowers,although we are using Brechtian techniques, I still feel that the flower movements should be very soft and light, as it is contrasting with the dark meaning of the scene, which is Ui and Givola trying to separate and manipulate Betty and Dullfeet. We mainly focused on this choreography today,rather than the characters in the scene but we did rehearse this scene twice, but we wanted to perfect the choreography first so that when we come to properly rehearse this scene, all the actors will know exactly what is happening and how the blocking is going to work out. I think this scene will look really nice and creative, as the flowers are all different colours and we want to have the lighting a pinky/red colour to represent the flowers and the "soft" feeling of the flower shop, when really Givola's flower shop is dark and represents something much more sinister, it is a cover up for himself so he appears to be making an honest living. Today's rehearsals went really well and we were productive, as soon as we came up with the idea of the flowers and the bamboo sticks, Heta and Sophie went to the shops and bought the flowers, and we started to create them as soon as they were back and we also read through scene 14 whilst they were gone. We are keeping to our rehearsal schedule, and we have nearly finished all the scenes, we need to now run the show every week, and work on the transitions and up our epic acting style even more. These are goals I have set for myself, and goals I hope the class will achieve too.

The movement group devising the flower scene, before we created the flower arrangements