We were all split into four groups and did our own total theatre pieces on the class. This included the audience travelling around the space and experiencing the piece through touch, sight, hearing and sometimes smell.In our groups, we had to pick what we wanted to do ours on and we had to include everything that total theatre was about, my group went first.
Our Total Theatre Piece: Homelessness
For our piece, we decided on putting our class through how it feels to be homeless because everyone looks down upon the homeless. You may try not to, but everyone does it. So our piece was starting with our audience being outside of the room and we would ask them to take off as many layers as they could so they felt cold. We then began our piece properly by telling them that there was no more space in our hostel and that they had to sleep outside for the night. Me, Jesse, Phoebe and Milly dragged them into the space as people who had driven them to homelessness. For example, a teacher telling them they're bad students who will never get anywhere in life. We decorated the space to look like a trashy street by spreading rubbish everywhere, a cardboard box for someone to hide in and Jesse's star projector which projects stars onto the ceiling. After we did that, we walked around shining torches in their eyes and giving them dirty looks then we became people walking around on our phones talking loudly about hair salon appointments, expensive trips and the rest whilst being aggressive towards the audience and being disgusted at their presence. Then to get them out, we took a broom (it was already in the room) and cleaned up the streets then told them they had to find somewhere else to go for the night.
On the actual day of the performance, we encountered a technical issue: the soundtrack wasn't working. We had a track in the background playing of an old man singing a song then an interview Jesse's friend did with a homeless man and the speaker in the space didn't have the correct jack for Jesse's phone. The space was the perfect place for our piece because it would be almost pitch black so the stars would be bright and everyone would be able to see them well. Thanks to the technical issue, we had to find another room and we went to 411 which had no curtains, so we used people's coats instead. It kind of worked but we couldn't block the top bit o the windowsso there was still light coming through. We shone the star machine into a corner where it was darker but you could only slightly see it, all the other props were fine but the music wasn't loud enough. The audience cooperated very well through this and I feel we did very well but when i tossed a newspaper at Emily so that she could use it as a blanket, I threw it too hard and it hit her in the eye. Not fantastic. The feedback we got was positive, but they said we could have done without the music, they could see the stars and the experience gave them an insight to the life of a homeless person.
Warzone
This experience started off with Gus coming outside to us and telling us about a plan to escape Nazis and the whole thing was an assault course with gunshots in the background. It was noisy and quite scary but it would have been scarier if there were guns being pointed at us. I like that they used wet leaves from outside in a part where we had to crawl to safety because it ws using the touch sense even though it wasn't pleasent to feel and it smelt rank. At the end there was a song playing that took the seriousness out of it all.
Mental Asylum
In this one, we came into the space and it was dark. Very dark.We were greeted by a doctor with a torch and he shone it on three people on nthe other side of the room who were dangerous, deeply disturbed people. One had a fetish for small children, another was a serial killer and the last one was called Project X who had been transferred from guantanamo bay and he was highly dangerous. Then they disappeared, the lights went out and all of a sudden they were either behind you, in front of you or approaching you. This was a fantastic experience and they played well with the sense of fear. The only thing that ruined it was that people opened a door to leave because they were too scared. That brought in light and took us back into reality, completely ruined it.
Happy Campers
In this experience, everyone was but happy. When we were waiting outside we were given blindfolds and told to hold onto the person in front of us' shoulders. We walked into the space but we were between the curtain and the wall and i think we all felt like it was meant to be scary. When we got into the space, we were told to find a seat and that was a challenge because we were blindfolded and everyone was everywhere and people were scared and screaming and we were being hushed, but no one was having it. After the fuss, everyone was sat down and we were told a story once again interrupted by people squealing because they had their legs or necks stroked by various individuals. When that was over we took off our blindfolds and found out that we weren't meant to be scared at all and they weren't expecting up to be screaming. We should have known this because they were talking in cbeebies presenter voices but I was picturing this happy camp being somewhere children are sent off to in the summer and either return dead or don't return at all.
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