On Tuesday, we did an afternoon of ‘speed devising’.
It was a fun. We played with placing the jewellery in different areas
within the space to create an image or atmosphere. To further influence
our scenes we picked a word or sentance at random (eyes shut finger
pointing) from the twenty pages of lists. Two memorable ones Katie and
I had were ‘beads clacking against plastic’ and ‘getting it over with
quickly’.
Katherine and Sam did a lovely scene influenced by the word ‘mother’
and my boyfriend came up from London to discover me lying like a corpse
under a shroud, with the jewellery draped over me.
At 6pm we presented three snippets to the small, but supportive
group of people who had turned up for Up Close. They saw one small
scene for each piece of jewellery; two of which they experienced as a
group, and one that they saw on their own.
Afterwards we had a 15 minute feedback session. A lot of the words that
we’d come up with on Monday were repeated by our guests – I wonder how
much is simply inherent in the jewellery, and how much we had
communicated our ideas through the scenes we created. Interestingly the
piece they had least to say about was the one that had no performance
element to it.
Next Tuesday we are doing another Up Close, which will probably
focus more on interaction between our performers and the audience.