Reflection on Devising and Performing

On the process of devising and performing, we all contributed many good ideas.  There were four ideas, two ideas were from me, and the others were from Cassidy.  My ideas were more toward the metaphors, and Cassidy’s stories are easier to act out.  Therefore, we used her story--a girl who has mental barricade and wanted to overcome her illness.  It is an attractive topic because we can emphasize the process that one breaks through his/her weakness or limit.  However, the inner conflict between the girl is difficult for us to act out, and the reason is that the audience will be confused to recognize the character.

As a leader, Cassidy did a great job.  Because the idea belongs to her, she created a basic structure and background of the story in the weekend.  She wrote a beginning of the story, and I personally continued to write the plot and finished the story.  I did not write Cassidy’s lines on the weekends because I would love to listen to her suggestion.  I think if it is a devising performance, the actors should write their lines by themselves so that they can be easy to go into the characters.  Therefore, we talked about the ending and wrote lines together.  However, when we practiced, Cassidy changed the lines almost every time, so it was a challenge for me so far.  I had to catch her point and answer her question.  Sometimes, I could not think that quickly, but I thought I would get used to it.

The practice on Tuesday was good, but there was some rush in the end.  For example, we did not act out the climax, the girl breaks her weakness, with our full emotion.  Then, we need to introduce Denny’s character more, and we have to give our characters’ names.  Therefore, Cassidy fixed the introduction part to make the characters clear, and I changed the climax that I stopped Cassidy and then she pushed me away so that we could act out the most intense scene.

The others’ performances were great as well.  Aaron, David, and Jacob used a freezing point to give each character a monologue so that they will emphasize the emotion of each character and their conflict.  The freezing point made the performance really fresh and made the characters active.  Secondly, I was surprised that others added a narrative in it, and I thought it might be good for us to help the audience to figure out the inner and outro of our main character.  After considering, I thought it would be unnecessary to add narrative if we could make a huge difference while making a close connection between inner and outro of character.  Even though the narrative is a good tool to tell the story’s background, I think we can try our best to let the audience figure out the character by themselves.