It was our first lesson of practicality working on our script. It was interesting to read though the whole script which is called “Today.”. I found the script fast paced, as some of the scenes are so intense, where the characters are starting to finish each other’s sentence. I like the narrator sections as they bring the audience back into context.
We also were given our first couple of scenes, as they haven't finished the script yet. I am part of the teachers’ scene and am signing for Ky, who plays the speaking vision of the first teacher. Talking more in depth with my partner about characterisation and how we want our role to be reflected on stage, I thought that we wanted the teacher to have a well-polished, stern and bossy personality that makes teacher 1 a bit of a “know it all”. My character would wear very plain colours or even black and white, which would make the character more feared in the school. As we have signers as well as speakers in each scene, we use the signers differently; for example for our scene, we are developing the scene as if the signers and speakers are having two different meetings on stage. As the signers are needed to be seen by the hearing impaired audience members, then they will be placed in the centre of the stage, as their audience will be placed in the centre of the sitting area.
We also worked on the first section of the teacher scene. This section is a movement piece about getting to school, we are going for the theme of a stereotypical American High School, so the class is split into the different types of groups of a high school playground; we have the Mean girls, Skaters, Jocks, Nerds and the loner. I am part of the skaters, which was a bit unexpected, but I took forward to the challenge and find that it was hard, as I do not know much about being a “Skater Dude”, so I asked my dad for advice, because he went to High School in the States, and he was telling me that he used to call them “Dirts” and they would be smoking weed as well as obviously having skateboards. So I thought about this and I need to work on my character, as I am positioned at the furthest point from the front, so it will mean that I need to work on my character in order to be noticed and feel confident on stage.
During my research, I found a picture of stereotypical skaters from the film “Clueless” and I feel this is a good place to start, as the film was made in the 90s, which I believe were the key years for stereotypes. The film shows all the stereotypical groups in a high school.
Physical Theatre -
We started working on part of the teachers’ scene, when they are talking about the children and how there are good and bad days, and not just good days. The class were split into two groups with one being Golden Children and Devil Children. The teacher would divide his/ her attention to work with both groups, they would carousel between the two groups over the next couple of weeks, but they would be in both groups’ pieces.
This week I worked with the Golden Children group. We had a couple of ideas on the style, movement ideas that we feel show what golden would be like. The
age group is KS4 onwards. We found that we were thinking of primary school children age, which would relate to our audience. I think we need to think along the lines of “School of Rock” and use this idea where the children go from the angel children to the rock devil children. I feel that this film would work in our favour, because it shows the two different sides of children as they are transferring from stage to stage. Our ideas were based on making it feel more extreme and involving an older age group. The children would start as sweet, innocent children who do their work, put their hands up, sit quietly listening and with the one child who is the teachers’ pet.
I had an idea for the other group (Devil Children) where the class is in lesson and the signers are with the speakers, and then the class go out of control, so the signers get split from the speakers and they are trying to get back into their pairs. I also thought that the students could somehow tie the teachers up or something along those lines, to make it look like a rebellion.
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