Devising - Week 5

More Scenes

To start off week 5 we did a warm up to get us ready. Unfortunately Kennedy wasn't with us today so we had to do scenes around her. After we had done our warm up we noticed that we had scenes that were refined but we didn't have enough scenes. I asked Phoebe to see her book as she had the most up to date scene list. I looked at it and we only had about 7 scenes. I said that we needed more scenes after Brother Taylor proposes. A scene I suggested was that Bobbie would tell Billie that she was getting married to Brother Taylor. I felt as if the scene couldn't get started so I told Donna to imagine that she loved someone and that they were snatched away from her. After I said this, the scene started to develop, but it was still difficult to get it really going. I also wanted to think about more scenes for our piece but I couldn't get any inspiration, I decided to do another warm up to try and get some energy and creativity, but everything that I thought of wouldn't work in the piece.

Character Development

In this week I wanted to get to grips with who my character was, I already knew that Brother Taylor was a religious man who has a lot of money, has a great status and is seen as a great guy by many of the elder generation. In this case the Father of Bobbie Sue. My character is also involved in an Arranged Marriage, he is set to get married to Bobbie Sue, yet it's obvious she doesn't want this marriage and how it's the fathers choice to marry them so that they can share the wealth of Brother Taylor. As soon as I started to think about my character, I immediately thought of West Side Story where Maria is arranged to marry Chino. In this Maria and Chino are both sharks a gang that is new to the streets of New York City, there rival gang the Jets has a man called Tony in it who meets Maria at a dance and they run away together. This is similar to our piece as Bobbie much like Maria has to hide the relationship from nearly everyone. I would say that my character is a lot like Chino's as he is approved of by her family. We also see in West Side Story how, Maria can only tell her sister about how she doesn't love Chino, this is shown in our piece where Bobbie can only tell her mother that she doesn't want this to happen. The character of Brother Taylor, to me is very religious and is seen as a antagonist in our piece. This I found easy getting to grips with, as societies views on certain things have changed so much that Religion is not the most important thing any more, in 2011 a UK census showed that 59 % of people in the UK are Christians. 24% said they had no religion at all. This shows how many people have gone off the idea of Christianity mostly due to many different ideas of life itself. For example Charles Darwin. Society are also noticing how homosexuality was noticed as an abomination in the Bible, and how the public's view on this subject has changed while the churches has stayed the same. This is another reason how I found it easy getting to know this character. Many Brothers in Catholicism are quite old, however I saw Brother Taylor to be about 43. I think to show that he needs to be this old to show how he is a sleaze as he is getting married to a girl much younger.

Objectives

On Thursday we didn't have much time to rehearse because of another unit. In the time that we did have, we decided to come up with two objectives so we could use the time effectively, The first objective was that we worked on Bobbie tells Billie that she's getting married to Brother Taylor. I suggested this to be one of our objectives as I felt we needed to work on this scene as it had lacked the attention it needed, as it shows how Billie's love is real for Bobbie and how this scene eventually kills him. Our second objective was to work on Joe's final suicide scene. So far we have only worked on this once so we need to rehearse it to make sure its great, at the moment its not running smoothly as its so new. In this scene we are trying to convey Billie's last thoughts before he jumps of Tallahatchie Bridge. This scene is the last the audience see so it needs to be our best. From this session I think we made sufficient work on Objective 1 however it still needs a lot of work. We didn't really get to starting Objective 2 as we implemented more into the Bobbie and Billie Scene.

In week 5 I thought we did really well, we made a new scene and refined older ones. For next week we hope to work on more scenes and the ending.