Initial Ideas

Another week has passed and we've begun the devising process for our first show! How exciting! We began with just discussing basic ideas and themes for the performance. We all had a similar idea about wanting the piece to be about current affairs, something up to date and relevant. So we set ourselves a challenging task and each of us went away to...........watch the news. 'Exciting! Thrilling!' I hear you shout. Well actually it was pretty inspiring. We each came back with two or three current affairs that inspired us and got us thinking. Here are just some of the stories we came across:

- Fracking

- Junior Doctor Strikes

- Relationship between Britain and Europe

- Refugee Crisis

- Greenwich University Hacking Scandal

- LGBT Issues and Awareness

Once we brought these to the table, we began a bit of improvising. We took each current affair as a theme and just kinda rolled with it. For some strange reason, each time we improvised, we ended up in this sort of office scenario. It sometimes felt a bit like we were in this bizarre sitcom! But we also sort of liked it. It became a nice platform for us to delve into each of these conversations with easy, relatable characters. 'Just another day at the office' sort of became a bit of a joke title, but also made sense for us if we decided that we wanted to tackle each of these individual issues. We carried on with this improvisation as although the material wasn't of much quality, it got us conversing and going deeper into each individual topic.

Yesterday (Thursday), we met for the first time with our lovely supervisor Bec Applebee. We were all a little nervous, as we felt as though we hadn't achieved too much. But to our surprise, Bec seemed happy with the ideas we had! If anything, we had too much. One piece of advice she gave us was that choosing the overall theme of current affairs is too big. Which we all agreed with. So we went back to the drawing board... or rehearsal studio... to revise our ideas. We discussed which of the issues felt the most important to us and we all agreed that the refugee crisis was what stood out to us the most. It is at the forefront of social media and discussion right now and there are so many opinions on the crisis, which we can really play with.

So it's decided! The refugee crisis it is! From now on our rehearsals will be focused on this theme and we'll keep you posted on what happens next!

Have a great weekend!

TinCan X