WEEK 1

Our first lesson of devising, we were put into groups of 5. Once grouped, my group sat around in a circle and decided that we were going to try and base our performance on the idea of twisted fairy tales. After discussion on whether we should use a well known fairy tale like beauty and the beast, or whether we should choose a fairy tale/story that isn't as well known so that the twists could be more detailed and wacky. After discussion we decided that we would base the performance of the tory line of Cinderella. Initially I was very happy with this idea, as I know the story line quite well and was excited to see what twists and turns we could put into it to create it to relate to the sinister and dark topic used highly by Kneehigh. We then sat round as a group and decided to research, different twisted stories of Cinderella, to see if we could get any ideas from performances or texts wrote about. In the end we choose the version where Cinderella cuts off her toes so she can fit into the glass slipper, and marry the prince to live a happy life. Instead of devising for the piece, we decided as a group that we would start by improvising a Cinderella scene based on what we knew about the characters and the storyline. I was Cinderella in the scene, and had to create an angry character that was fed up  with the way things were going for her, the idea of Cinderella being angry can be expanded to help create the sinister idea during the performance. 

Once we had started improvising a piece, we decided on pieces from the scene we liked and pieces we wanted to get rid off, the reason we decided to lose some of the scenes we created was because we felt they didn't have a strong enough link to the Kneehigh idea and we wanted to related the performance to Kneehigh as much as we could, we then spoke about how to link the performance back to the idea of Kneehigh. Kneehigh theatre company buts a non naturalistic approach into their performances. They improvise throughout like we had been doing, and the script is one of the last tasks they do before the real performance. We used the idea of having a sinister and scary story and set, but to put fairy tale like props into it to contrast the stereotypical idea of what a fairy tale story really is.

Once we had done the first scene, I was beginning to really enjoy the idea of using Cinderella, and was really excited to see what further more there was too expand on , and to be able create a sinister story based on the perfect fairy tale. Throughout the lesson I contributed to the group by using techniques to create small scenes, as well as giving information I had researched. Once the lesson had finished I decided that once I was home, I was going to expand my knowledge by looking up more information on Kneehigh, to help myself get a good idea of what the performance should be like.