HIC Day 9 - New staging

Today we looked at how we are going to stage our piece. We watched a performance of Black Watch in which they performed in traverse and it got the audience close to the action and really created an intimate setting which we felt would be good for our piece. There was also a moment in Black Watch where one guy was doing a monologue about the history of the Scottish army. However he was pacing up and down the stage discussing the history of different points in time and everyone else was changing him into different costumes that matched the period of time in which he was talking about.

I really liked how this moment covers a lot of history in a short time, while being entertaining to watch. I would like to use something like this in our piece going through the history of discipline in school however we could go from the past up to present day then if the piece is really short we could go into the future and make predictions of what could happen.

After we watched the performance we then discussed how we will do to opening we created for a traverse audience. We still like the idea of the audience behind desks but we didn't know how it would work in traverse. I had the idea of moving the desks like this:

have the audience facing forward and have an isle in between for us to perform in but then the audience will find it difficult to see the performance int the isle. So we developed the idea to look more like this:

with the desks at an angle so the audience can see the isle better. however there was still the issue of things happening at the back that the audience at the front wont see so we changed the staging once more.

This staging has the audience each behind their own desk (black box) looking in towards the stage (blue arrow) We each sit behind our own desk (red box) and face in for the soundscape. This way the audience will always see half of our casts faces while having access to viewing the whole stage.