Devising (Shanay Neusum-James)

I'm playing the role of Adicia who was the spirit/demi god of injustice. The character being a demigod goes with the theme of Gods and Goddesses and Hades being the ruler of the Underworld trying to sell his own properties in hell. She is often portrayed as an ugly barbarian woman. This matches up to the characteristics many higher class people are thought to wrongly accuse lower class women of having.  I chose this character because poor people often are treated in a very unjust way. 

The rest of the characters who are labelled as rich have much more pleasant deity’s as they are rich and so are more valued by society.

I contributed to the devising processes by first researching my character and making sure that her characteristics matched up with the lower class character I previously had had in mind. We then played a hot seating game so that I could improvise some more characteristics that my character might have such as her relationship with her family and how she feels about being a resident of the underworld.

I offered the idea of having the character sitting in their own sections of the slope and having the audience travel down the slope whilst stopping at every character and interacting with every character. I also offered the idea of having a mayor-like character showing the audience around the town.

We developed work as a group by firstly brainstorming ideas and writing every idea down on a piece of paper whether the idea was good or bad in order to have a selection of ideas to choose from. We then began to improvise ideas in order to get our piece on its idea by using our idea as a stimulus. This helped us to form and develop our characters in more detail. We made decisions in relation to the site by simply sitting in our space and looking around at its architectural qualities and all of the things that it had to offer. We began to name all of the things that we could see in our site and then mention what we noticed about the things we could see. This was useful in allowing us to determine what features were going to be useful to our performance in order for us to really make great use of our space.

I made decisions about the image, sound, physical performance, character, narrative and costume by simply again brainstorming all ideas and eliminating the ones I did not feel would be effective. By having the idea that our piece would be based on Greek Gods and Goddesses and Heaven and Hell, because these themes are so specific, this made it very easy to decide what the characters should be like and how the physical performance should be carried out. Any ideas that were formed as a group would have to be investigated, explored and researched by an individual meaning that everything we do in our piece has meaning and a logic behind it. (although most of it is metaphorical)