Candidate number

Candidate number
Name of piece
Component 1 portfolio

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1. What was your initial response to the stimuli and what were the intentions of the
piece?
The stimulus we were given to begin the devising was a quote, "The 21st Century addiction to
technology". Following our group discussion, we presented our ideas as a mind map as seen
below.

(Mind map)

We were also given two other forms of stimuli. The second was an image of a sand-glass timer
and the third was famous quote from Albert Einstein stating “Insanity: doing the same thing over
and over again and expecting different results”. However, we felt more connected to the
technology, and we decided on the quote from stimulus one as our main stimuli. As a group we
began discussing our ideas which connected to the stimulus and to us as people who have grown
up with technology all around us. The theme, which was important in our ideas were, addiction,
parental control, and the idea that those addicted to technology become separated from the
real world. After group discussion, I suggested that our piece could follow the story of a girl who
is addicted to technology, and it is having a huge impact on her life and those around her. This
was a successful idea as we wanted to make our leading character relatable to our audience. I
also suggested that our key character was of a similar age to our audience members, with the
aim of not only connecting our audience with our character but also for our audience to feel
empathy and understanding of our character. After more discussion about this idea of a story,
we began to consider other characters in her life that play an important role in supporting our
character and her addiction. As a group of 4, we wanted to make sure all members in the
devising group played an equal role throughout the plot. I suggested that the key characters in
her life would be a therapist, and two parents. To highlight our idea of addiction, I suggested
that all the characters were somewhat addicted themselves. We discussed different types of
addiction, such as drugs, alcohol, and exercise however, we wanted to continue to focus on
social media.

Our aim of our devised piece was to education our audience members about not only the impact
of technology but to be aware of the amount of addiction we face in our daily lives and how we
have become dependent on technology.

2. What work did your group do to explore the stimuli and start to create ideas for
performance?

In one of our first rehearsals, we created still images which communicated the concept of being
attached to technology. In our first image, we had one performer holding placard which stated
"screen" (representing technology), behind the screen we had another performer pulling a third
performer towards the screen. This image successfully represented the idea that we are
dependent on technology more than we think.

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*Pic 1*

In our second image, we were inspired by our study of physical theatre and in this image, we had
one performer using her body to show a table, with a computer on her chest while a second
performer was typing on the computer. This image once again showed how technology has
become such a huge aspect of our lives.

*Pic 2*

The third image showed one character being happy, this was once again achieved using physical
theatre of a girl performing her acrobatic skills. Also, in the image we had a girl holding a mobile
phone while being blind folded by a third character. This communicated the idea that those who
watch others happiness through social media are blinded by perfection and the expectation of
happiness.

*Pic 3*

As performers in each of these images, we had to make sure that our facial expression
communicated our emotions clearly to our audience, as you can see in each of these images our
facial expressions are bold and expressive, whilst also communicating our characters with bold
physicality. The incorporation of physical theatre successfully encouraged us to use each
performer effectively without the requirement of set and props on stage.

We improvised a scene based on the idea of parents shouting at their daughter for spending too
much of time on social media. This scene was staged with parents standing stage left, whilst
arguing with the daughter stage right. After reflecting on this scene, we decide against using it in
our final piece, although we wanted to keep the idea of parents trying to help their daughter
with her social media addiction because this directly related to our dramatic intention for our
piece.

3. What were some of the significant moments during the development process and
when rehearsing and refining your work?

During our early rehearsals stages we wanted to communicate a central location for our piece of
theatre. We considered different ways of staging the scene and following our early rehearsal of
improvising scenes, using different stage formats, such as theatre in the round and end on, we
decided the most appropriate would be an end of staging with the therapist sitting stage right
and the mobile phone addict sitting stage left. This configuration successfully supported our
audience so that they could see both characters facial expressions clearly throughout the scenes.

Following further spontaneous improvisation, we spent a large amount of time refining the
dialogue within the therapy scenes. After a lot of research, we wanted to ensure that we were

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using the correct language which would be heard within a therapy session. I suggested to my
group that we would write a script, to ensure not only the language was believable, but it felt
natural and honest. The script writing process was successful as we were able to agree
collaboratively on what would be included and taken out. However, as we lacked knowledge in
script writing, this could have been developed and refined further with more experience. We
also discussed the idea of taking inspiration from our second and third stimuli in this scene.

Initially we discussed the connection between the quote from Albert Einstein and the mobile
app of tiktok. Following research into social media, we came across a number of dances. We
wanted to include this in our piece in some way to repetition people face when spending a
significant amount of time on social media. We came across one dance and decided to include
this in our piece as a visual representation of my character's online experience. To make this
engaging for our audience, we performed this is a stylised way. It took a considerable amount of
time to rehearse and refine the dance, ensuring that all members of the cast performed in
synchronisation.

As the scene progressed, we repeated the dance several times. As each dance progressed, we
wanted to communicate the level of addiction to our audience and in doing so we increased the
volume of the sound and added another character into each dance with the final dance
encompassing all 4 characters in the piece.

Throughout our piece, we also included the third stimuli of the he sand-glass timer. We used this
image as it is symbolic of a passing time. This successfully communicated a progress towards the
end of our piece.

4. How did you consider genre, structure, character, form, style, and language
throughout the process?

I understood that the idea of mental health and addiction is quite a sensitive topic and therefore
I wanted to approach this in a comedic manor. Following numerous discussions with my group,
we decided to stage this in the genre of comedy. We not only wanted to successfully educate
our audience about the impact of tech addiction, but we also wanted to entertain our audience.
To make this a successful comedy we initial made our stock characters comedic, firstly with the
parents in the way they spoke. Firstly, the mother and father had an interesting relationship
where they would argue frequently and be patronising to each other. In terms of their vocal
skills, the mother would often raise her voice, in juxtaposition with the father using a downward
inflection. This would show the broken relationship between the parents.

The structure of our piece was linear as followed one therapy session into a consecutive scene
where the main character Eva was attempting to arrange a follow up session. I felt it was
important for our piece to be linear as they were discussing the impact of technology in the
moment. We discussed ideas of including flash backs of scene went technology had an impact of
the lead characters life, however, we wanted to focus most of our piece on the single therapy
session as this would be clearer for our audience.

In terms of the characters within our piece, we had 4 key roles. The daughter (Eva), the mother,
the father, and the therapist. We wanted to communicate a family dynamic to the audience and
therefore decided on the mother and father. The therapist was a serious character, we

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successfully communicated the therapist’s frustration by the family in moments such as

The style of our piece was very naturalistic given the dialogue within the therapy session. The
language we used was very colloquial and with formal language used by the therapist which
contrasted with the family and Eva. However, the naturalistic language contrasted with the non-
naturalistic repetition of the dances. This added complexity to our piece, which in turn made it
made it successfully engaging to watch for our audience.

5. How effective was your contribution to the final performance?

Overall, I was pleased with my involvement to both the devising rehearsals and the final
performance. Firstly, I was pleased to be able to perform the role of the main character within
this piece, this was initially a huge challenge for myself as I had not performed a principal role
before. In terms of the final performance, In order to communicate my characters frustration to
her parents, I raised my voice and delivered lines with a sarcastic tone. My character would
often avoid questions, I would often do this my being distracted by my phone. To communicate
this to the audience I would avoid eye contact with the other characters in the scene. On the line
"Mum, you have been spying on me", I raised my voice and presented a shocked facial
expression to show her anger towards my mother. In terms of proxemics, I successfully
communicated her anger by standing up on this line and confronting the mother character face
on. Whilst I was pleased with my performance of my character, on reflection I could have
explored my characters back story further using a hot seating task. This would have enabled me
to understand my character in more detail. I also feel I could have considered my characters
costume more, as the costume I wore was very neutral and it didn't represent my character
enough to my audience.

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6. Were you successful in what you set out to achieve?

The overall the intention of our piece was to educate our audience about not only the impact of
technology but the idea that society is never protected from addiction and that addiction is all
around us. On reflection, I do believe we weren't completely successful as our audience
members lost the intention of being educated due to our inclusion of comedy within our piece. I
feel that the comedic moments over-shadowed the serious topic and therefore the intention to
educate our audience was lost. If we were to perform this piece again, I would have focused
more on the therapy session and the conversation between the daughter and the therapist. I
also feel we could have included scenes from just the parents discussing the impact that
technology addiction is having on their daughter’s life to express the importance of the message
further. Whilst the intention of this piece was to educate the audience, we were successfully in
entertaining them. Throughout the final performance, audience members were laughing and
following conversations with audience members they had enjoyed our piece and were clear on
our message. I also believe that it would have been more useful for us to study different styles
and forms of theatre in preparation for our devising project, to take inspiration from different
theatre practitioners. Prior to this we had only studied naturalistic devising methods and
therefore we were limited with devising ideas.

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H&S - To make sure all health and safety was considered, we made all of our rehearsal spaces clear
before each practical lesson. We also wore appropriate clothing for our rehearsals to allow ourselves
to move around freely.