3.How did you and your group explore the possibilities of form, structure and performance style?

After deciding on the theme of secrets when looking at our research from our New York Trip we originally decided to create a 30 minute peice of theatre based on one contsnt running storyline, subsequently adopting the simple play format in which the audience will follow the same set of characters through on story told generally in chronological order. However when we began 'getting the first scene on its feet', after designing roles fitting sepecifically to our personal acting strengths, we encountered a few problems. The first was that the montage at the beginning of the play to help establish the characters was too long, cutting down our time to tell the story behind them mimicking a secene from an Action Adventure film. The second was that we found creating scene simply through on the spot improvisation was a challenge, as respomding to one another's lines appropriately to create humour as well as elaborate on their extravegent plan of a bank robbery was hard without having a set script, something which we did not want.

16/10/12
As we all felt that the comedy behind our performance was the most important thing to us all, we made the decision to change the performance style in order to enhance our chances of creating humour for the audience, as well as make sure we were able to all use our own acting skills to our advantage. Therefore, we cast our minds back to before we began devising and when we began the year as a new class. During this time we played around with pair improvisations in which their was a 'sculptre' who moulded the two improvisers into starting posistions, from which they created storylines. This was something we found 'naturally funny' as we discovered being moulded into a shape to adopt an intial character, enabled us to create 'over the top' exaggerated senarios. As this was a technique we felt confident with, we all agreed the short spontaneous improvisation technique was the direction to go in with our performance. As a result, we are now changing our peice of theatre to a series of improvisations based on a variety of characters and secrets they are keeping.

Structuring the piece 
Spontaneous improvisations were key when structuring our piece of theatre as it allowed us to create a large number of characters that played to our personal acting strengths. For example, Raye was able to showcase her ability to mimic accents as she played someone with  South African accent, as well as someone from Australia. We were able to create a fast pace series of interactions with different on stage personalities through the Bus Stop improvisation exercise as it required us to think quickly, devising a short conversation to portray a snippet of a storyline, before having to 'leave the bus top' unexpectedly to introduce a new character. This helped us to gain a feel of what a farcical comedy in the form of a sketch show would be like to perform, as we would have to adapt to each new set at a fast pace, taking on a different role each time that completely contrasts our previous character. For example, i found myself playing a women that suddenly went into labour, however I then became a little girl of about 5 years old, sitting with her friend. Due to this style of performance being a way we could all play roles that we personally created and were able to portray to our highest ability, improvisation was the devising method for the whole piece.

27/11/12
As the style of our performance fitted within the comedic genre, due to it taking on the form of several splackstick orientataed sketches, we decided it was important to make the characters' enterances as humourous and exaggerated as possible, in keeping with the over-the-top acting style. To help us come up with some enterance ideas, we carried out some reasearch based around characters in well-kown comedys. I looked at BBCs top ten comedy enterances, on the BBC website in the 'Comedy Collections' section. http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/collections/p0069r6w
I found watching these extrremely helpful for generating ideas for our third scene. Each enterance fitted perfectly to the exaggerated comedy style of our performance, may of the features of particular scenes suitable to incorperate within the structure of our peice. For example, Rodney's enterence in Only Fools and Horses focused more on the sound of the doorbell to create a humourous element to the situation, as Del made Rodney ring the new doorbell even though we could see him standing outside with his key, shouting 'I've got my key!'. this simple exchange between the two brothers was funny to watch due to the fact Rodney was shut outside, shouting through the glass door to Del who pestered him to ring the bell, mimicking a bossy older brother stereotype. When the bell eventually rang, the theme tume was extremely high pitched and elaborate, creating an exaggerated situation as the over the top bell contrasted the little flat on a council estate.
Furthermore, some openings concerntrated more on costume to create the comedy in the scene. Little Britian relied on the fact that Davith was an archetypal gay character to emphasise his lether skin tight costume that shocked the audience as it highlighted his dillusion in the fact that he thought he looked extremeley attactive, when in actual fact the constume did nothing for his 'flabby' physique. Also, Two pints of Larger used the idea of the unexpected to create shocking humour as Jonny suddenly enters wearing an adult sized nappy, after compalining that he has 'been neglected' since the baby has been born. This is extremely visually funny as Jonny looks ridiculous dressed as a baby, and his childish attitude is emphasised. As a result, we were inspired to use costume to created a visually funny, as well as physically funny scene through using exaggerated unexpected constume that restricted our ability to move.