Lesson 9 (Chair duets for Santa Fe) Thursday 8th October

In this lesson we began to do work on the song 'Santa Fe' in the original script and play it is set on the subway in new york. we wanted to keep this in our version of the show, for this scene we we still setting it on the subway but we were going to show the through Frantic Assemblys technique of Chair Duets, i felt confident witht eh style of performing and physical theatre movement. So i naturally took a lead on organising this scene and how each duet would link into each other. 

We started by going off into our pairs and making up 4 counts of 3 to put into our duets, i found this easy to come up with and me and my partner ended up finishing the duet quickly so we brought in a third person to our movement sequence. his gave us more oppotunitys to add in some more dynamic movements into our piece. We looked into using the chairs more and explored swapping areas and levels with each other. 

When we brought the duets together and placed them all in the space we put them in a traverse style, straight down the centre of the performance space. I suggested to put it on an angle going from one corner to the other. This then gave each audience group a different view. section A would get a view straight down the centre of the isle and the other two sections would be able to see through the pairs. 

once we had brought these duets together and put it to the song of 'Santa Fe', we looked at places within the song that we thought this non-naturalistic style of movement would work best. I suggested that it would work n the more more choral sections of the song, as the pace and tempo are picked up and then this was the section when everything came to life. For the rest of the ong when the character of Collins is singing the rest of us would be doing pedestrian movements to give it the illution of the train. I focused mainly on filming for my character and documenting what was going on. This worked well. i played around with levels in this song, and going around to everyone involved. What i found interesting about this was the different characters reactions  me filming them and how i would treat it. I felt more natural doing it to the characters that i was close with, like Roger, Collins and Angel. However everyone else on the scene wouldnt be as willing to be filmed and i would have to go around it in a calmer way. I did this by first making eye contact with them, in a wa y of getting permission from them, then being a bit slower while filming, to not be to intense.

I felt that this rehearsal of blocking and choregraphing this song went really well for me and i felt that this was one of the most productve lessons that i have had so far. I feel that i gave plenty of advice to the cast and suggested ways on how we could set things and try out new ways of doing it. To take this scene and song further i will look into more pedestrain movements to fill out time when me character is not doing anything else in the scene.