Exploring Stimulus


During this lesson we created scenes based on music as a stimulus. We first looked at a song by Artic Monkeys From the Ritz to the Rubble, followed by “This is Me” from The Greatest Showman. We then used these two songs in order to create a mind map of possible ideas for a piece. We found that Ritz to the Rubble was really useful for beginning to create a narrative and it introduced two opposing scenes we could create using a day time world and a night time world. It also gave us the idea of having a lack of control and we began to relate this to drinking and addiction. “This is Me” also allowed us to consider the kind of emotional journey of a character and introduced a discussion of whether we wanted a resolution for the story or whether we wanted to view more as documenting a characters experience.

We then began to create some starting scenes, exploring the idea of the morning after first of all. We looked at this scene in two different ways in order to explore how to build relationships and make more realistic characters. The scene shows a character recovering from a night out, whilst a friend looks on and looks after the character. In the first version, we gave the friend a mask with a happy character, whilst in the second we gave the friend a more stern character mask. By doing this, we were able to present different relationships between the characters. We found that the second mask made the scene more complex and so more realistic.  This was because whilst we chose to keep the upbeat physicality of the first version, we chose an almost opposite mask, therefore using the idea of counter mask in a backwards way, creating a character who clearly wanted to help their friend but was also angry at them at the same time.

Members of the group also introduced a scene which followed the idea of the nightlife in comparison to this mundane day life. They created symmetry in the characters during the day scene to show the monotony of daily life in comparison to more chaotic night scene.

We decided that we wanted to develop this mundane scene. We looked at having three characters in the scene, two who would be everyday workers and one who would be the main character. The two workers would both have the same mask, which we decided would be the happy character mask, whilst the main character had a more open face that had an almost deer in headlights expression. We introduced computers and began to look at how we could create rhythmic element using the keyboards for sound. We chose to have the two workers already on stage, and the introduced the main character so it appeared as if he was late or at least didn’t conform fully with the other workers there.

The idea would be to then begin breaking down the symmetry, showing the main character beginning to lose the beat of the other two, falling behind and therefore creating chaos. Hopefully this is something that we can begin to explore in the next lesson.

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