After being given our stimulus title for our second time doing the devising unit, 'Humanity in Crisis', and being split into our separate groups, we were given these images as more stimuli to spark ideas on how we create a piece based on this title. The images show both historic and contemporary issues that have happened around the world. Based on the images alone, I get the feeling of fear, desperation of hope and chaos.
From these emotions I gathered, along with our title, my group and I created a general mind-map of initial and basic ideas that we could potentially progress on and workshop.
These were just general ideas of themes we could create a piece around - not really going into depth of either of them yet, to ensure that we don't have final decision at such an early stage as this would defeat the whole object of performance workshop which requires endless brainstorming, workshopping potential ideas; scrapping ones that don't work as well, and keeping ones we like.
A lot of us amongst my group, including myself, really liked going as far back as World War 2 but to go very different with it. We liked the idea of going along the root of the post-effects of after war - putting a ex-soldier, now a very aged grandfather of a family, who suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome having witnessed the most traumatic and horrifying images and things when at war.
After creating initial ideas on a mind map and lots of discussion within my group, we were then to explore just one of our ideas and create a small sketch/piece thinking about our stimuli and ideas. We chose to use our WW2 idea and create a piece which explains our general theme and idea, where this grandfather, who obviously has some sort of leg injury, enters his living room surrounded by family of his (e.g. children, grandchildren etc) to then hear a knock at the door. This then triggers a panic in the grandfather's head - the sound of a door knock sounding horribly similar to him (perhaps gunfire, or the attacking of an enemy) - causing him to take to a stand using his walking stick as some sort of weapon. After turning around to his family, he falls into a delusion and finds himself stuck in the middle of freeze frame of traumatic memories from when he was on the field. Of course this is all in his head but this is the point of view the audience see. He walks through the still image panicking, hyperventilating really showing this disease having control of him. I played the grandfather and the rest of my group played the family who create this freeze frame, and when working on this, they all wanted me to be saying things, shouting, making a lot of panic through noise - which I did do in the end - whereas I, myself, thought that the silence would be a good way of showing his weakness to what's in his head. He would walk through the image and be stopped at the end by a daughter, telling him that it was just someone at the door.
I think this short piece worked really well in terms of meeting our stimulus in a very unique style.
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