Evaluation

I feel my group really worked hard to incorporate as many offers from the site into our piece and development as possible. One of the strongest aspects of our performance was that I truly feel we managed to incorporate the site's physicality well and creatively into the shape and the concept of our piece. This was definitely one of our successes as we were able to use our site directly to tell and create the story and that we wouldn't have been able to perform it with as much effect in a different location. By researching different aspects of our piece, we were able to develop the authenticity of the piece and intertwine that with offers made from the site. One of our strengths was the fact we actually used an elderly person to record the sound and tell the story, this helped us create a realistic world that the audience would travel through and take part in, we felt as a group that our story's impact would've fallen flat if we had used our natural voices in the place of an old women rather than the real thing.

One of our most obvious weakness was our use of sound. We were planning on using a portable speaker that Andrea would carry whilst travelling up the stairs however, despite testing it on multiple occasions, it did not work on the day of the performance. This meant that we had to use the big theatre speaker that was extremely quiet and was not loud enough to have the desired effect. This had an extremely large impact on our story telling and I feel that this aspect fell quite flat, meaning we lost a large amount of the effect and impact we wanted to have on the audience. We had developed our piece to work in tandem with the sound and so without the sound working properly, I feel it was a lot harder to follow the story, especially as we as actors remained completely silent till the end. Although our piece could have worked without sound, I don't feel it was completely clear or distinct, therefore again, losing a lot of the effect.

If I had the chance I would have really liked to have developed the use of physical theatre further and in greater detail as that was a large part of our original plan. I feel our piece could have been more entertaining if we had really indulged into using physical theatre at each level rather than mime like actions, however, we still managed to tell the story through the actions we chose but I wish we had been slightly more experimental in the way we performed and told the story. I personally feel it would've been interesting as an actor to explore different solo pieces that help tell different parts of a story which all come together and reveal itself at the end, I hope to explore this further in future acting projects that allow me to be as experimental as I possibly can.

My role in our piece, Brenda as a young adult, was supposed to show how the death of her brother hand followed her to the next stage of her life. This was also aided by Chloe and Tia following up in onto my level, physically portraying the death of the brother on the stairs beforehand. I feel we were able to show the progression of the story effectively through the use of the headscarf that we each wore on our levels to show that it was the same character growing up as well as the physical progression of the audience up the stairs. We chose to use the same piece of item of clothing to distinctly show that they were the same character, this meant that it was clearer to define the fact that her past followed her wherever she went as the passing of the scarf happened at every single stage. Without that distinct piece of clothing and the action of each Brenda passing it to the other, I feel the effect of the piece would've definitely been lost through the distraction of travelling through the space and so I am extremely grateful we were able to use it to our advantage. We successfully presented both the literal progression through the story, through the audience's journey, as well as the figurative - through our actions and the headscarf.

Overall, I really liked how the piece turned out. Though I feel it definitely could have been improved and I don't feel we were extremely expressive enough with our choices, I feel we were successful in the decisions that we did make and were able to carry them out effectively - especially with our dampened down sound. We were able to truthfully incorporate our site into our piece to make a really honest piece of site specific theatre that would definitely had not been as effective if performed in a different location.