Cabinet of Curiosities Evaluation

Overall i believe the piece was a huge success as we all explored new forms of devising and exhibiting work that was creative, challenging and un conventional. The strongest part of the overall piece i believe was each groups ability to work and move as an assemble, in each piece you saw moments where the group had to react and stay in tune with the others in their group in order for the piece to stay together. For example their was a moment in Will's where everyone to had to scream and run in and out of the audience, dodging both actors and audience members at the same time was tricky so that had to be aware of one another space-ally  and stay in tune witch the energy in the room to know when it was right to stop and move on to the next section.You also saw this is in sarah's piece when the group had to move from left to right whilst making sounds, each person had to stay close to each other and have the same foot movements to move at the same time.

Another strong moment in our piece was the revealing of our faces and the duo movement section because each duo had a different relationship leading the audience to see different meanings in each section. I also like how each groups text bounce off another and seemed like it was telling a story, when we created without any intention of doing that. What i partially loved about this piece was the audiences freedom to roam and observe the work and how immersed they were in the piece. They were up close to all the action and had to engaged and interact with the actors which allowed them to feel like they too were part of the performance.

Something i think we could have experimented more with was voice and the exhibition boards. For example in our group piece it would have been nice to see a range of different vocal qualities overlapping one another which would have created two different dynamics to the piece visual and audio. I also think we could have better used the boards by laying them down and climbing on them, creating more interesting shapes and exploring the boards through improvisation.

In addition i think we could have better experimented with light and sound, using music created by students that explored different topics or were created through experimenting with sounds. The same with light, we could explored projectors, ovp's or different colour lighting. This would have allowed us to be even more creative and create a whole piece digital insulation.

Working with the exhibition boards

I found it both challenging and interesting working with the exhibition boards as at times it was a challenge to move them into position quickly and neatly but also was fun because it created interesting shapes for the audience to stand in and/or be contained in.

The white background of the boards created a blank canvas for us to work around and allowed us to frame our work as we could manipulate the audience and ensemble into different shapes. I like how the set was constantly moving and changing, it made me as an audience member more exited as i didn't know what was going to happen next, how the set was going to move and where i would be placed.

Questions of the cabinet

Today we worked as a large ensemble, as their is large number of us i feel that we all learnt how key it is to be focused and tuned into the energy of the room, doing this allowed everyone to be responsive to one another. For example when we first started working as a group answering questions things began to get heck tick, people were not looking out for each other and people's focus began to run off, this made it near impossible for everyone to work together and create a piece which was responsive but also visually looked good, so when we picked one person to respond to the questions and everyone else responded to that it became a lot clearer and more instinctual as that person was put on the spot.

However although at first it was sometimes chaotic and uncomfortable i actually really enjoyed the danger, the fact that you didn't know what was going to happen next, how far people were going to take it or how aggressive someone may be with you. The fear made me work harder to find the question and for me made it more exiting. I personally feel like we need to keep a dose of this in the real piece, the idea that you are slightly on edge because someones respond may be unexpected all we need to do is make sure we are ready as an ensemble to react to the energy in a calmer way.

It was important to make yourself open to exploring and discovering partially when answering the questions, being able to view everyone as a blank canvas instead of the people you know helped me to reveal a truthful answer to the questions. What i found most interesting and amazing to see was that everyone had their own interpretation of the question so you weren't copying the answers movements but responding to the energy they were giving out, this helped me answer my own questions and made me think about what the question meant to me. Breathing was also key as it aloud us to work with our instincts and continue working at manageable pace.

What really makes the whole piece work is when everyone is entirely focused on the person who is answering the question. As an ensemble you cant be selfish you have to accept that instead of one person taking the light you are all equal and working together to create something beautiful. I think when everyone realised this, stopped being selfish and allowed everyone to work communally thats when the piece worked. I can say this for myself because at the beginning i was answering the question in the way i thought would look good or make me look interesting but then i learnt that it wasn't about that, it was about sharing the moment with everyone and just being truthful, not answering with your head or caring about what anyone else thought.

Spontaneous writing

This week we did a small amount of spontaneous writing to add some text to the piece. We did this by looking at the art "the lovers" and writing down anything we felt. I initially felt like writing about why i thought their faces were covered. I wrote about the barrier they had between them and their lack of love.

Practising spontaneous writing as helped me think about how i can use spontaneous writing when devising a piece of theatre and how effective it can be. I believe it is effective because you are writing from a natural place and with a flow, when you do this more comes out and you begin to write things that you wouldn't have been able to think of if you planned what you were writing. 

This was proven today because everyone's writing was special in its own way because it was authentic. When we pieced all of the text together it somehow seemed like we had written it to connect to each piece and had a system when in fact it just naturally happened that way, i think its beautiful way of devising. 

The lovers

We have been creating work based around the piece of art by Rene Magritte's called The lovers.

In a group discussion we talked about what this piece meant to us and the reasoning behind Magritte's choice to cover the faces of "the lovers." I believed that the muslin could be a metaphor for the suffocation of their relationship. Others thought it could be a visual barrier showing that their is something in the way or hindering their relationship.


It was interesting to see how everyone interpreted the piece in a different way and took what the believed they were seeing. I was intrigued to know that the artist had no reasoning for the covered faces and stated that the painting meant nothing. I have learnt that you can use non meaningful stimulus to create meaning. Not always do we need to set out a purpose and a message to our audience but instead let the audience take away individual meanings. However one thing i would ask is, is it really possible to create art that is non meaningful. I ask this question because personally i feel as actors and story tellers we are accustom to finding characters that we can latch onto and giving the audience a journey they can follow. So although we may say it means nothing i believe that overtime the more you work the piece the more you will begin to discover and the art you are creating will become more meaningful.  

Something that has exited me during this process is the concept of automatism (Automatism - The process of writing or creating art without conscious thought.) I have found a vast amount of creative freedom from allowing myself to create work from a natural, instinctual place and not letting the constrictions of my head get in the way. For example sometimes when we can be self concious or afraid of making mistakes and this stops us from creating work that is challenging and different, so using automatism is defiantly a skill i have learnt that will continue to use in he future.

"The Surrealists borrowed many of the same techniques to stimulate their writing and art, with the belief that the creativity that came from deep within a person’s subconscious could be more powerful and authentic than any product of conscious thought."

I would agree with this statement that using automatism allows a persons creativity to come from within the subconscious mind as supposed to the concious mind which comes with restrictions, the work i have created through the subconscious has been better and more powerful in my opinion then concious work therefore i definitely understand why the surrealists were empowered by this method of devising.

I like how the muslin takes away our identities and makes us blank canvas's. It also creates other meanings for the audience like control, being a number, ,hiding yourself etc. 

Costume Ideas

I drew out the costume ideas to help me visually plan and see how the costume are going to look. Drawing helps me to mind map ideas in a creative and more interesting way.

I have insured that all the real colours of the costumes will be colours that match the piece of artwork we are using as stimulus. We are doing this because as a group we wanted to do the artwork justice by using as many key features as we could, like the melting and colliding of objects, the colours and the autumnal theme.

Materials and colour scheme ideas