When my class and I started devising for our section 'A taste of Madness' I was a little bit worried as it was hard to come up with a way that is effective to portray Mental Health in not only an entertaining way but also in an entertaining way.
Our performance starts off with all of the actors sitting on the stage portraying their own versions of mental health using various gesture as well as different objects. I think that this was successful because from the get go audience members are immediately captivated and intrigued and will want to know the story of each of these characters. I also think the fact that we had different levels when doing this (some of us were sitting down, some were bent over and other were standing up) was a good idea however i think it would have been more effective if we were all sitting down so that when the audience came in they would all have to look down on us and that would show that the audience hold power and give them an air of authority over us to show how powerless mental health patients really are.
After that Niyi screams which signified the ending of our previous bit and we all freeze. This part was some times difficult because we had to all freeze at the same time to make the ensemble effect effective and to have it not look like a domino effect however in the performance we all froze at the same time from what I could see from my periphery. We then proceeded to say a word that was given to us in order we had established. My word was 'Twisted' and I came after Mani who said 'Spoon', it was important to know your cue because when we started our word saying part of the performance it had to be quick - one after the other so if someone missed their cue the whole energy of the play could drop but thankfully no one forgot their cue and the audience found this part interesting as I recall seeing their heads snap at every new word spoken by each speaker. After this we all stood up and stared at the audience in a neutral stance with a neutral facial expression as well. We then proceeded to say our fact about mental health before sitting down. My line was '3 in 4 young people fear their friends reacts when discussing their mental health', before performing I slightly struggled with making sure that my voice filled the entire space and that I spoke clearly enough for the audience to hear and understand what I was saying. This is important because our performance was a piece of ensemble work and if one person doesn't put in 100% energy then the piece of the overall piece as I previously mentioned will deteriorate, this part of the play was interesting because none of us were playing a character, instead we were completely neutral which made what we were saying almost impersonal which complimented the idea of it being impossible and that it could happy to anyone and this is a message I think the audience received quite well.
In our performance we had a piece of physical theatre that had solely boys and one that had solely girls. In my opinion these pieces were the highlight of our show especially the boys' physical theatre part. The reason that this was the highlight in my opinion is because you could clearly see how committed each performer was to what he was doing and the movements that they repeated. The movements were extremely bold and clear and immediately captivated the audience members. And when all the boys started to repeat Niyi's movement (who's was my favourite) you could see the dedication they all put into that and they even had subconscious parts unison which I thought was really nice. Overall the choices made in the boys physical theatre piece all complimented each other, from the music to the increasing of the pace at which they did Niyi's movement it was all very well thought out and in my opinion very effective. On the other hand the girls physical theatre part was also effective but i think because we had to take off layers of closing we were not able to concentrate as much on out movements and this resulted in them not being as bold, clear and sharp as the boys one was, in addition we didn't use as much of the stage when doing our movements and focused on only moving our arms and legs in the spot we were standing in. I think next time to make it more effective instead of having three layers of clothing to take off we should only have one and that way we would be able to focus more on our movements, also we had to take our cue to take our clothes off from Becky and not everyone was able to see her so this made that task a little hard. However overall our physical theatre pieces within the play were my favourite parts and were extremely effective in showing the audience what metal health and hiding is like without using words which in my opinion made it even more successful.
All in all I think that my classes performance was extremely effective as the audience were able to see the portrayal of mental health in many different ways from sounds with found objects, to voice to the use of our bodies - all of which were productive. I enjoyed doing this play with my teacher and my class and was very happy with how it turned out.
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