Piece with Sonia and Robin

Using the poem "Home" by Warsan Shire as stimulus, we developed a piece looking at the idea of how our a place of comfort - like your home - could turn on you and become unstable;

"no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear

saying-

leave,

run away from me now

i dont know what i’ve become

but i know that anywhere

is safer than here"

We felt the most effective way to show this was through the innocence and obliviousness of children - a lot of the children who have been caught up in migration, will not know what they're running from or where they're going. All they know is that they can't go back home. We explore the simplicity of children playing a game of hopscotch that would then morph into something darker - a minefield and escaping bombs. This was to show how a simple game you play as a child can be distorted by war. 

As we were looking out sounds this lesson, we decided to contrast our piece with the sounds of children playing in a school playground. This is a sound that everyone who has gone to school or lives by one, recognises - it's a very familiar sound of everyone's childhood. Furthermore, it highlighted how safe you feel as a child in your playground compared to how unsafe the conditions the children running from war torn countries have to play and live in. 

It would be quite hard to involve everyone in this piece, however we did question perhaps involving the audience in a game at the beginning before splitting off and performing but we didn't get round to rehearsing that properly. 

Piece With JJ

Using this FOX News article as stimulus, JJ and I wanted to explore the idea of welcoming something only to turn your back on it. This was boiling down the main idea the article was presenting into it's simplest forms. We decided to do this through using a scrunched up piece of paper - representing the war torn migrants who had fled from their home country. This was our way of attempting to get our story across without being too literal. We then unfolded the paper carefully to represent the surge in volunteers and countries beginning to welcome refugees across their borders. This was our attempt to show 'protection'. However, as the last few months have gone on - a surge of anti-migrant protests and right wing groups have gained popularity, especially after the attacks in Paris and Brussels. We then scrunched the paper back up and tried to get the other to take it - this was our way of showing the idea of 'it's not our problem' - an ideology that many people seem to possess.

In 17/03/16's lesson we decided to try and develop the piece without using the paper or words - making it purely physical. This meant that we really had to tap into what we were trying to explore and the very basics of what 'welcome' and 'enough' means and how to portray that. I feel we did this quite successfully as we did not have a lot of time but we were able to have a piece that was ready to perform (despite not performing it). I would like to expand and develop that piece further as it has a lot of potential, I believe, as a piece on a whole.