Wednesday, November 13, 2019
Alan Bennetts Talking Heads inspired my initial idea. :: Drama
Alan Bennett's 'Talking Heads' inspired my initial idea.    DRAMA PRACTICAL  ===============    Our group comprised of Jennifer Harney, Jamie Hollaway, Antonia  Forsyth, Nick Hudson and myself.    Alan Bennett's 'Talking Heads' inspired my initial idea. I had  imagined two seats on stage with two people portraying an unusual  event. The other actors would then act out the narrated story. However  this was not met with great enthusiasm and so was immediately  dismissed. Our second idea was more stimulating. We came up with the  idea of a failing band who were looking for new talent a la 'The  commitment', and were holding auditions. Jenny was immediately taken  with the idea and imagined herself portraying the role of director. We  soon had discussed this idea to death and were no longer inspired by  it but dreaded the thought of how we would bring it to the stage..    The end of the lesson arrived and we realised we had done nothing but  talk and had rubbished all the ideas we had come up with. We repeated  the second lesson in the same way, however it was a little more  productive. We moved from the idea of a failing band to an actress who  was finding it tough being at the top. However two problems soon  emerged. The first was that we were coming up with fantastic ideas  that would obviously only work on film, and not on the stage. The  second was the lack of insight and excitement for all the characters,  other than the star herself, leaving everyone else feeling worthless  and unimportant; the group was starting to split- this was turning  into a disaster. We were able to salvage this by the lifeline provided  by Nick. Although his idea also contained many problems that needed to  be discussed, we were able to recover the fading spirit of the group.    During the third lesson we became worried that we not getting anywhere  fast, so we decided to change our approach. We remembered that in  earlier workshops, when we had been stuck for inspiration, we wrote  down random words and then just improvised based around the chosen  word. The first to be used was squash, after the second attempt I was  reminded of the metaphor 'When life gives you lemons make lemonade'.  Although this was a slight deviation from 'squash, nevertheless the  group was inspired ands so we spent twenty minutes discussing the  idea. We then realised our idea had, once again, dragged us back into  the fatal area of discussion, which we were trying to avoid!    The fourth lesson we returned we asked for the help of our teacher  (Mrs. Curtis)- we were aware of the other group's developments, and    					    
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