Devising Experience

         Our group came up four different topics. Afterward, we decided to choose the topic of a teen has a mental block. Four different topics were coming up by all of us. Firstly, I was suggesting to have the first topic that was a person who has two different personalities while he is playing on the phone and living in the reality. Eventually, I approved the idea of Cassidy that we should use the topic of mental block person. The reason of that was that character could reveal the theme - Fences - the best. On the part of devising, we tried to make the environment like a real clinic. I helped to grab chairs and managed the sequence of the chairs. The sequence of chairs should be like the doctor faces to the teen, the block of the teen sits back to back. Scripts went really well so far, we decided to topic firstly we discussed it, then we focused more about the teen has a mental block. The framework of the story went in the beginning like a normal meeting of a counselor and a teen. Along with the story goes, the block came out, the block has to be the other personalities of that teen. Moreover, the teen conflicts with the mental block virtual. Finally, the teen conquered his mental block by himself. The scene ends.


           I would say the thing we should improve was the ending we wrote. Somehow we couldn't find a good way to end the scene with the victory of the teen and how can let the scene ends fluently. It is difficult when we prepared for the scripts to end this play in the way of showing everyone a clear feedback in reality of the teen, people can see the teen wins the block inside but not outside. In this group project on devising theater, I first learned about the staging, before we started it, I had no idea about how to use furniture of the blackbox to arrange the scene we wanted to have. It is also a first time I studied to combine ideas of all three of us when we had brainstorming for ideas, It was hard to persuade or convince others to have your ideas. When I watched the other groups' plays, I realized that they used the positions to identify whether the scene was happening outside or inside of the house. Some group liked to use a narrator to introduce the background information and consist the plots together.