Feedback on scratch performance

Site Specific Shooting Gallery Feedback. 

Today we performed a sketch/rough run through of our idea for site specific. We spent the morning setting up: scattering props on the floor, playing music out loud for our piece, sticking up posters, and getting into charter.  

Overall, the sketch went well; it allowed us to see what was working well in the performance and what could be improved.  

The performance was effective because it created a grimy, gritty atmosphere through the use of hardcore drugs and symbolisms of sex and alcohol abuse, and this allowed audience to get a feel of the negative impacts of heavy drug use and drug addiction.  This was effective because it’s what we wanted to achieve – we wanted to create this shocking atmosphere to highlight to the spectators how corrupt this lifestyle can be. By throwing the spectators in the space and creating this performance around them so that they were in the centre of it all, it allowed them to genuinely feel as if they were in a shooting gallery and to witness the effects first hand.  

Although our performance went well, there is always room for improvement. We noticed some of the things that could have been approved upon, and we later got feedback from Jack which helped us in initializing what we needed to work on.  

One of the major problems in our performance was the rain – we don’t have a shelter in our space, the roof it wide open and so this means that if it rains, it becomes difficult to carry out our performance. At first we thought that this would add to the effect of the piece – that it would contribute to the ‘destruction’ theme and idea, however on the day we realised that it was a bigger problem than expected. The rain actually ended up soaking and ruining a lot of our props which created difficulties for us when we would try to use these props, or when the audience would try to interact with these props. It also got the audience wet which was a bit of a problem, because nobody really liked standing out in the rain. As well as this, it made our space very dirty and mucky with wet mud. This meant that the performers would get dirty while performing, the spectators would get dirty while experiencing the show, and the cleaning up after was hard because everything was covered in soaking mud. Our solution for this problem is to create a roof shelter for the actual performance using cardboard or a rain cover over at least half of the space. This would stop any rain from getting into our space, and it also created a more enclosed feeling which adds to the ‘trapped’ atmosphere.  

Another problem that occurred: Jack pointed out that we were doing too much for the performance; we were trying to include too many aspects into one idea. We were focusing on drugs, sex, alcohol, abuse, homelessness, depression and others, when we should have actually just simplified it and made the simplified version intense. For the next performance we are going to take away aspects that don’t need to be there: we are going to take away any sex scenes because they don’t add any effect, and we are going to remove any symbolisms of sex such as condoms on the floor, because even though sexually transmitted diseases can be a part of the drug addiction lifestyle, our initial idea was to have a shooting gallery and this is the idea that we should stick with instead of over complicating it. This applies also to the alcohol; we are going to remove the extra bits of alcohol that aren’t needed for the performance such as empty beer cans on the floor.   

Another aspect that would be improved on was our acting. Instead of acting out so many scenes in our performance, we should just find one or two simple actions that contain an element of surprise and stick with these. We tried to do too many things at once, and it just felt like we were cramming too many things into a small performance. Jack said that this wasn’t needed and that it was a bit too ‘full on’. For the actual performance, it was recommended that we each find a simple action or two that link in with our idea and just repeat these over and over again. This way the audience can simply walk about the space and explore the performance by themselves at their own pace instead of being crammed with too many ideas.  

As well as simplifying our performance and creating a shelter, we also came up with some ideas that we could add to make the performance more effective. One of these was the idea that the audience could listen to audio about the performance while exploring the space. Our idea for this was to create an online blog with audio’s, and the audience would be directed to log onto this blog using their phones by a poster, and once they were on this site they could listen to these audio’s and the audio’s would give a background story of each individual character; of how they used to have a positive life and how now their lives have been destroyed because of drugs.  

Overall our performance was good, we are happy with the idea’s that we have came up with and we are happy with the results that the scratch performance showed. We now just need to adjust little elements of the performance and this will improve our overall piece for the day of the performance.