Education - Devising

We decided to experiment with using a table as a lot of people associate that with school and teaching. Still being influenced by the element of brutality & violence the rhythmic sound of banging down onto the desk was created. By letting this sound influence our bodies as we strived to move towards the desk, an interesting image began to form. This became the opening of our piece. Devising more material I found quite challenging because I wanted to stray away from being too obvious or realistic with how we would portray or represent things. However because of the time limit and difficulties of working in a group a lot of compromises had to be made between us all in order to progress further. A lot of the material we explored wasn't able to be used because it didn't make sense or have any sort of purpose, however finally we managed to create a physicalisation of young people being denied education by ripping me away from the desk where I was trying to write. To make this effective we created a slow build up of how I was ripped away each time to draw the audience in & have more of an impart. Otherwise if we were going to go straight into a really horrific image of being dragged kicking and screaming away from the desk it could potentially be too much too soon for the audience to handle. To bring the piece to a close we decided to make a comment on the part money plays in the right to and education. This was depicted using different levels to convey different classes of people. The people on top of the table were happily dishing money out to everyone and singing a classic nursery rhyme you may learn in a wealthy primary school, where as the people under the desk were begging for money and having to support the other family member as they got more and more defeated. 

I think although the work we created was fairly good, there wasn't much of it because we found so difficult to devise as a group. Part of the reason being maybe that we were all used to working in diffierent ways and therefore the style and type of work everyone felt comfortable and wanted to devise was different.