Week Three 

After last week, I felt as if our performance needed some stimulus, so I researched poems about fire and found a poem by Nick Flynn called 'Fire' http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/181214 . I got inspired by how the poet mentions all the different effects fire has and the after math of it. I thought our group could also touch on what happens after an incident such as a fire.

As our piece's main inspiration was the abandoned fire exit sign:

I thought it would be wise just to do a small bit of research about why we have fire exit signs and possibly we could use the reasons in our performance. Fire exit signs were brought in after the Victoria Hall disaster in Sunderland England, 1883. More than 180 children died due to a door being bolted at the bottom of the stairwell. Afterwards, the British Government began legal moves to enforce minimum standards for building safety. This then slowly led to the legal requirements that venues must have a minimum number of outward opening emergency exits as well as locks which could be opened from the inside. The site we are in is a door which is locked but can be opened in case of a fire. I thought maybe we could use to history of the fire exit sign somehow in our performance, possibly mentioning how sometimes doors which are supposed to be opened aren't, and therefore you can get trapped.

Our group started to work on this and we came up with a movement which shows us ''trapped'' in a box, clutching at our throats as the fire approaches us. Another element we added in today was including the patterns of the ground and the windows in our performance. In the image below you can see the very structured patterns of the ground. At first, we were repeating certain movements, but we decided that these certain gestures didn't tie in well with our performance and weren't specific enough to our site and its qualities.

Through doing this, however, we started to come up with individual characters. I decided that mine is a business women who doesn't believe in luck. All of our characters are basic, as we wanted our performance to be a microcosm of society and for the audience to focus more on the message rather than the characters and the dialogue. Leading on from this point, today we finalised where our audience would be. As we want as many people as we can to see our performance, our group has decided to place our spectators on the stairs situated behind the windows.

We feel that because there is a barrier blocking the audience from being able to touch us, this would add to the element of no one being able to help you if you are trapped in a fire. It will also isolate us more. When we tested out the viewing point, I noticed that there was a humming sound on the stairwell, which contributed to the eerie atmosphere our performance will have.