Week Two 

Today we continued to devise our performance. Before we could carry on our devising process, we took into consideration the history of our site overall. As our location is on The BRIT School grounds, and part of the older building, we all looked into the history of our school.

The History:
Mark Featherstone-Witty had been inspired by Alan Parker's 1980's film, Fame, to create a performing arts secondary school specialising in the creative arts. He started to raise money through the School for Performing Arts Trust (SPA), and has consequently refined a novel  integrated curriculum.

Featherstone-Witty approached Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, to be the Project Champion. He agreed but would only carry on if other record companies 'chipped in'. Luckily, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) were concerned with home taping and realised they had no political influence to bring the necessary pressure to bear. The Conservative Government needed to give impetus to their flagging City Technology College Scheme.

For over twenty years, The BRIT School for Performing Arts and Technology has been the beneficiary of the British Record industry, who has given more than £7 million to the school. Annual contributions form the Brit Awards have also been given to the school via the record industry's charity, the BRIT Trust.  

This research helped influence our piece, as the school has been supported from trusts, we decided demonstrate how people rely on the support of others during fires and everyday life. We started to work on how we could display this, and I came up with the idea of performing a few trust falls, to show how humans rely on other humans. We worked this idea into our piece, weaving it into a few sections of our piece.

While devising, we noticed that the glass resembled a large mirror, as we could see our reflection in it. We decided to use the reflection of the windows in our piece, mirroring each other resembling how fire itself follows you about. Our group decided to include this short mirroring in our piece as it is another aspect which connects our piece to that specific site, as no other area in the school has the same window placing. Here is an image of what the windows look like. You can see clearly in this picture how well this glass reflects what is opposite it.

The meaning behind our performance is that no matter how much you plan and rehearse fire drills, you can never be prepared for what life throws at you. When a real fire happens, I would say there is a very low chance that everyone will file out in a single line to the car park. It  is the same in life, you can't plan what will happen to you. We also want to show how everyone's lives is almost like a constant drill; you have breakfast, go to work or school, have lunch, go home and then go to bed.

The site offered these themes and morals to us, as our location looked as if it once used to be used regularly, but over the years has been left, possibly because it wasn't convenient enough. Our group want to include this idea in our piece.