17-21 Nov

We have started construction of the trees. To make the tree's, we stuffed coiled metal with balled up paper. For the lesson, Connor, Steve and I went around the school to collect the paper we needed to stuff the tree's. When we returned with all the paper we could find, we started to stuff the tree's. At this point the class all worked together and split into two groups. One group stuffing the tree's whilst the other group made sure the paper was stuffed in securely. When we finished stuffing a tree, we had to role the metal until the tree became strong and secure. By the end of the lesson we had managed to make the basic structure of all four trees and place them into C5. I feel that this lesson was well spent. I think that the trees are one of the most important aspects of this play we need to accomplish as the sooner that we make all the trees, the sooner we can put them up permanently. When we have them all up we will be able to see the boundaries that we have when rehearsing. At the moment we use the entire room. However when we have all the trees up, we will be able to see what space we have and make improvement around this. Our next stage is to wrap the trees in mod rock and paint them to make them look authentic. On Friday we ran through all of the movement pieces that we have in the play. We started with the dream sequence we have after scene ten. In this movement sequence Oskar falls asleep and we all play Oskar's thoughts and fears. It starts with us rolling to our left then our right (symbolising the sequence of falling asleep) we then sit up to show that Oskar has woken up in his dream. We then stand up and throw Oskar up. This is meant to show that Oskar feels that the whole town is against him and want to hurt him. We then force Oskar down onto his knees and Jonny goes to break his neck. Oskar falls down and Hamburg drags Me and Jonny off. This is when Eli shows up and cheers Oskar up. However this is short lived as Hakan takes Eli away and Oskar is left alone. He is then picked up and falls back asleep. I feel that this piece of movements is one of the strongest we use in the performance. It was made in under an hour and symbolises a lot. The next sequence we done was the knife dance. Because we have rehearsed this so much it went fine. This is the same as the thought sequence where all of our characters battle their inner demons and try to come to terms with the hardships in their lives. The final movement we done was the final death scene. I feel that this scene went okay however it did not go as well as I would like it to. Because we hadn't rehearsed it in a while there were a few mistakes. We were a little out of time and a few of the movements went wrong. But this only due to us being out of practice. When we finished all the movement scenes we started to mod rock the tree's. I feel that fridays lesson went extremely well as we were able to see how well we can do all of the movement pieces. This gave the group a huge mural boost. I think that next week we should focus more on our individual characters and work in small groups to analyse our characters and how we can better ourselves as actors.