On Tuesday we went to the archive to find letters from the Beechey boys to their mother. The people in there were really helpful. They gave us three DVD’s with the digital letters from the first three sons. As we are mainly focusing on the first son we read the letters he sent. We were also given a book with a summary of each letter that all the sons had sent. We looked over these and noted down the letters that were of interest for us. One man gave us a novel written about the Beechey boys with the letters written in them, so we looked at these and looked at how each son signed off their letters. This gave us an idea of what we want to include in Amy’s monologue. It also inspired us for some performative actions for our walk. We also walked on our route and spoke about what would be happening at each point and what performative actions we would be doing. This really gave us a clear idea of what would be happening.
On Friday we wrote down the route we wanted to do and when our interactions would occur. We then went up the hill with Karen and spoke about our ideas. It really helped us think about each interaction and why it would be happening. We also spoke about the here and the now and how we would talk about the past in our performance. The idea of having the headphones on and being in the past and then taking them off and being in the present day. We then spoke about what tense our monologues would be in and how we want the audience to perceive them. We decided to record our monoluges in first and third person to see how they sound in the site and then we will decide. We also spoke about being ourselves when the audience take the headphones off and talking to them naturally about the tasks we will be asking them to do.
We also showed the performance part that we worked on, the first bit worked well but being children playing in the playground did not work. Therefore we have to discuss and think about how we can incorporate hopscotch into the performance to move it along.
Overall I think this week has been very productive and we know what is happening now. What we need to do now it really work on our sound and see how it sounds and looks in our site.
Chloe Downie