Recording our Monologues and Audactiy- Laura Cooke

This week in Tuesdays session we wrote our monologues. We chose to write them in the present tense from the characters point of view. For the piece, we decided to base them on  Amy Beechey, Florence Bonnett and the Teacher. We went with the idea that these women all connect with one another, as the war affected each of their lives, everything changed for them.

In todays lesson we edited our monologues to make sure that there weren’t any mistakes or things that didn’t sound right. After this we recorded two of the monologues, Amy Beechey and Florence Bonnett. We feel that we need to make more changes to the Teacher piece. Having recorded our monologues, we uploaded them to Audacity and saved them to my drive account.

Next week for Tuesday’s lesson, we plan to go to the Lincolnshire Archive to see the Letters that Amy Beechey received off her sons; as we want to include more in our monologues and also make sure that we are using correct information. We also would like to find out more information on Florence Bonnett and her fiance who went to war, we hope to find something that we can use. I feel that this will be interesting and look forward to going to the Archive and finding out more.

Progression – Friday 13th

As I was absent last week my group filled me in on what tasks they had been doing. They had a group meeting with Conan were they discussed our ideas. He recommended not using costumes, as it may not work as well as we first anticipated and therefore we will have to come up with different ideas. This is because we only have the costumes in the props cupboard and they may not be realistic enough for the audience to believe we are in 1915. We also have to think about how we are taking the audience on the journey as we are not able to actually take the audience back to 1915 therefore we have to think about how we will be able to make the performance believable. This includes what tense we want to write the monologues in and what sounds we want the audience to hear.

This week we wrote the monologues for our three characters. We wrote them in present tense from the characters perspective. They are not as long as I expected them to be, however with layering sounds on them and adding them into the final piece they may work. If not we will be able to record more material and add it in at a later date.

With Amy Beechey’s monologue we are going to include a letter from her eldest son, Bernard. He was the first to pass away at war and we want to focus on how she felt about this. We want to include the final letter he sent her as we feel this will be a powerful piece for the audience to hear. With this in mind, on Tuesday we are going to go to the Lincolnshire Archive to find the letter as they have over 400 of the letters from the Beechey boys.

In Florence Bonnet’s monologue we have spoken about daisy chains because we want the audience to be making a daisy chain when they listen to her speaking. We are doing this because she was only 15 and she was making tracks for tanks that were going to war, when instead she should be living her childhood, having fun and playing games with her friends. She should have been making daisy chains not tracks for tanks. We are hoping the juxtaposition of the audience making the daisy chain whilst listening to Florence talking about tanks will show them that not only men suffered in the war, it was everyone including young women.

With the teacher’s monologue we have decided to talk about her leaving the job as the money is not good enough. With this piece we have already spoken about layering different sounds on it, for example the sound of a school bell and a playground of noisy children to set the scene.

 

Chloe Downie

Development – Laura Swain

Our group this week have been gathering the research that we have already collected in order to create monologues for our piece. the monologues are from the points of view of Amy Beechey and Florence Bonnett. We have also been developing a different style of monologue for the teacher Miss Young. We are looking at combining the issues of pay and the strict rules that the female teachers had to abide by, as a reason as to why most of the teachers would leave the profession and go into munitions work. In todays session, we have recorded monologues for both Amy Beechey and Florence Bonnett.

Although having recorded the monologues and listened to them back we feel that we can develop them further by using the letters that Amy had received from her sons and for Florence to have more information about her fiance who was fighting in the war at the time. I feel that it would be interesting to have the way that the Beechey boys sign of from their letters repeated over and over again, as way to represent the loss of all the men in Lincoln and by extension all the british soldiers. This relates back to an exercise that we did in class where a simple, polite action was repeated over and over again to the point where this endearing act almost become an act of torture and made me as an audience member feel uncomfortable. We do not want to make out audience feel uncomfortable, however, the act of signing off the letters was a form of love and comfort to the mothers and loved ones that were receiving them, to then repeat that act multiple times would be our way of creating an echo of the past and turning that act into a final farewell from the boys.

Next week we are planning to go to the Lincoln Archives and find the letters from the Beechey boys and use them to develop the monologues. We are also planning to look for any accounts of the working women from that time and to look for as much information as possible.

The Coffee Shop.

We have decided to change the location of our performance. It seems logical to change it to Stokes coffee shop as we wanted to end the performance there. With the building work that is going to happen at the lawn we were unsure where we was going to be able to go which would affect the performance. Changing the location did not drastically changed the script a few adjustments were made and it still gave the effect we wanted if not a better affect.

The coffee shop has changed our piece and made it more interesting and the whole group has become more excited about it. Now we have a final idea what we are doing we have finalised our script and started to record our main parts. I felt that the recording i have done went really well. I made sure that i slowed down when speaking and articulated. Listening back I was pleased with the end result.

Memory – Laura Swain

Recently I have been thinking about the concept of memory and how reliable memories are. I have been thinking this more recently because I know that most of our work is based on the reliability of other people’s memories. The accounts of Florence Bonnett and other accounts of the goings on at the time are all based on memories. How much is fact, fiction and how has time distorted those memories. I tried to perform a mini experiment on my own memory. I decided to draw the city of Lincoln from memory, specifically the town centre, which should be the first picture below. The first picture is missing a lot of the cathedral, I have also in my memory added elements of the town which are not there.

.lincoln 1

In the second picture I had looked at an image of Lincoln and then proceeded to sketch what I had just seen, this demonstrates the difference of how time delays effect the memory,the shorter the time the better the memory. However, if the memory is a personal one there is a stronger connection to that image and therefore the time becomes secondary to the emotions of that memory.

lincoln 2

A study on the effects of time delays and the role of emotion in relation to memory stated that “memory for emotionally arousing information will be persistent over time, whereas memory for neutral information will decline over time.” (Wang, 2014, p1) so the stronger the emotional link the memory the more likely you are to recall the event and its details. The accounts that we will be using I our piece will have had strong emotional links to the women at the time because of the environment and the situation they were having to live in a the time. Particularly the Beechey accounts of the war will have strong emotional times and will therefore be more reliable than, for example, the accounts given from a secondary source.

  • Wang B (2014) Effect of Time Delay on Recognition Memory for Pictures: The Modulatory Role of Emotion. PLoS ONE 9(6): e100238. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0100238