Physical Session - Competiton and Office Sequences

As established from early on in this process the play exists in two parts; The Physical world and Scripted world. From now on we will be using our Tuesdays as purely physical theatre sessions to make sure the sequences are a polished as they can be. I believe this was a good call as when we focus we can get a lot done in a quick 2 hour session especially when we have a clear goal to achieve. As a company we do have trouble with maintaining disciplined for extended periods of time. The way we have figured out how to combat this is through turning things into competitions!

We started this session off with a plank off. The rules were simple, whoever could hold a plank for the longest would win. I however unfortunately did not last very long (I would blame injury but I'm not the type of person for excuses). When we got out we split off and cheered for whomever we wanted to. This brought about a pack mentality where we would all bound together and give support or alternatively demoralise  a person. When this got to the top two it became very heated. The competitive element really brought something out in us. It was very primal and aggressive; we almost went as far as bullying the opposing side. We need to be able to bottle this hyper-competitve atmosphere and use it to make the world of the play. Especially in the first half of the play the audience need to feel like they are "on the winning side" and go along with us. It was more simple than we thought to feel like a winner just by being around someone who was doing something successfully. Enron will only really work if the audiences feel like we are the winners.

To emulate this competitive mood we found we split off into 3 groups to devise a physical sequence for the office scene and then Ben would chose the winner. My group used a mixture of duet work, soundscape and motif movement. We even had a movement of "watching the sunset" to show the passage of time during our sequence and too juxtapose the bustling fast pace of the rest of the action. Sounds like the recipe to success? No. We placed a measly second place. So the competition had worked. All 3 groups worked really hard and produced very strong work and we had fun whilst doing it. The group that did win had a very unique approach of building the business slowly and having elements of calm within their piece. This will work well in the final product because it shows a very interesting arch and the narrative carries through within in the movement. Although if I was to critique it could take some elements from the other pieces such as the throwing the phones back and forth or the sunset moment in our piece. That way we have a strong narrative and cool tricks to make a fully fleshed out physical sequence.