Tuesday 24th Feb- Goat and Jane scene

I found today's warm up beneficial to my characterisation work and it helped me place in the play’s hierarchy, where Lisa stands. We were asked to work with our symmetrical character, to discuss where, from 1 to 10 in the play’s hierarchy of importance, we would place our character.

Issy and I had a long discussion about our view on this. Firstly we thought about Lisa being at the top, number 10 as without her, Dissocia and the character’s within her world wouldn’t exist as the place is in her head. However we then realised without these characters, Dissocia wouldn’t exist. The citizens of Dissocia all have an effect on Lisa at one point, influencing her to act the way she does therefore, she can’t be placed at the top because she isn’t the most important throughout the play.

In conclusion to this, Issy and I decided to place Lisa right in the middle of the hierarchy at number 5 as we have found out, Lisa as a character, fluctuates in importance and status through the two acts of the play. There is common medium where we can say she is definitely at the top or bottom of the hierarchy due to the fact her status and interactions with other characters is forever changing.

The main focus of the lesson today was to block the Goat and Jane scenes. The Goat scene, especially towards the end touches on a very sensitive subject therefore we had to be mature, respectful and really put planning and thought in to how we were going to represent this to the audience.

The scene entails Lisa almost being raped by the Goat, which is intended to symbolise either experiences in her childhood or abuse she has been through with her boyfriend, Vince. Our intension was never to show any explicit content but only to suggest things will and do happen.

Today we also work on the Jane scene, which is also to do with the near sexual exploitation of Lisa. In this scene, we hear suggestively that the Goat does to Jane what he intended to do with Lisa, beat, anally rape and piss on her. We have choreographed this sequence in a sensitive way as the subject is a grey area and not to be messed around with.

The final scene we touched on today was the bear scene, coming directly after this traumatic scene. We worked specifically on the staging rather than the words being said and the song. We placed the bear in centre stage as the bear is at that moment, the most important thing in Lisa’s life. She looks to the bear for comfort and reassurance whilst going through tough times. We placed the bear in the centre to reflect importance.

Overall today we manage to block a large section of the play which we handled well considering the unpleasant content. We worked as a team to achieve the best results visually and pragmatically for the audience to watch and understand. All in all, a productive lesson.