It all came down to the highest number of votes. Shutter, Filter and Distracted Monkey had all lost their vote and the one that was left was Refract. To refract is “to deflect the course of (light rays), esp. when they enter the medium” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2015), our idea was to use famous images and shine a new light through them to create something that is not always noticed. The name just seemed to fit, thus Refract was born.
The first five weeks are what I would call the experimental devising process, nothing ever works if you just sit, talk and discuss ideas, so we cracked on with it straight away. Using images as stimulus allowed us as a group to create stories, write scripts, make movement and just go crazy with the different impulses that we were having. We also experimented with recorded and live music to create different tones and locations to the scenes we had created.
One image we used to create a scene was the ‘Jumpers Holding Hands’ which was taken at the scene of 9/11.
At first we decided to create a back story to the people in the image, we knew it was actually taken during the events of 9/11 but we decided to think of a different story, One example was of an old lady going on her first ever cruise without her husband but allowing the memory of him to remain with her during her trip.
In another rehearsal with this image we decided to just use movement. Our fantastic choreographer, Tom Hitchen, added music and created a routine which represented the events of 9/11 and the image of someones decision of whether to end their life by jumping off a building, We kept these short and snappy because the whole idea was to create something that an audience member would recognise in a split second and would link it back to the known event.
Using the same technique when devising we carried on to represent images such as the Banksy Balloon and the Atomic Bomb, creating more small scenes to show at our first work in progress.
Chamberlain, Y (2015)
Crowe, P (2015)
Jumpers Holding Hands (2001) Available from: http://moblog.whmsoft.net/related_search.php?keyword=9%2011%20jumpers%20bodies%20pics [Assessed: 10 March 2015]
Oxford English Dictionary (2015) Refract. [online] Oxford: Oxford English Dictionary. Available From: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/161028?redirectedFrom=refract#eid [Assessed: 10 March 2015]