A welcome return to Sam as our guest blogger
I see having an English Language exam tomorrow the perfect
excuse to write a blog: obviously, it counts as revision, so no harm done. Moreover,
alongside this, Sapphire Company this week was full of plenty of things to
write about and our creative task differed from our usual offering so it would
simply be a crime not to seize this opportunity.
Refreshingly, after I had taken two weeks off due to GCSE
woes, our first game this week was Coconuts. It’s one of those games where things
don’t just get easy with time. Sarah was telling us about how new groups of
people can find it difficult, yet to become used to the format of the game,
leading to a slower pace. With experience, Coconuts is one of those games that
just speeds up, maintaining the mental challenge and keeping your heart rate
going. Taking it for granted most
weeks, I felt this was something notable to take away because I suppose it is
nice to see how challenges can still present themselves even when you have
travelled a long way – it is still important to recognise this journey.
Our creative task today differed from the usual kind of
fare. Rather than a small piece of theatre (though we still included bits and
pieces), our brief today was to pitch an idea for the upcoming performance at
Ossett Gala. An interesting format, we
worked in groups to come up with our plan before presenting it to the
company which in many ways altered our approach: we spoke directly to the
Company, giving explanations of our ideas which gave us a way to share our
thought processes; our ideas didn’t need to be polished and complete as the
plan was to get a general overview of what would be a much longer piece.
In order to generate enough content – producing the story for what will be a 10 minute performance - how we worked together to generate ideas became very important this week. A difficultly that we faced was when ideas that were suggested became lost and weren’t utilised. It became apparent that at the start of a creative process like this, no ideas were too silly and, to use the popular phrase, bouncing them off one another helped to build them into solid foundations to produce the final piece. Using a “yes and,” mentality rather than the “no but,” fatality, we were able to bring substance to our pitch.
In order to generate enough content – producing the story for what will be a 10 minute performance - how we worked together to generate ideas became very important this week. A difficultly that we faced was when ideas that were suggested became lost and weren’t utilised. It became apparent that at the start of a creative process like this, no ideas were too silly and, to use the popular phrase, bouncing them off one another helped to build them into solid foundations to produce the final piece. Using a “yes and,” mentality rather than the “no but,” fatality, we were able to bring substance to our pitch.
Considering the breadth of our task, it is not surprising –
though still pleasing – that we were presented with such a vast array of ideas.
Unfortunately, this does mean that not all of them work together and can be
used in the final performance, but ideas from all of them were relevant and
useful. One of my favourite things
about Sapphire company is perhaps our originality and tonight we saw plans for
both a silent movie and a thoughtful presentation of our lives running in
parallel to the seasons. For this reason, I look forward to next week when we
can begin to work on bringing our performance into fruition.
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