Until yesterday a lot of our meetings have involved discussions about our ideas, but very little practical devising. One of the first decisions we made in our devising process was that we were going to use various forms of text, such as speeches, monologues, lyrics and poems and re-contextualise them. Our first task therefore was to individually seek out texts that we could use as stimuli in our workshops.

Unsurprisingly a lot of the texts that we bought in had linking themes. Ideas such as power, beauty, and dreams came up a number of times, and when analysed outside of their original context, a lot of these texts had underlying themes of feminism, though only a few of us had actively sought to bring that topic in for discussion.

Though we have work shopped one other idea before, based on Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, the result of that session was a scene that we do not see ourselves using in our performance, though some of the elements of it may find there way into the final piece at some point.

The result of Fridays session however, was much more promising. The workshop involved us playing with one of Marilyn Monroe’s speeches about natural beauty. We have been playing with the idea of adding a multi-media element to this particular scene, while exploring a feministic take on the opinion Marilyn was expressing on beauty and sexuality in society. While I do not want to divulge too much information on the scene itself so as not to give too much away before the performance, I am excited to say that that workshop has set the ball rolling for what we hope will be a very exciting piece of work.

Image taken by Lizzy Hayes, 2014