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Risk Assessment - 

Hazard	Involved	Likelihood	Severity	Control Measures in place
Trips and falls	Cast: 12 Audience: 15+	Even	Mild	Audience will be given a briefing before the performance by staff and a teacher, cast will also mention it throughout. The cast will rehearse and be familiar with tunnels as well as having a safety talk.
Accidents on stairs	Cast: 12 Audience: 15+	Likely	Medium	Audience will be given a briefing before the performance by staff, cast will also mention the steep stairs before going up them.
Items falling from a height	Cast: 12 Audience: 15+	Unlikely	Medium	No items up high, not attaching anything into the falls that could fall.
Fire	Cast: 12 Audience: 15+	Unlikely	Severe	No open flames used during the performance.
Light sensitive reaction (epileptic seizure)	Cast: 12 Audience: 15+	Possible	Medium	Strobe lighting only used at one point in the play and kept down to 10 seconds.
Health problems (cast scaring audience)	Cast: 12 Audience: 15+	Unlikely	Medium-severe	None of the cast are jumping out from inside the tunnels; there will be no hiding of the cast.

Site Specific

Over the past couple of lessons we have been finishing off scenes and rehearsing scripted scenes, just generally working on our performance.

We worked on the two movement pieces we have created, the schizophrenic scene and the one including all of the mental patients (seven devils). We have really just been going over the movements, making sure everyone knows what they are doing so that everyone is in time and it looks effective.

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Movement pieces-

Schizophrenic - In this scene we basically all act as the voices in Carl's head, so we all surround him then break off into a line where we repeat a movement sequence referring to the control and frustration inside his head. Then we pass Carl along the line making him adopt our personality with simple movement that we make him do in a puppeteer way, then we all spread out and again start a repetitive simple movement that we all follow from Carl that is all to do with his head. After this has built up Carl looks around and is overwhelmed by everything in his head and screams which is a common occurrence for his character. 

Electric chair - this scene was primarily dialogue but we decided to add some simple movement to make it more interesting. It involves four of us imitating the movements of either Kyle or the doctors and references to his not being able or wanting to speak.

Seven Devils - this is the movement piece that we started devising when we initally had the mental patient idea. All of us are sitting around the room on chairs, when the singing on the track starts we come to life and have 8 jagged movements reaching out to the audience. We then do some simple movement like turning and banging our chairs in unison, then we move around onto different chairs. For inspiration for part of the movement I watched some music videos which featured some contemporary steps which is where I got the idea for the reaching section which we repeated. Here is the video of seven devils.

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Today we set the final order for our scenes and worked out what we were going to do where in the tunnels. We created a kind of flow chart of what we are going to do which was quite difficult at the start cause we were not sure how much space there was at each point but as group we worked out what we thought would work best at each point as we worked our way through the tunnels.

We worked a bit more on the story line, making sure to tie the psychiatrist in. Our piece is going to be set in the 1960's and we know that a nearby hospital would have been All Saints hospital in Chatham, so he is going to be visiting us to complete some research for his PHD.

Again we worked on developing the doctor idea and decided that we would have them at the end revealing somehow that they were all in fact mental patients and they were just role playing. To bring it all together we are going to have hints throughout the piece about how the doctor and nurse are not real and are in fact as dangerous as the patients themselves. Here is a pictures of the running order and plan we have created.

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Character development :

My character is quite a messed up person. You would think she is quite innocent and simple because of the way she speaks and her childish mannerisms but the reason she is stuck at her age is because she killed both of her parents at the age of 6. I think she has some kind of psychiatric trauma but also wants to stay a child by choice, she has been acting like one for so long it is what comes naturally to her.

She always carries her teddy bear around, which is naturally blood red and wearing a night dress similar to hers to add to her creepiness. This is the teddy she was playing with on the night she killed her parents. Being childlike she is very simple and only wants to play a game, which ties in with the underlying theme throughout the piece, are the doctors real or not?

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Today we started discussing our previous idea of the mental institute. We thought of a way to develop a story line, as this was the problem we had initially with the idea, and came up with having a psychiatrist shown around the place by a doctor and nurse who are not actual professionals.

We printed out two of the pictures we had and started devising in two groups. We based our scene on the introduction of my character who is a 20 year old girl that is stuck at the age of six because something traumatic happened to her at that age. In our picture there was a gate so we decided to have Carl, who is playing a schizophrenic, shut the gate while the audience is inside. We tried to create a creepy and slightly jumpy piece but also working on the characters of the mental patients.

The other group created a scene all about a patient who thought he was the second coming of christ which worked very well as their picture was of an area which looked much like a church. There are other patients present praying, and Tom (Jesus) is performing a ceremony and proceeds to get very angry when he is interrupted.

To develop the piece further we were trying to think of what kind of treatments they may have had, like the electric chair. We thought this would make quite a good scene and would work with Kyle's character who is silent, as it is a form of therapy to try and reforge connections in the b rain, which could trigger speech in his case.

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Today we went on a tour of Fort Amherst, it has given us a lot of inspiration and finally helped us to start imagining our actual performance. The tunnels create a quite creepy atmosphere, they are quite narrow at points and also steep which I think will be interesting to perform in, but there is a good variety of locations within the tunnels which will inspire us for different scenes within out piece.

Some of the tunnels become quite small so we will have to think carefully about our audience and if they will be able to fit and also be able to see what we are actually doing in the space. It is also quite a complicated network of tunnels so we will have to plan carefully where we are walking with the map we have gotten, and then rehearse lots on the day.

We found out that there are 5 other forts like this in medway, one of which was used as a mental asylum after the war which has re-sparked my favorite idea which was about mental patients. I think it would very well, the mental patients have all been drawn there by something and are all living within the fort, isolated from the rest of the population.

Here are some pictures that we took while on our tour of the fort. I think it is a great performance space as it is completely different to a stage or traditional place of performance and will be very interesting to perform in, as well as giving us lots of inspiration from the set up and shape of the actual place.