We also all had the oranges that we were told to bring in because 'A brain affected by the disease can weigh around 140g less than a healthy brain. That’s about the weight of an orange' (taken from: https://www.dementiablog.org/the-future-of-dementia-is-orange/ ). Because of this, we have decided to use oranges in our piece as a symbolic gesture and a wake up call to our audience members. During the lesson we were each given a post it note and told to write our dearest memory. Surprisingly I found this harder then I thought I would, actually trying to think of a memory I found really hard even though there are thousands that I have. It also allowed me to put things into retrospect because it's one thing to not be able to think of a memory at a certain moment in time, but it's another not being able to remember a memory virtually ever. After we'd written down our memories we took someone else's and improvised the other persons memory.
The memory that I tried to recreate was about someone's granddad's birthday party, he made a speech and talked about how beautiful his wife was and how he was so lucky to have her. The actual experience of reading someone else's memory was quite overwhelming especially when imagining that one day that memory could decay until it no longer exists at all. I normally find it really difficult doing improvised work, but having such a meaningful stimulus, I was able to create wok that I was proud of, really quickly. We then had to add the oranges into our improvised solos. I didn't find it difficult to incorporate the orange either, in fact it added an extra layer to my piece. For example, in one section I dropped the orange from a high level and then caught it at a lower level which acted as a transition. I also help the orange out during one section, admiring it as though it were the most beautiful and loving person that I knew before pulling it to me chest and into where my heart is located.
Rose was then introduced to us, and we had to perform our memories to her as though they were her own and we were trying to make her remember. Then, one by one, we sat by her and read her the memory from the post it note. Rose then got us and began to peel the orange,watching her do this was very sad and no one really knew what to do. Whilst she was doing this, I really wanted to do my improvisation and then leave the room because it would have looked her memories were being peeled away from her until she was left with nothing. However, I didn't do this because we were in a lesson and it would have been weird. After a while of her peeling the orange, Miss came in to the scene with some wipes and took Rose away to get cleaned up saying 'did no one else help you?'. We all of course felt extremely bad for not helping at this point and of course would of if we knew that was an option. Although, the scene turned out looking really nice and it would have been interesting to see if the scene would have benefited or not from our interference.
After lunch we created a timeline of Rose's life:
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We then chose a section of the timeline and got into groups so that we could create a physical piece to represent the part of the timeline we have. My groups section is about when she protests about the Vietnam war. We rehearse Here's a video of what we created:
Our group was really good at lifts and being able to create a quantity of work, however we need to work on quality and transitions. I was really happy with the amount of ideas put forwards, now it;'s just a case of making everything fit together well. I really likes Tara's groups memory piece because it is very syncranised and technical however looks very simple yet effective. Justine's groups piece was also amazing and their use of physicality worked well.
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