Devising Review - Asylum

Tina’s
In Tina’s scene, we tried to show the audience Tina’s child-ish personality but also how she
is sometimes controlled by her imaginary friend, Dirt. I think we did a pretty good job at
conveying all of these ideas to audience, especially with the change of facial expression and
body language after Dirt has taken over. Everyone was happy and cheerful while running
around and playing. Then suddenly, Dirt came in all of us were all so frightened and too
frozen to run away from him. Also, the fact that Tina and her other imaginary friend, Sky,
was position in the middle of the stage only shows how helpless she was. She stuck there
while Dirt was roaming free and causing all sorts of havoc. The reason why we chose to do it
this way was because we wanted some diversity throughout the whole performance. The
others were already quite somber and dark so we need something more active and wild to
wake the audience up. I was part of the group who were running around playing and
afterwards, being killed by Dirt. My job was basically to run around and played then when
Dirt is in power, act scared and let him touch me so I can freeze. Then when Dirt finished
freezing everyone, he clapped his hands and everyone collapsed. When doing this job, I
tried to stay focus on the fact that I’m a kid and I’m supposed to be like one. Also, I paid
close attention to the distribution of the ensemble and I ran to the area where there weren’t
many people to fill the space. For a good performance, you must make the audience believe
in what is happening or else the show is no more. In my opinion, the only thing that needs
improvements would be the distribution of the ensemble because as I mentioned earlier,
there were lots of people in one area and barely in the other. Next time, I think each person
should be assigned a series of position and at the end an exact spot where they should be
frozen and then collapse.
Luke’s
In Luke’s scene, the ensemble demonstrating how Luke’s mind, a person who finds
everything funny, would be like. I particularly like this one since it created this sense of
mystery among the audience. There was no actual plot, we just sat there and laughed out
loud as Luke tried to tell us something apparently very ‘important’. It really confused the
audience and they really had to think and try to guess the plot but there’s just no plot to
guess. Furthermore, in this scene, we’ve added this break in the middle where all of us just
stopped laughing. The audience were expecting something spectacular like a plot twist or
something but afterwards, we just continued laughing again. The reason we chose to
perform Luke’s scene in this way was because we wanted to add something surreal and
abstract in contrast of the other’s naturalistic nature. If we keep doing the same thing then
the audience would get bored so by doing this we’ve successfully got them intrigued again.
In this scene, I was part of the people who was laughing. I laughed like I’ve never laughed
before. I was lying down and rolling around and clapping my hands and choking on my own
breath unintentionally and all sorts of stuff. While doing this, I just paid really close attention
to the timing where we were supposed to push it up a notch, then another, then another,
then the max and then the break because you wouldn’t want one part to go too long or
pushing the notch too quickly. I really wanted to make them react the way they would
actually react if they ever meet a person as crazy as Luke. Even though this is surrealism,
the way the audience react must be natural. All I wanted for this scene was for Luke to kill at
least 3 people before all of us stopped laughing because he’s crazy and he finds everything
funny. So why would a simple murder stop him from laughing? He should be laughing even
harder and Luke should get enraged by that, killing more people and in result turned into a
beast or some sort. That’s the point where Luke’s ‘normal sub-conscious’ kicks in and tells
him to stop laughing.