Throughout the creation of our devised piece, my group and I faced many challenges, however, we eventually overcame those and as a product, produced a piece that we are all very proud of. At the beginning of the process we had a hard time coming up with ideas of stories that we could tell. The stimuli of ‘memories’ is so broad and so there was a lot we could work off of. We brainstormed ideas and eventually decided on a story about an old woman named Daisy who has Alzheimer’s and reflects on the important memories in her life that she can remember. The process of developing a story that made sense and creating complex characters took a few classes and a meeting outside of class time. We had many moments in these sessions where we would hit a creative block and not be able to create any ideas for blocking and this frustrated us a lot. We experimented with props like a chair and mirrors but they just didn’t fit or help us develop our piece. Later, I suggested we use a frame and after experimenting with it’s uses, we were able to apply it to many scenes that we were thinking of using and ended up using it in our final product. I think the important take away from the whole developing stage was the importance of trial and error and being able to have perseverance when things don’t go the way you expect. Something I think our group did well was being able to transform our story and message into a performance and relay that to our audience. I think that the rapport we had with the audience was really powerful and I feel like we did the piece justice by performing it the way we did. Alzheimer’s affects many people all over the world and we wanted to make sure that our portrayal of what it’s like to have it and how it affects the people around them to be authentic and sensitive. I feel like I have a new found respect for Alzheimer patients as well as the people related to them as they need to have such courage and patience to deal with what they do. In terms of the performance and the process, I think our group did a great job at respecting one another’s ideas and compromising where needed. This proved to be effective and better in the long run as everyone was content with the final product. I also think we wouldn’t have been as successful as we were if we all hadn’t been so passionate about our story. Everyone’s willingness to contribute and work hard towards creating the piece made it easy to collaborate and overall made the experience more fun and worthwhile. I have grown quite attached to our story and characters; it will be hard to say goodbye. It was such a pleasure to work with my group (Natasha, Quentin, Ali and Mergen). I think we all worked well together. Overall I am very proud of our performance and have learned a lot from the experience.

Here is the link to our performance and some photos: