Overall i believe the show was successful. We managed to pull all of our ideas together and create a piece of work that was able to connect with the patients and able to communicate our experience of the project. The most successful part for me was the tap dance sequence, this is because i think the text combined with the dance gave this moment a rhythm and a beat that made the text come alive. Having a combination of text inspired by the places visited by the patients then also communicated through movement allowed the audience to be taken to those places and feel the fast paced sounds of traveling like trains of walking, busses and people. I also think this was the most successful moment because we created it through improvisation and playing as we originally were going to have the poem separate to the movement, i personally believe that the best work is created through feeling something in the moment or 'creating without thinking' and this is what we did. We didn't think too deeply into the creation of this moment we just played around and let it happen and i believe thats why it really worked.
One thing i believe could have been improved was the way in which we used the patients stories. For example in some cases we would take people's stories and creatively use it like my scripted scene was using Daphne's stories as inspiration, writing a scene which i imagined may look similar to Daphne's household. I didn't put Daphne in as a character nor her actual children she had described instead i created something new, a new world that the audience could invest into. I feel like throughout the piece we switched from creatively using the information to simply reading back the information and i didn't like how the piece (for me) didn't flow. Another example of this is the cat scene, part of that moment was creative and the other part not, as creating the cat through pup petering i believe was creative however the text which was being said during that was something along the lines of 'Dawn loved cats' which is just simply saying we all already knew about Dawn instead they could have created a scene with three cats talking about there owner or got the cat to speak a poem or sing a song etc just something more creative then simply saying what she said herself.
Another success was the song at the end, i was amazing to see how just spending those days with them had brought something beautiful into there lives and equally had changed our hearts. I was overwhelmed with emotion and proud to think we shared a moment with them which they will remember until they pass. The project has defiantly changed my perception on terminal illness, i know understand more about the process of being terminally il, how that effects the family and the person and also how important it is to fund places like St.Chrisopher's.
