Devising a 12-Minute Festival Piece With Nine Learners and Six Rehearsals
A combined school in Rundu enters the regional drama festival. Nine Grade 11 learners have three weeks - six after-school rehearsals of two hours plus one Saturday - to devise an original 12-minute piece on the theme 'Water is Life'. Constraints: two learners live 18 km out of town and cannot attend Saturdays; Frieda is on crutches for the whole term after a road accident; Petrus is the strongest mover in the class but freezes when asked to speak; the school provides no budget, only four black curtains, a CD player and the hall when it is free. At the first rehearsal the group wants to copy a viral dance routine from a phone video, and by minute 40 they are arguing about who should lead. Nobody has written anything down.
1. Produce a rehearsal plan that spends the 13 available hours, saying what each block achieves and why it comes in that order.
Read the worked answer
Devising needs structure before content; the plan protects the group from the trap they are already in (arguing about 'who leads' before there is material).
| Block | Time | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| R1 | 2 h | Rules of play, theme brainstorm, three 5-minute improvised 'images of water' (drought, flood, fetching water), written down by a scribe. No decisions yet. |
| R2 | 2 h | Select 4 images the group actually enjoys; improvisation around each; capture phrases on paper/video. |
| R3 | 2 h | Shape: choose a spine (e.g. one day in a village: before, during, after the rain); decide order and rough timings. |
| Saturday | 4 h | Set movement, staging, sound; solve Frieda's staging; first run-through. |
| R4 | 2 h | Polish and cut - devising always overruns, so this block exists to remove 2 minutes. |
| R5 | 1 h | Full run with sound, notes, contingency (power cut) plan. |
| R6 | 1 h (or 2 h if available) | Dress run and final notes. |
Two learners absent on Saturday means Saturday cannot be the day you invent material - it is a setting and assembly day. Nothing is set until R3, and every rehearsal ends with five minutes of written notes so the piece does not depend on memory. Argue this to the group: copying the viral routine gives you 30 seconds of borrowed choreography and no ownership; devising gives you 12 minutes that only this class can perform.
2. Explain how the group should convert an improvisation into repeatable movement material, using three named devices with an example from the 'fetching water' image.
Read the worked answer
An improvisation is raw material, not a performance. The process is: capture → name → repeat → vary → fix.
- Capture and name. After the improvisation, the group replays it and identifies one short phrase - say, four counts: reach down, lift, brace on the hip, step. Give it a label ('Bucket'). A named phrase can be called out in rehearsal; an unnamed one is lost.
- Motif development devices.
- Change of level or tempo: the same four counts performed in slow motion, or on the floor, reads as exhaustion - useful for the drought section.
- Canon: three learners perform 'Bucket' two counts apart, creating a line at the water point.
- Retrograde or inversion: the phrase backwards becomes a pouring/staggering action for the flood section.
- (Also useful: fragmentation - use only the lift and brace.)
- Set it in writing. Record counts, formations and who does what on paper; film on a phone if allowed. Set material must survive an absent member.
- Fix only what survives repetition. If a phrase cannot be repeated three times in a row by everyone, it is not ready to be set - simplify it.
Example outcome: 'Bucket' in canon, slowed, then retrograde gives you roughly 40 seconds of the piece from one improvisation, with three distinct moods. This is how nine learners get 12 minutes without inventing 12 minutes of new movement.
3. How would you stage Frieda and Petrus so the piece is not 'about' their limitations, and what would you refuse to do?
Read the worked answer
Frieda (crutches). Do not hide her at the back or build the piece around 'a girl who cannot walk'. Two better options: (a) use the crutches as a property - a rhythm instrument, a scoop, a yoke across the shoulders of two other performers - so they become part of the stage vocabulary; (b) give her the still, weight-bearing moments the piece needs (the figure waiting at the water point while others move around her, the one who speaks the closing line) and stage travelling sections in a tight arc so she is never chasing the group across the hall. If she wants to move, a low bench, a wheeled chair or a hand-held frame may be available; ask her, do not decide for her.
Petrus (mover, non-speaker). Give him movement responsibility: he leads the warm-up, he is the group's movement captain, and his character communicates in gesture while another character speaks to him. Silence becomes characterisation, not a gap. Do not force a solo speaking line 'to build confidence' in a festival week - that is your need, not his.
What I would refuse: any staging that makes disability the joke or the moral; any costume or prop that implies Frieda is a patient; and any solution arrived at without asking both learners privately first. The test is whether an audience member who knows nothing about the class can read the piece without reading their bodies as a problem.