Site Specific

Title	Benumb / Living Gallery	Reference/ Version
Department	Theatre	Date of Assessment	14.2.17
Location	By Staff Toilets @ The Brit School	Next Assessment Due
Assessor Name		Job Title

Hazard	Injury	Who at Risk	Existing Control Measures	Risk Score			Further Control Measures Needed	Action
				Severity	Likelihood	Risk Rating  (S x L)		By Whom	Due Date
Laptop Charger	Trip and fall, perhaps hit their head on sides	Audience and Actors	Tucked away as much as possible	2	2	4	Made a sign saying ‘Caution, tripping hazard’ and put it somewhere visible for all
Sharp corners of printer	Could hit head	Audience and Actors	Try and limit any tripping hazards	4/5	1	5	Make some signs.
Getting into the bin	Fall from a high surface	Actors	Make sure there is a chair to stand on when getting in the bin, someone there to assist and then move the chair and then insure the bin is padded so no injuries occur in the bin	2	1	2	Make sure there is enough support around to catch you if you fall.
Bin lid	When opening hitting our heads or even the audience if they are too close	Actors and maybe audience	Will be bubble wrapped so if does occur no one will get too hurt because of a softer material.	2	1	2	Make sure audience are a good distance away from the bin and that when we close the lid we do it slowly.
Jumping out on people	Could cause someone a heart attack or to fall over from fear	Audience	Insure we are checking who it is we are frightening, judging on appearance and physicality depends on the degree of fear you experience.	5	1	5	Also, if they do fall down the bubble wrap is on the floor so shouldn’t hurt self too much
Fire	Burns, death	Audience and Actors	Fire exit not blocked, right next to the bin so easy and quick access if needed- pathway clear so nice and easy	5	1	5
Inside the bin	Overheating, dehydration	Actors	Insure water is inside bin with actor, make sure when come out of bin when performing you get enough air	1	1	1
Bubblewrap	Slip or trip on it	Audience	Insure well stuck to floor, shoes are worn and no running.	2	1	2

 

Severity			Likelihood			Risk
Severity = Level of potential harm			Likelihood = Chance of harm			Severity x Likelihood = Risk
1	No action, delay only		1	Very Unlikely		1 - 6	Acceptable
2	Minor injury - 1st aid only, minor damage		2	Unlikely		8 – 10	Tolerable if strictly monitored, but try to improve
3	Injury, illness – time off work, damage		3	Fairly Likely
4	Major injury, disabling illness, major damage		4	Likely		12 - 25	Unacceptable, further controls are mandatory
5	Fatality		5	Very Likely - Imminent

		Severity
		1 Delay Only	2 Minor Injury	3 Injury or Illness	4 Major Injury	5 Fatality
Likelihood	1 Very Unlikely	1	2	3	4	5
	2 Unlikely	2	4	6	8	10
	3 Fairly Likely	3	6	9	12	15
	4 Likely	4	8	12	16	20
	5 Very Likely	5	10	15	20	25

TATE MODERN

When I saw this artwork I took it as someone who has a normal working office day job and its showing their mind. To me it is showing how the constant pressure of life has changed them completely and they have become a prisoner in their own body.

Its showing how your mind is so powerful that it can blur out the old you and bring forward only the demons in your life. If someone has a job which they hate and are day in day out depressed about going to work than it will have a massive effect of your brain,

When I saw this drawing I was really intrigued by it. It made me really think about what it was trying to say. I took that as humans we have become so desensitized to things happening in the world that we stop caring even though what we are watching on T.V is horrible things happening to humans. Because we feel safe in our environment the horrific news we see is going in one ear and out the other.

From this I took that as we go on in life the energy and creativity which is inside us from birth, slowly drains away as we get older. I also saw it as our "brain juice" which keeps us healthy humans, and when you become ill the brain juice starts to disappear.

The art also reminded me of people who are so mean or are always negative and the more time you spend with them the more they sip away your positivity.







REHEARSAL 1

Me and Callum partnered together, we decided to use the image of the man with a carrot through his head. We liked this artwork in particular because we thought it said a lot in a weird way which interested us both. Our first idea was to hurt each other with fruit and veg because we believe that in society we are always told things that we should do or look like because they are good for us, where is in reality they are actually killing us.

However in lesson one day we watched a video about this experiment where scientists asked these people to electrocute someone who was to their belief behind a screen. The scientists then asked the person to keep turning up the voltage. It was all fake but the person in control didn't know that, and all of them kept increasing the voltage because someone who they saw as trusting told them too. This got me and Callum thinking and we decided to change our whole idea. This experiment made us think how in society people are completely desensitized to other peoples pain. This idea of desensitization really clicked with us and we adapted our piece to show this idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DxSKTSoA_E

We had to think about these questions in preparing our devised duet:

What comment am I making??

What question/s am I asking?

What am I trying to make the audience think/feel?

Benumb

Francesca Stone and Callum Moloney-Joyce

Due to things like social media and the news, ordinary people are exposed to horrific real-life content every day. Knowing and exposing us to the brutal truth should spark a want within us to make a change to the world we live in. However- society has made us desensitised to other people’s suffering, the fact social media allows people to have so much freedom, explicit content is never hard to access or accidentally come across. You might retweet a declaration of acceptance or change, but how many of us actually follow through with this declaration and make the change? Despite the retweets or facebook likes, you return to your safe, warm homes without giving it so much as a second thought. We have become emotionally immune to the brutality in the world, it’s accepted and expected as a ‘norm of today’. The art of empathy is becoming extinct, superficial. Our piece looks at this desensitisation, and how we, as a society, are becoming benumb.

Our final idea

So our final idea is to have the audience experience different emotions in a very short period. The first emotion is pleasure, as they walk along a corridor of bubble wrap. Than they come to a screen of a horrible video showing real life footage of things that our happening in our world. The video goes from animal testing to terrorist attacks. We want the audience to feel shocked and disgusted by the things they are seeing, not by what is shown but in themselves. Everything they are seeing is happening in our world and they are turning a blind eye. Than the final emotion is fear, as me and Callum are in a bin behind the screen and at the end of the video we jump out at them. We wanted to do this to shock them into waking up and getting out of their safe place and looking at the real issues right in front of them. However we tried it out on Ben and he honestly nearly died from a heart attack, so we decided we wont scream at them when we jump out but instead will just jump out. Or even have just our heads or our arms jump out.

Evaluation

From the beginning me and Callum were really excited about our idea. Hopefully so of looked at our piece you would of been able to see that passion we had for it. One thing I noticed which people loved was our decoration, we literally put bubble wrap everywhere, the floor was covered and when walked on made you feel so satisfied by the feeling of popping the bubbles. This is the effect we wanted, and we definitely achieved this as even though me and Callum were in a bin we could still hear the sounds everyone was making, and they seemed to love the bubble wrap! 

We weren't sure how the video was going to go down, we knew how horrific it was by showing other people and getting their reactions. When we did jump out people were generally terrified and this is because of how engrossed they were in the video. We were really vary of timings, and trying to make sure people had watched enough of the video before we jumped.

Our idea of jumping and screaming kept getting more reduced, but not in a bad way. We realised how the scream took away from the message we were trying to highlight. So in the end, we may of only used are arms to jump up and lift the bin lid, or even our heads. Sometimes we just made crying noises, and I think from keeping the movements smaller, made the piece more effective.

We didn't actually do a lot of acting/performing in our piece. The main part of ours was the ability to make people feel comfortable and than very uncomfortable in only a matter of seconds. And in creating this juxtaposition, we used objects such as ; bubble wrap and a video. So if we were to do it again, I'd try and think of ways in which we could perform more and create the same effect. 

Overall I am proud of our piece it did everything we wanted it to do, people seemed to be really effected by it. After talking to people but also hearing their reactions, I could tell they were made to think. And that really was our main goal, to make people think about issues they normally want to pretend aren't real.  The journey we took them on, from the bubble wrap to the scare linked so well together. If we were to do it again I would want to enhance the effects that we made them feel by 100, to create an even bigger reaction.