As Performance Studies Cross Arts Project

As Performance Studies Cross Arts Project

In small groups we were given a choice of stimuli such as poems,

pictures and ideas. Our group chose the idea of ‘chaos and order’ as

our stimulus because we thought that there would be many ideas to

develop from this. We spent a lot of time discussing the idea of

‘order and chaos’ - they are opposites - there is never a situation

where both occur at the same time yet you cannot have one without the

other. Order is the way most people would like things to be, to keep

order we use laws and rules so that everything should stay in control,

without which there would be chaos. Chaos can be shown in many

different ways such as riots or personal chaos e.g. a mental

breakdown. There is no order in this kind of situation, if there were

to be it would no longer be a riot but a march. We began by drawing

out a spider diagram with the ideas we brainstormed about ‘order and

chaos’.

Using these ideas we decided to base our piece on Obsessive Compulsive

Disorder (OCD) as it seem to express the idea of someone keeping order

so much, to the point where their life becomes chaotic. In order for

us to meet the criteria of this project we decided that we needed to

research OCD so that we could base this piece on factual information.

Our group gained a lot of useful information from the Internet and

books. Fears, worries suspicions and beliefs come into everyday life

but when these doubts start to emerge much more excessively e.g.

spending hours washing clean hands or driving round and round making

sure no road accidents have occurred, these worries start becoming

classed as obsessive compulsive. A lot of people who have been

diagnosed with this disorder can only describe it as mental hiccups,

which cannot be controlled. The cause of OCD is a medical brain

turmoil in which people have trouble processing certain information.

It is also caused by a ‘weak’ or unstable personality. Usually people

with OCD will suffer with certain obsessions as well as compulsions,

but in some cases they may only suffer with one or the other. One of

our group members new someone who suffered with this disorder quite

badly. They had observed this person from the beginning before being

diagnosed with OCD. As a group we decided that we could use this

person as a basis for our piece. This meant that we had some first

hand information on the disorder so we could give our piece some