We thought an interesting way to develop mine and Ryan’s characters at the same time would be to show them having sex on the stage.  We tried it as my original character of Annalisa being forced to have sex by Ryan’s character Paul. But it didn’t make sense that she was there with him having walked out of the dinner and added a much darker side to Paul that there was no evidence of in the script. Instead we decided that I could be more of a groupie and go there to have sex with him willingly but be cast off by Paul afterwards. This develops Paul and shows how he is falling into this band life of sex and drugs by having sex with and then kicking out all these girls that come to see him.

This scene was difficult for me. It was hard to work out how to realistically have sex on the stage, as obviously that is a very personal thing to do in front of your peers. I was forced to almost remove myself from that and think about it as a series of movements that looked realistic, rather than thinking about it as embarrassing or personal. Ryan and I worked really well together, using Edward and Charlotte as the audience and thinking about it almost clinically; how could we make the audience think that we were genuinely having sex on the stage. This meant some positions were better than others, what could I wear that would cover Ryan’s crotch to make it realistic, would we be making noise in this situation. We decided we wanted this whole movement scene to be an assault on the audience. We want to make them uncomfortable with really loud music, strong strobes and aggressive sex happening right in front of them. Because the song we chose is a punk- rock vibe we wanted it to be really loud which would make the audience uncomfortable, add the strobes and its an assault on all the senses for them. We realised that we wanted some noise for the sex but we would have to be nearly screaming for the audience to hear us over the music. So we searched for a porn track that had the noises we wanted then played that alongside the music. The nature of the track makes the audience uncomfortable and the volume adds to that.