Contemporary Theatre 2

                                                       Contemporary Theatre
In this lesson we were given a new member to the group, Montana we explained to her the moral of the story that we are doing for a play and showed her one of the scenes we had done. We all then thought of what we could do for our next scene and make it abstract because we didn’t want it to look GCSE we wanted to show the story through our bodies. So we started with the opening scene, we wanted to sum up a part of the start from the line “I rode on the bulldozer as it repaired the road throughout the day” up to the line “I don’t know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank- shell holes in their walls” but we didn’t add speech we only added in movement because Miss. Day wants us to layer our pieces so we understand each key element to put together a scene which is important to do so we value each element in our pieces for the play which will become more in depth and well thought through, so we all stood together and said ideas of what we could do for the scene and how to make it abstract, we started it off with me and Montana standing doing a sequence with our arms to show that we are protesting, because me and her are playing activist and I’m playing Rachel. Whilst we are protesting Chris, John Luca, Emmy and Shaine who are playing soldiers are driving by and watching us, they stop and get out of the car march in a straight line in front of us and shoot us they stamp their feet they stand up shrug and March away. We originally had them shooting with fake guns with their hands but Miss. Day said what would happen if we took that away, instantly it becomes more abstract so instead they just stamped there feet symbolising gun shots, we really wanted the stamping to be loud and deep because we want to shock or try and scare our audience to the reality of what a gunshot may sound like or how it might feel hearing a gun shot, whilst this is happening me and Montana are falling down in a slow, fast dynamic movement and showing facial expressions in slow motion after being “shot at” I’m hugging Montana’s lifeless body on the flow and the scene moves to the part of me putting Montana’s dead body under a blanket which is when it then turns into a child sleeping in bed I’m tucking her in when all of a sudden there are banging noises in the background symbolising the shots fired from a tank, I’m reacting badly to it worried for the child’s safety, whilst Montana (the child) is thinking what is she doing why is she acting like this. At the end of it I try and comfort Montana when she shrugs it of as if whatever, which is our groups message from this play that the war has made people become used to tragedy like it’s a shrug of the shoulder for them because they get tragedy everyday which is mentioned in the play.
This lesson I think it was very productive, we had a lot of creative ideas from everyone which is going to be useful for the other scenes and hopefully make this play more abstract and different so it has an effect on our audience. Next lesson we are highlighting our lines and officially casting people with characters.