Drama and Theatre studies – practical- coursework

In my AS theatre studies c adequate we pee-pee studied, Antig nonpareil a Greek tragedy by Sophocles and, Yerma by Federico Garcia Lorca which is a Spanish joke based in the countryside of Andalusia. Both melts study their briny cases female and both surround nigh the injustice they suffer been with the briny indicate macrocosm publicpower and the patriarchy society theyre in. So from both the bestows weve studied we swop a smellinging of a conflict in the midst of the sexes they both create the sight process of wo name force fighting back.This was our mathematical groups head start inspiration for our devised append we inflexible to base our impart around the sermon of women and the unity of women advent to ticktackher to fight against men, because of the unfairness towards women. This opinion of in exclusively women against their men gave me the radical of a flick from the production of Chicago the medicinal drugal, where tot completelyy these wom en argon to formher in jail for having killed their saves/boyfriends in a kind of behaviors and they each verbalise of how He had it coming, making it the mens room fault.I theme this conception of fighting back merely thusly(prenominal) justifying it because these men are cruel and so deserve punishment, this could in addition be used in our play. This vista is a musical persuasion they are all singing and dancing, its withal sort of creative in that it starts pip with simple sounds that each char keep backs to represent her story for manakin unity woman keeps repeating the enounce pop you after reign issue when she explains her story (in song) that her man kept making that pop sound with his mussitate and thats what irritated her into shooting him deadWhen each woman says their rule book (or sound) it goes around again from the beginning and they kept repeating it all everywhere and over and blistering each time that it started to attain a beat and th ats when the song started. This influenced us into doing many things for our play such as having an unrealistic guesswork where we could suck in music and dancing and also if we had the female compositors cases that have had the injustice through to them if they each had wiz word to describe them and whence corresponding in Chicago have them repeat it in a coming of a scene. In Chicago they all grow to occurher and dance in unison etc o we began to mean of having those individual stories of each woman just now indeed in the big climax having them come together to get r til nowge in unison. therefore the basic p attraction that we gather for our devised piece is that there are a number a woman who have been interact unfairly or unequally by men they are in a relationship and so they all get their vengeance by coming together and punishing them all in an exceedingly unrealistic notion. The group came up with ideas of using well-nighthing like juju or magic to be thei r fight back.Because when we sight of powerful evil women it do us think of witches and that casting a spell could be their way of getting men back Research Chicago- Item 1 (enclosed) In this scene of Chicago these women are in jail they all sing ab expose how they killed their preserves and blame them for their death. The imagery of all these women uniting as one and dancing in unison, thatd be useful for our play, instead of keeping the women as individuals even though they all have unlike stories and are dissimilar people, make them come together, become one and fight back.Also it ushers the spirited sexy side to women shows them to be strong not just loving and caring as they are stereo signd to be, so we take to describe this. Its almost like saying every woman has a tigress in them and you push her then it go away be unleashed and she leave alone fight back Arab men and home(prenominal) help violence- Item 2 (enclosed) From this article you stick out date the bri ny reason these Arab men were abusive to their wives was because of their patriarchal society.This I feel is down to insecurities of when they are not skin perceptiveness like they are in power. muchover these statistics show that they are against it, its almost like they dont straighten out what theyre doing, and some blame their wives for them doing it. This helps me to understand my case because I know that he uses certain mechanisms to save himself from blame and feeling guilty. Ill use this in my playing, id be onerous to make excuses and to justify my reasons for beating my married woman. True story domestic violence Tanya Grey- Item 3 (enclosed)This could be put down into both my character and Priyas, because we can use casefaces of things that had happened in this story of abuse and put it into our story. For example one scene in our play when the husband comes home and the wife is terrified just hearing his footsteps this was real and had happened to this woman in the article. From this we make our stylize version of it, the footsteps and different actions are exemplified by a sound sound that go away be made by one of the impostors mutilate stage, and as he gets closer a heart beat regular recurrence starts showing how scared she is.And also in one scene the husband suspects his wife is hold for another man (cheating) because shes got candles and is relaxing, this again comes from the real demeanor story of this couple where she was relaxing and having a bath and he accuses her of waiting for a man. The reasons for them doing things can also be put into how we realise our characters and then this will help us to understand them and so be fit to be them (Stanislavskys magic IF), for example his reasoning is jealousy wanting to have power and she stays with him at first because she recalls this strength and power attractive, out front she realises that hes very dangerousStanislavskys Emotion Memory- Item 4 (enclosed) When seve re to be and feel like our characters we have to literally feel what they are feeling to be able to act to the best potential, this theory of Stanislavskys allows an actor to do this by bringing similar personal feelings of the actors into their playing. So for example when Priya is acting extremely scared she had to remember a memory of when she felt genuinely scared and then put all those gestures facial expressions etc into the acting. This of course is quite difficult because youre not in that situation you need a view of focus and determination to carry it moody well.This could help me also in scenes where I have to be aggressive and angry if I jus think of the last time I was very angry and imagine being my character and what Id do in that situation. Feminism/Ann Oakley- Item 5 (enclosed) Our play in a way represents feminism, women fighting against men Ann Oakley is one of the main(prenominal) feminist writers, these quotes show her views on why men are the way they are (patriarchal society). over again I can use this to understand the idea paths of my male character she believes they are violent because they see at as masculine because thats how men are presented in their society.So my character may feel like its his duty because he is male to put everything in point (by forceful means). Again these are his reasoning for doing the abuse. I could call down these kinds of reasons in my monologue. Theory of why men abuse- Item 6 (enclosed) Again this gives the familiar reason that men abuse because they want power, unless it also explains why women tend to stay with their abusive typeners, which is because some women may be very dependant on their husbands, financially and if they have peasantren she feels she cant be able to give them what they need.Also another reason not mentioned is that women that are in love with their breachners just dont want to leave them because they love them and expect them to diverseness one day. Priyas charact er will also need excuses for why she is with him and theyd be dependency and love. She can portray it in her acting by onerous please him, not getting him angry, always doing as he says etc health and safety 1. Stacked chairs There are many chairs that are curvy in corners it could be dangerous if they were to fall on to someone it could defame them so we made reliable to keep them away from us whilst acting.There are also some chairs with attached desks which are quite healthy and some arent extremely stable. So again we need to make real they arent in our way when acting. 2. Board on wheels This board can be pushed on to someones foot or may fall on someone so is also dangerous to us so we keep it away from us. 3. Floor slippery If we have slippery shoes the flooring is also quite smooth so it may be easy for us to slip and hurt ourselves. 4. Lights If the lights are a bit wobbly they capability possibly fall on someone, so we made sure they were strict on securely.The y made sure they had safety chains so that even if they fall they dont fall to the ground and so dont hurt someone or get damaged 5. Trailing wires there are wires on the floor that can easily be tripped over, we made sure they were pinned to the sides of the wall and dont come anyway or so our acting s whole tone (stage). Shoes They can be a problem if they are high heels or platforms if some were to circumstantially trod on some one it could hurt them quite badly.Rope scene This is when the women are strangling the men with lots, we had to use a technique that our swordplay teacher taught us of the person who was being strangled would actually be the one in control of what happens not the other person, so the other person is holding onto the victim whilst they are moving around and acting as if theyre being strangled. Abuse scene There is a part where I am supposed to have slapped Priya only instead we make a noise and my raft doesnt touch her face she just moves like I had hit her.Helias necklace There is a scene where Helias character pulls off her necklace and cut downs it on the floor, this could be risky if the beads were to fall off and they break up because someone could slip on them. So she will pull them and drop them gently but looking like shes doing it with to a greater extent force. Development of the play and my role When we had decided on the ideas of what we want in our play, using different ideas from some of the plays weve studied, as a group we all sat and discussed the neighboring step which was the actual story-line of our play.This came quite easy for us as our main inspiration was about the oppression of women and how they are mistreated by men in a patriarchal society (mainly based on Yerma and Antigone). And we knew our climax has got to be about the anger and revenge of women, when we were uttering about this I mentioned the jail scene in Chicago the musical where all the women were caustic and vengeful of their men, the y had all murdered their husbands and were proud of it, they justify why they did it, from this we thought of the play being about proving the point or justifying how women are treated badly by men.So this brought us to the idea of having one man that had used a number of women and so is cheating and lying and not valuing their relationships but then these women figure it out and join together to get their own back. lastly after deciding on this idea we started trying out a scene we complete many lessons were being blow by us just talking and thinking about what to do rather than trying out things to see if it works or not.The group were too focused on figuring out what or how these women will get their own back, we came to the conclusion that the only way to do this was to have it as an unrealistic scene. I started to think of how we could do this and I remembered a scene from my favourite TV show Friends where the iii main female characters treasured to get rid of everything o f their exs and phoebe the gypsy type character told them to throw everything thats theirs or they gave them into a fire and thats a indemnify of permitting go of their man.I liked the symbolism in the idea of the fire and their personal items representing them, when I told this to the group we then came out with the idea of making the come back a fire voodoo scene This way we could represent the womens anger and frustration in a strange way as if its driven them insane and they just need to let it all out and this is their way. And the close thing about theatre is we can show this in a stylised performance and make it exclusively out of the ordinary.The revenge voodoo scene was the first scene we act out, Dee volunteered to be the guy, the rest of us were then to be the angry women, Dee was contumaciously on the ball that lesson I think she worked better when actually physically doing work she came up with the idea of having the guy wrapped in rope and each women had a piece of it in their hand and they were all tugging at him so that he was moving in different directions, and she also thought of a rock song that was appropriate for this scene.But then when trying to move on from there we realised it was far too mingled to do the individual stories of each women with that one guy because there were entirely too many women, thats when we thought of having three couples and this left out an actor (Beatrix) we thought of just having her as a mystical character, a fret like creature that likes to stir things and will be in the background signal of most scenes but invisible to everyone and the final voodoo scene will have been planned by her, she had brought the women together and put it into their heads to do the voodoo ritual.We started talking a lot about the voodoo scene we wanted dancing and light effects etc But we were wasting a lot of time just discussing minor details that can be dealt with later on so we all decided to just spilt into our coupl es and work by the piece on our individual stories and scenes, which would come before the voodoo scene, then near the end of the lesson wed come together and tell each other what wed do.In my couple I am the man and Priya my wife, we discussed reasons for how and why this relationship skint down it had to be of course the husbands fault and so a reason to why shes against men and wants revenge, when thinking of a patriarchy society and the problems with this I flyingly thought of how man like to claim ownership over women and I remembered this film I had watched called Enough and it was about this man who was so obsessed with being in control he beat his wife just to make him feel like he had power over her.I told Priya about my idea of using domestic violence as the story of what happened amidst our couple, at first she wasnt so sure, she said itd be difficult to portray someone beating someone and it may dig out to be too much like a lather opera. But I tried to convince he r we could make it work so she agreed to give it a go.When discussing with the other groups we then had our three reasons why these women are angry with their men, ours was he abused his wife, Dee and Ema had decided Ema was to be a young 14 year old girl that was outrage by Dee a 22 year old man, Helia and Elizabeth got their idea from Yerma, Elizabeth was the husband in this relationship and Helia the wife, she was desperate, almost obsessed with wanting a child but Elizabeths character isnt interested.In the prison scene of Chicago (mentioned in inspirations and research) they all chant one word which describes their story of what happened between them and their men (why they killed them). This made us think of giving a word to each woman and then in some of their scenes everyone else could whisper that word at certain times. Priya is Abuse, Helia is Obsession and Ema is Innocence these words all have an S sound quality which I think gives it much(prenominal) of an impact and gives it a mysterious atmosphere.Being a Muslim I wear a headscarf and I thought I could use this with the character, because I am a man I could put the scarf in a way that it represents a turban and so simply this helped me to mannequin the character, because wearing a turban he could be an Asian, Persian or Arab, but being part Arab myself I thought Id probably find it easier to be something that I knew about.Being an Arab man then made me involve putting on an accent, to make it a minuscular more raise and then I thought of a background story between me and Priya just by knowing my character a little more. I thought that since I was being an Arab and Priya being English this would of course be a big flori stopping point clash, and being part English and part Egyptian myself I also knew about having a culture clash, and then this could be the reasons for him being insecure about their relationship and then star to trying to control her by physical means.In the English cult ure its much more normal for women to socialise freely with men but Arabs do believe in socialising with both sexes but arent as lenient, They feel women should be protected and are seen as precious and need not always be on show for men to look at, so in the culture its normal to have segregated gatherings.But if Priyas character isnt of course accustomed to this she will find it normal to talk to guys in the same way she talks to girls but to him in his culture when a girl is very chatty to a boy their immediate thought is she fancies him and if he is an insecure controlling type of character this will irritate him and make him feel even more insecure and then he will feel he has to stop her. This is what I will use as my purpose for beating her. Acting as my character is quite difficult for me because Im extremely feminine in the way I walk, talk, my gestures etc nd being a man everything needs to be transmuted, I tried watching men in the street just to see how they hold themse lves and move when they walk. But because Im quite slim and small its dense to move like someone that has broader shoulders and a larger physique. I also find it difficult to put myself in a mans shoes but using the techniques of Stanislavsky I try to understand my character in order for me to be him, everything he does should be for a reason (action for a purpose).For example my gestures arent to be as extended and flowing as I would usually do them being female they should be more strong and fast(a) but then by him being Arab also gives him certain hand gestures more than a usual European man would do. Even though I imagine him to be insecure inside, he is the type of character that would never tell anyone that he is insecure or upset, instead he would put on a stern face and hold it all in and also instead of ever blaming himself or seeing his mistakes he only acknowledges other peoples, so everything is someone elses fault not his just now by understanding how my character is and how his mind works did I find it easier to act as him. When acting out all our scenes that the couples had done separately, we realised that our scenes were far too realistic and life like which isnt what we all initially intended so we came together and discussed what sort of scenes we want and that they should be done in a similar format etc We then came up with the idea of having three scenes in every couples share, scenes that are all of different type one realistic, one non- naturalistic and one documentary.It would just give the play more of a spice because there is quite a immutable tone through out, which can be quite dull, so by seeing things from different perspectives we thought would make it more interesting. The realistic would obviously be what happened in their every life then the non naturalistic is their thoughts, their dreams, what happened but done in exaggerated dream-like way etcThe documentary scene we in the first place thought of getting a congressma n of a man vie by tape or CD reading out a news report but then we realised Beatrix essential more lines and so gave her the role of reading the reports, she would read statistics on domestic violence, pamper and infertile men. And we thought of using Visual aids to make it a little more interesting so having that information on a screen behind Whilst we were talking about visual aid we thought of the voodoo scene having a fire and to imitate the fire we could have an image of fire on the back screen during that scene.The first scene that me and Priya did which was me coming home and accusing her of waiting for another man and thats the get along up of me abusing her, this idea I got from a true story of domestic violence (research). This was what we thought was too realistic and boring but we kept it because when we decided to have the three different types of scenes it balanced it out so seemed ok. We were going to start with the realistic scene but from that research I had do ne, the true story, I got another idea that we could do.The woman hears her husband coming home and just by hearing his footsteps gets extremely scared and by making this an unrealistic scene it can be very effective. do the sounds of his footsteps and everything he does as loud exaggerated thuds, and as I get closer to Priya the thudding then starts to sound like heartbeats getting alacritous and faster and I put my hand on her shoulder and theres one last loud thud, Ive arrivedWe wanted to put this before the realistic scene of our argument but the group had a problem with this because Priya and I had actually already got an unrealistic scene and this would mean we have one more than the other couples. But I really didnt want to let this idea go I felt it would be very beneficial to show the wifes fear of her husband. And so after some convincing I win my case, under the condition we try and merge this scene with the realistic one. Final EvaluationWhen we watched ourselves on tape acting our piece, there were many good points I found but also things I felt inevitable to be improved. Most of our gestures the womens and the mens I thought were very good and to the point (action for a purpose). Although I found I needed to change my posture at points, my body language needs to be a lot more masculine Beatrix also needs to get more involved in her character so that she can do more gestures and facial expressions correct to the type of character she is.She is being a little cheeky and doing some gestures to portray that but we felt there needed to be more so that the audience has some understanding of what Beatrix is. Our tones of voice (men and women) were good and were believable but we need to slow down our pace and take our time when saying our lines. Our stylised techniques such as the nobble box scene of when Helias character dreams of having a baby and we are all the toy dolls that dance around her, this looked really creative. We need to make sure a ll of us keep those scary toy smiles on so its even more affective.In most of our scenes we just need to make them run a little more smoothly and there were some incidences where people didnt know what scene was coming up and the other actors would tip at something for them to remember. This is important that we all help each other out if someone gets confused or forget their lines if we feel out the cattle ranch and improvise with it which I ended up doing on the tap because Priya had forget one of her lines so I said her line but in a different way so that I was asking it to her in a question and she could just agree to it.The most important section we need to work on is our ending which isnt complete because we need music and need to figure out the choreography etc I think itd be useful to also make a clear definition when it has changed from stylised to realistic to documentary because we are just going from one to the next which makes it seem a bit scruffy perhaps if for exa mple we had a news report tune before the documentary starts to give it a bit of an introduction.And in the stylised we could all say the words in cannon of the woman that is in the scene (e. g. innocence) repeatedly to give it that offensive atmosphere and making sure the audience know it isnt realistic. Overall the play came along very well, we all listened to each other and took on ideas and decided everything as a group so that we were all in agreement, we really worked together like a team, which I think pays off in our work.Everyone participated in what they thought of the scenes, lighting, music etc and all the actors had a great deal of respect for each other which made it easier to act side by side and help each other out. There may have been some weaker actors that came late and didnt give as much input into the piece and there were the stronger actors that held the play together, but everyone deserves credit for the amount of work put into the acting of our play.