Month: April 2015

For this performance we have decided to explore the idea of God acting as a father towards a certain individual rather than others, someone who is fortunate enough to be receive generosity from God but has exploited it and as a result he must face the consequences.

when developing this our central question ended up similar to ” is unconditional love a wrong” or ” what is it to have freedom”For characters such as John’s, he plays as Vincent  the one who has taken his prestigious life for granted and must face Gods fury. Its mostly centred around Vincent’s redemption. He also posses a strong firm belief in the idea of a God watching over him and everyone else.

There is also the Warden and the cell mate, minor characters who’s  appearances purpose is to belittle and break the the main characters from the inside stating the lack of his worth and challenging his faith without remorse.

Finally there is the almighty “God” of the performance God. The one who gave Vincent the life of a king and like any other parent who’s child lost their way he is not only disappointed in the child but himself , as it is said in the performance vince was stuck and its his fault but unlike other parents he has to he has to inform divine punishment upon his son before he can be redeemed.

In the beginning God seems very angerd and vengeful  but as the performance moves on his attidude and way of thinking change to something more realistic like an actual parent instead of an all powerful being who has no time for such “trivial” things.

To help represent who has the power of the stage or who the audience should be focusing on at certain moments we have them at the front of the stage for the majority of their lines we also kept a box at the centre of the stage for the passive character, the one who has to listen or is reduced to listening , for example at beginning when God first introduces his dilemma and the plot of Vincent’s redemption this technique was also  used to represent the wardens power over the former high class citizen, to help  the audience understand  how low the this certain individual has fallen, its also used to show the level of threat that the cellmate posses not only to vince p physically but to his strong faith in once again living a life with no worries. To summarise which ever character is at the front of the stage will always have control of the scene and the current situation.

In the aspect of the audience and performance space as I’ve said before the audience will always be within almost face to face reach in different scenes which will help them identify which character is in total control of each scene, we’ve also kept in mind that some parts of audience will be at different angles so we’ve tried to make our movements well orbiting the box in the centre. This way will be an unbiased presentation of the use of our performance space during.

The impact I intend to leave upon the audience I am not yet sure myself but I do hope to at least spark their interest, perhaps make them think if their much like vince taking something great and then abusing and exploiting it for their own selfish reasons or could even help could prevent other people or even themselves from ending up in this kind of situation where redemption is needed. if this could leave a big enough impression and actually help someone who considers themselves to be taking something or someone for granted that will be enough of an impact.

when improvising our performance we began with the idea of a powerful being and lower life forms being at their mercy, we obtained this from a story involving a child, toys being at his mercy  and them desiring their freedom from the idea of freedom we moved on to an individual wanting his freedom from God but then we changed it to someone provoking and actually deserving of Gods wrath. this evolved into the creation of the character Vincent and how he earns his name  after exploiting his gifts from above, we also explored the famous story of jesus if he lost his way and angered his father instead of dying  for peoples sins according to the christian belief and thought of the opposite result of the christians lord and savour, this is how the idea of “jesus” who lost his ways who was in serious need redemption came to exist in our performance, after we explored and repeated the idea  a few times with slight changes each time to develop our final result of a performance we repeated it a second time to polish and perfect it I believe this is an example planned improvisation.

The genres of this performance is centred around improvisational type which  we had to create from slightly related text  this type of theatre is often comedic but in this case possible a very dramatic scenario of as I’ve said before if the position of the son of God was taken by selfish and sees themselves as high born, we also kind of explored epic theatre genre involving an actual actor to play God in the performance and actually interfering with an individuals personal life to teach  them a lesson.  Our performance style involved non-natualistic elements as we found a way to keep all performers on the stage without confusing the audience which scene incorporated which actor, we also subtly used red and white bloody sheets to kind of represent the beginning of Vincent’s suffering as part of his redemption which is torn of at the beginning of the performance. We’ve also incorporated abstract theatre into our performance for example when Vince is has his faith challenged by his cellmate they do not face each other  while in conversation but the audience to show the anger and ridiculousness that the cell mate express towards Vince’s backtalk.

The conventions we use for example was conversation such as between Vince and the warden who purpose is to suggest to the audience that they should feel sympathy towards the main character another example of conventions we used was narration, we used the existence of the almighty God in this performance to our advantage and gave him the power of narrating the performance    which helped the plot continue and what it demands.

One way we used the semiotics of theatre and drama was within the scene after Vince’s imprisonment when a random per on decides to try and befriend him he immediately rejects and pushes this individual away without knowing it was one of hiis father’s attempts to help Vince redeem himself without any pain or suffering but of course that wasn’t the case. We decided to use costumes to help symbolise  the mood and situation of the characters for example the God of our performance will be dressed in a suit to represent his extremely higher status than everyone else at all times, Vince will also be wearing a suit to show his status but soon have it taken away and replaced with a plain white T-shirt to show that his status has fallen considerable low. Another way we use semiotics was how were used our dialogue as a signal for example when Vince has his high status costume taken the trigger word is “Darkness” during Gods rant. Also after Vince has his epiphany and apologises for his action God will let the audience know that he has finally earnt his name and freedom.

After the performances my group was told on how we could improve and expand upon. And that’s what we needed to do expand our performance and fleshing out our characters, it was stated that we also needed less symbolism and more naturalistic moments.

My evaluation of another drama groups performance, Louie’s group. In my opinion they had a great performance the did well in showing the audience the story of a man who accidentally beat his unfaithful wife to death and involves his “loyal” brother who refuses to help him. They could have attempted to show or give a representation of this mans wife because so far all I know is she’s a nice person also why does he claim that she is this nice person even after he finds out she was cheating on him.

The stimulus material given to me is about a organisation called project prevention, a particular member named Barbra Harris  has  claimed to help prevent the extremely young (infants) from becoming addicted or involved with drugs, which I agree is a noble cause but what would disagree with is their complete disregard for the drug addicted parents. you see in order for them to prevent children from being born affected by illegal substances they pay drug addicted women to be sterilized and if their pregnant, abort their unborn child. In opinion these people and what they do compared to what they say is at the very least is questionable.project prevention tried to establish itself in the UK many times but was not allowed until 2010 however it was allowed in the US as soon as it was created, this alone proves that america is more accepting of controversy than us.   If I were to meet anyone within this group I would ask why not try helping people right here and now who are addicted to drugs instead of basically taking away potential lives, they obviously have more than enough funding to do so and this would be a more solid and potentially perm init solution instead of tempting these poor souls to make even more mistakes than they already have with their lives. project prevention is covered in contradictory and should not be allowed to take advantage of the weak and preform these eugenic treatments on them.

Item 1: my groups performance is about a young girl named Samantha and a quick show of her development from a pressured model citizen to a lowly abuser of drugs and desperate for help to get her life on track. this is linked to project prevention cause when she is on the edge of desperation she seeks out help from project prevention but before she makes the same mistake as many other women before her she refuses and goes to an AAA meeting to discuss her problems. In this performance I played as Samantha’s father who had so much pride in his child that it caused her to feel pressure about letting her father down, if this was to be developed we would of shown the fathers reaction if Samantha lowered her standards and his pride in her getting over her drug addiction. this is linked to the stimulus  because it represents someone who was able to escape their shady acts.

Item 2: In the first part my presentations I discussed the development of the characters and the plot if we were given the time to preform a full length performance.

1. I would have liked to spend more time on Samantha’s development from an upstanding person to a drug addict .

2. I would’ve liked to establish and develop the relationships she has with her father and James.I could do this by incorporating the use of space within the characters, for example if the characters distance themselves from each other then it would show that their relationship is also distant.

3. also to show how and why James became addicted to drugs? ,did Samantha know about his addiction?, how did this affect her and their friendship?, were they still friends while he was on drugs?

4. when Samantha was on drugs did her father know?, if so what was his reaction?

questions I would like to find out and answer.

Item 3: In the second part of my presentation I discussed my groups use of our props, the meaning and how they link to project prevention.

1.we used the setting of an NA meeting in background for all the scenes as a way to separate the preforming actors from everyone else on the stage we made it clear who was acting to the audience this way also it helped us keep all actors on stage at all times.

2. we used a blood covered blanket many times also. it was first used to represent the birth of Samantha and as she grows up it always appears in the use of something else in her life, it was also used as a symbol of project prevention’s blood shed of the unborn and their shady treatments on women.

Personally I would evaluate my groups performance as very effective way to express how and what could cause people to turn to drugs while indirectly or ignoring my groups central question.” Is addiction a choice”.using our performance I’d like to think that the audience will come up with their own answer.personally I think the NA meeting background setting worked well along with another non-naturalistic technique we used to show Samantha escaping project prevention’s clutches. we could have improved the way we established the friendship between James and Samantha and how they developed.

Jacks groups performance was very effective showing project prevention disregard for drug addicted women it also show the inhuman procedure that these poor souls are reduced to. effectively proving that project prevention is not the right  solution. they represent this using  very disturbing and gory methods for example they show the treatment with the women on their back while having I’m assuming their unborn children ripped out of them, which i wouldn’t put pass the organisation.   the acting of the women’s agony and the gore was very effective. they could have acted a bit more natural in some scenes, it was very effective in others but in my opinion to non-naturalistic.