In Drama we studied different techniques and how to cooperate these techniques into our individual performances. We looked at the abnormal through characterisation and dialogue.
We explored how different playwrights used characterisation and dialogue as a way of communicating to the audience. We looked at Steven Berkoff, Samuel Becket and William Shakespeare. All of these playwrights use different techniques which in our final performance we attempted to incorporate them all in some way or another.Samuel Becket is about the theatre of the absurd, the language that Becket uses is emptied of meaning, the words become senseless, useless and absurd. His plays have a dream like quality; he often dealt with real life problems such as dying and isolation.
We looked at "end game" which demonstrated the absurdist qualities that Samuel Becket uses. Steven Berkoff has a contrasting style to that of Becket's. His plays often filled with sex and furry he had a certain style of humour.His plays are usually very physical such as "metamorphosis" the actors are under great physical demand. He uses a technique called total theatre which is the idea of the audience using all of their senses.
William Shakespeare has a distinctive style of dialogue, verses and proe's- 10 syllables, iambic pentameter. Shakespeare incorporates the use of dramatic irony (the audience knows something that the character does not. ) Shakespeare is undoubtedly one of the most famous playwrights there ever was, and still is.Devising our piece trying to integrate all techniques was hard as we had to submerge them all to make it a successful drama performance. We got into small groups, out group consisted of four people. We firstly looked over techniques that the three above playwrights use and try to adapt those to the stimulus that we were given.
As a group we decided that the stimulus (poem) was related to religion, as it had many hidden connotations to do with sin.Due to the religious element of the poem we wanted to collaborate it with the theatre of the absurd (Samuel Becket) therefore we wanted to detached the idea of religion and show the themes of the poem through an unrelated object such as a chair or a light bulb. We chose to use plants as our object as we felt that this would be a great opportunity to create beautiful gestures representing the plant, this and make the piece visually stimulating. Once we decided that a plant was going to represent our stimulus we then developed this by using props, and by adding absurd dialogue this linked with Samuel Becket's technique.Also this showed a great contrast as our group was trying to demonstrate the beauty of the plat, its physical shape and movements, then by adding this absurd dialogue shows the total contrast as it is not nice to listen to and confuses the audience.
Our set was made purposely very minimal; me only had two large frames and a set of stairs in the back set. This was so that the audience was focused out us as actors and what our performance was about instead of being attracted to our set.Our piece was mainly developed by trial and error; we had general ideas as discussed above but tried lots of different techniques as to how to devise a script. The way we eventually developed a script was by each person in the group writing 2 lines of any topic then randomly put theses together creating absurd dialogue. When we performed our piece everything went well as we had rehearsed many of times and knew the timing and words of every member in the group, this helped us with the overall pace of our piece as it was well organised.Originally we wanted to perform our piece outside in a built up area as we got good acoustic sounds and combined with the idea of plants growing and dying therefore linked well, but due to the weather on the day we were unable to do this.
Consequently we had to perform in the drama studio which had its benefits as physically we were able to express the plants growth and dying stage by using the floor whereas if we were outside in our original destination we would have been unable to do this.We also had to advantage of using the stairs/ladders which gave our performance different levels again making it more visually exciting and stimulating. In our performance we wanted to use the frames to the best of our ability so we decided that we would try to intimidate the audience by rocking the frames back and forward creating loud thudding sounds whilst we were doing this we walked forward towards the audience focusing on one particular individual so that they were connected into the performance (directly talking to the audience).The feedback from our performance was very positive, the audience liked our starting position- the good use of frames. People picked up on the fact about the physicality around the frame. Due to how well we worked together as group this was picked up though the way we performed as a group and the audience commented that we had ensemble performance.
Because of the use of levels this gave our piece great proxemics.Overall I was very pleased as to how our performance went and I feel that we created a piece of drama that I was proud of and would have wanted to watch as an audience member, we as a group had great fun exploring the different techniques used by the different play writes I learnt that through trial and error you can cooperate many ideas into one combined one, this consequently developed our performance as a whole but also developed our skills in devising a drama performance as we were exploring new ideas that we can use for future reference. Therefore the performance was successful and very enjoyable to devise and perform.
