lesson three

In todays lesson we worked on our solo performances that we were devising from a stimulus. my stimulus is the poem 'Dulce et decorum est'. I chose it as I think it gives a very visual, impacting view of the war. my original idea was to read a section of the poem I had chosen whist physicalizing it in an inhuman way. grabbing my arms legs and all over my body and expression the pain i was feeling on them as if I had been shot a thousand times. However after performing it to the class we decided it would be better, as the words themselves are so powerful, if i contrasted it with something gentle like holding a baby.I this this is a very good idea as it shows the contrast of war and home life and also shows the audience the shock soldiers must have got when arriving at the trenches because of how different it would have been to home. In future lessons I am going to re work my piece and try to change it to fit more with this new idea as I think it will improve the piece greatly.

Aside from the change that I am going to make with my physicality I was very happy with my piece when I performed it. however when I develop it more I want to work on making the way I say the poem itself more impacting by making my voice harsher and changing the pace at which I say certain parts as I think the language in the poem is the most impacting part of it because of the imagery it creates so emphasising lines like 'froth corrupted lungs' really shows how hideous the war was and the things that surrounded it.

I also want to include noises separate to my voice such as slamming my feet together as this puts the audience on edge and heightens the imagery making them feel as if they are really there in the trenches or on the battle field.

lesson 2

in todays lesson we continued work on our world war 1 ration line piece. we developed the piece by including other groups which added to the scale of the line. we also changed the piece of music we were performing it to and instead chose one which had sharp sounds that didn't keep in time exactly with what we were performing. this was effective as it contrasted the movements we were performing and reinforced the idea of fighting, in future I think our classes need to continue working on getting into the line efficiently and the spacing within the line as when new groups were added it became a lot more cramped to perform in.

my group worked on our piece on our own and tried to make it more clean cut and pedestrian so it appeared effortless. we also had to change our spacing in a section of it to allow for the amount of space we had once in the line as this  was a problem we had observed when performing it all together. As a group we all agreed that our piece was very minimal and simple so we added more switching between positions and changing levels within the piece for example when I go to the floor to tie my shoe lace this improved the quality and impact of our section as it showed peoples desperation to get to the front of the line but we also included very pedestrian movements to show that this was just everyday life for them,

in the lesson we also had groups feed back to us from their research surrounding certain areas of the war. this was useful as it allowed us to broaden our knowledge of the first world war which enables us to come up with more ideas on how we can devise a piece of theater from it. it also gives us contextual knowledge as to how the people of the time would have been living and what they would have been experiencing as well as this finding out about areas such as fashion means we can work on picturing characters in our heads which is something I find very useful and imagining and creating what their life is like.