Tuesday, 30 September 2014

Individual post by Rochelle; Law and Order Performance

Posted by Rochelle 
Todays lesson went so well! i'm very pleased with our piece. just a recap..we focused on Absurd Theatre, having our characters not making sense with their dialogue. The piece was based in a court room focusing on the theme of law and order from the initial material - the trial. From reading the text we extracted the themes of Law and Order, Hope and Deceived, waiting..(for death, hope, fulfilment, future) and finally control.  After researching Absurd Theatre - Jack Mower, we liked the idea of the unknown, so having our audience not knowing what the main focus point of our piece was e.g. the murder of Ted “the teddy bear” and through rehearsal we found that having normal court order lines from the prosecutor that the words shouldn’t make any sense…

 There is a randoms advert which I used as material to help with scripting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aETAPlXAT-w this research really helped with the absurdity of our piece and when put into action we saw a massive improvement. In regards to us having the “criminal” and “victim” not using random nonsensical words, it helped with the audience connecting with the characters.

In the next lesson when discussing ideas to adapt and progress our piece we decided to experiment with light and dark while still incorporating absurd theatre, so after a few trial runs it adapted into us become animals. Where on the queue “questioning” from the Judge it went completely pitch black and we used LED lights to add colour and contrast while manically acting as Gorillas, lions, Apes, and screeching birds. This conveyed to the audience a ferocious side to law and control, completely contrasting with how law is expected to be civilised when infact there are a lot of things wrong with the system, shown in “The Trial”. Then when the lights were back on, the judge had a complete costume change of bright green sunglasses and a jester hat. This signified a mockery of the criminal justice system and how there are so many things wrong that no one sees when it comes to judgement and justice; which were also some things shown in “The Trial.”

Also at the end of the case I took the jury (audience) out in the back and asked what they though, their final verdict was guilty which is what we aimed towards but when one of the audience members had sais innocent, I followed with “that doesn’t matter” which was a quote from the priest in initial material 2 showing how once a verdict or opinion has been made no one else’s opinion can make a difference.  

A few quotes personally stood out to me –
“ But I’m not guilty. Its all been a big mistake.(…) everybodys guilty.”
“the doorkeeper deceived the man, just as the law is deceiving me.”
“there is no door and no entrance”
“you must accept the laws servant or doubt the law itself”

“do you want to leave already” 

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