For this unit we focused on 'Find Me' text written by Olwen Wymark. The play is about a twenty-year-old girl called Verity Taylor, who was charged by the police with damaging a chair in the mental hospital where she was a patient. Later she was committed to Broadmoor, "from where she may not be discharged or transferred elsewhere without permission of the Home Secretary." Using a technique of multiple characterization, the play seeks to investigate in depth the personality of the young girl, to "find" her, and at the same time studies the effects of her behaviour on the family, the friends and the officials in whose care she is periodically placed.
Throughout this unit we performed and worked on pieces on text and off text, looking at different periods of Verity's life. All pie
...ces performed were connected to the emotional struggle and differences Verity and her family had to coop with. We communicated these emotions through dramatic devices and skills.
In lesson one, we looked at anger and how we could use different tones in our voice, using the drama medium voice. We concentrated on a thought or memory that made us partially angry. Then we got into pairs and discussed the building up of anger in 5 stages, 5 being the highest point of anger. We then created a short scene, choosing a level of anger and other members of the class had to figure out which level of anger we were portraying.
We discussed the tones of our voice and how appropriate it sounded perhaps it may have been to harsh or to soft, angry or happy? And if it was suitable for the role
we were portraying. We also discussed the volume and if we had the loudness or quietness of our speech right and if the audience could hear us. We also considered the pitch of our voices and if our character spoke with a high or low-pitched voice and why we did. We also thought about the pace we were delivering our lines and how we could alter the pace according to the type of anger we were playing and also the clarity of our voices.
In lesson two, our teacher gave us a line from the play, which was, "when I swim in the pool the water is blue and green and silver. It's soft and I feel like I'm flying. I'm a flying fish. I'm a seagull." We then created a few scenes using these lines as our stimuli. We used explorative strategies to create our scenes we mainly used crosscutting. Crosscutting is what you do after you've created a series of scenes or sequences, and you re-order them to create a drama that goes forwards and backwards in time.
Our first scene was the "present" day, which then went into the past showing why the present was the way it was, and our final scene was a split stage of the past and the present. We also used marking the moment; this is when a group decides a moment in the scene is significant and want to show it in some way. We showed our moment by slowing down the pace of the drama leading into a still image/freeze frame following with a fast beat action to show the contrast, of actions.
In lesson three, we were
split into groups of 3 or 4, to research topics and issues in the text, such as Holloway Prison, Broadmoor and about clothes in that time period etc. We did this to inform our understanding of the text; this also helped us to form our own production of the play, as we knew background knowledge and the key ideas of the text and how it was formed.
In lesson four, we created a thought tunnel which is when a character from the drama walks slowly between two rows of students. As the character walked down the corridor each student called out a line from the play. The line is either what other characters think of that character or what that character thinks of itself. We firstly used the character Verity to walk through the thought tunnel. The lines we used were all from the text "Find me:"
- -" The winner."
- -" I hate you."
- -" Be a good girl."
- -" Stop being so silly."
- -"Get out the way."
- -" She's crazy"
- -"She's got so good at swimming."
- -"Stop her."
We did this to get an insight into the character, to see what others thought about her and what she thought of herself this helped us later on to form the character and to recognise her strengths and weaknesses and her personality.
We also did the same thing with the character Jean using the following lines again from the text "Find me:"
- -" I can't bare it."
- -"I'm sorry Mum."
- -" I can imagine how difficult it is for you."
- -"Mum will get drunk."
- -"Oh my God."
In lesson five, to develop characters, we used hot seating. This is a
technique used to deepen the understanding of a character by being asked question. We only hot-seated Verity, which was done five times, as there were five Verity's' and each Verity showed a different personality. Simple questions such as the ones below were asked first to each different Verity because, in each Verity she was a different age, for example when she was at school as a child and when she was taken to Broadmoor as a young adult. These help us build a character, knowing the character is a child would be shown in a completely different way to as if the character was an adult. We asked questions such as:
- -"What is your name?"
- -"How old are you?"
- We also asked more in-depth questions such as:
- -"Why were you taken to Broadmoor?"
- - "Did you enjoy school?"
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