In this lesson we were split into groups again and were given another section of the script. This time, the four of us girls formed one group. Our scene was the "morning song" that the women of Troy sing. We kept to the same characters as we have so far (Kat played Polyxena, Rhiannon played Andromache, Hope played Cassandra and I played Hecuba). We read through the script first to understand what the song was about. We realised that this song leads into the section of script that we did before in our group of four. We decided that we would perform this scene in an abstract style as we couldn't see how we could do this naturally.
We decided we would have three chairs adjacent to each other on stage to begin with, however, the middle chair would face the back. When Hope brought on her chair when her character enters, she put her chair to face the back as well. Rhiannon and Kat's chairs faced the audience as their characters were relatable, whilst mine and Hope's chairs faced the back to show that they are not mentally sound (as Hecuba constantly speaks of her dreams and Cassandra states that "he is always here"). We started away from our chairs and walked to them and sat down on our first lines. Whenever Polyxena and Cassandra had dialogue between them we would lean forwards or back to allow them to talk across me.
As well as using our heads and leaning, we created levels by standing on the chairs when appropriate. For example, when I said "the temple steps are 91" I stood on my chair and remained standing when my character speaks about the view, and then I sat down.
The feedback we got after performing this piece was that the class liked it when we stood on the chairs. They thought that the section when Andromache speaks about being pushed in the water was clever. For this section, Rhiannon stood on her chair and on the word "push" I leaned back and Kat leaned forwards (so we both leaned towards the audience) and Rhiannon then jumped off the chair.
After watching the other group perform, we discussed what we thought about "After Troy". Although we liked our prologue and liked little sections of the script that we performed, we thought that the play itself didn't really work for us and thought it was a little bit boring (as some of us find the language difficult to understand) and we can't really connect to it). Therefore, we began discussing other plays as a group and our teacher came up with "1984". None of us had ever heard of it before so we watched two trailers for it and instantly liked it. We could connect to it as it involved technology and we all liked the atmosphere created by the trailers. We found out that the play is about "big brother" always watching you and that personal thoughts are not allowed. We shall do some research on this play and see what we all think of it.
