"Dr Faustus" - Marlowe (8) (Wrath & Script)

In this lesson we:

• continued with our work on the sins.
• performed what we had so far to Charlie and Rhiannon as they were not in the last lesson.
• put Rhiannon and Charlie into what we had and ran through it again. 
• continued with the sins by beginning work on "Wrath". So far with our physical theatre section on sins, we have been quite naturalistic, so we decided to make this next section a bit more abstract. Rather than having seven sections exactly the same, we thought we would start "Wrath" with a movement section and then go in to the speaking.
• discussed recording the dialogue for this section as our movement section here is quite intense and it would also break the mould a little bit, rather than having every section similar. We didn't come to a clear decision on this so are still debating at the moment and will work something out a little bit later.
• began devising wrath...

To begin devising wrath, we had to work out where we finished for the previous sin to ensure our transition would be smooth. As the previous sin ended with James being pushed to his knees centre stage, with Lewis and I beside him (as we had just lifted him), we thought that the three of us could drop down at the beginning. James, Lewis and I could do a section together, whilst Robert and Charlie could do a different movement section at the back. Robert and Charlie's section contained a lot of stage combat, whilst our section was more dance-based. Whilst we created our section, we had to remember that our staging is traverse so we had to consider the view point for different audience members. We chose a piece of music to help us with our choreography and to give our piece more depth. The music creates a tense atmosphere due to the suspense filled pauses between the explosive chords. On the first chord, Lewis and I drop to join James. Between the first chord and the second chord, Lewis and I roll outwards to face he audience members we are nearest to, whilst James rolls to face the back. On the second chord, we hit aggressive positions to intimidate the audience. Lewis and I then move in short jagged movements to end up looking at James. Lewis and I then do a short section of weight distribution involving pushes to show mine and Lewis's strength and power over James. We then began choreographing a dance-based section between Lewis and I where we are fighting each other, and James is stuck in between us not knowing what to do. The point of this section was to emphasise the fear people have of those with a lot of power, especially when they come in to contact with another powerful person. This is as far as we got with the sins


In this lesson we also:

• decided to start staging some of the play from the beginning.
• worked out where we each character would enter and exit and where they would be positioned in the stage space.
• discovered that working in traverse is challenging! When working in traverse, we need to keep moving so that audience members aren't left looking at a characters back for a long period of time.