Theatrical piece involving taboo features

Within todays lesson we created and devised a theatrical piece that involved a taboo subject that was related to the theme from the theatrical piece. We was put into groups and we had to come up with a 2 minute piece which could have been influenced by our creative writing that we had done the day before. Within our group we decided that we would use Lillian’s creative writing piece as a stimulus for our theatrical piece. We as a group went through Lillian’s creative writing and underlined important words and sentences that could have impacted or again influenced our theatre piece. Lillian’s creative writing was about the recent death in Edinburgh with the mother killing her child and apparently accusing the baby (3 year old) of running away. This is what we decided to place our piece around, a murder of baby from their own mother.

I thought that our performance was very good and we achieved our goal from the performance which was to scare and make the audience feel uncomfortable. I believe that we used many taboo aspects and features within our performance as for example, we would sometimes perform behind the audience which I believe made them feel uncomfortable as they couldn’t see the actors or what they are doing. Also within our performance we would come really close up to the audience, again making them comfortable and a bit scared during the performance. I thought that the repetition with the ticking noise was very effective as well, as I thought it gave the audience something to think about as it was kind of pre-empting something as, you knew as an audience member that something was going to happen as you was anticipating it but didn’t know when it was coming.    

We as a class watched everyone else pieces and I thought they were very well performed as well as devised. I thought that from each one of the performances I saw you could understand the story and the meaning behind that story. One performance that really stood out for me was Lucy’s group as I really liked how they structured and devised their piece. I think that the book had huge meaning and effect to that piece as I developed an interpretation that when Lucy started reading the book she was telling a story in which she was involved in herself. I thought some of the movements they did as an ensemble really worked as it definitely emphasised the importance of the object and the book. Also what I really enjoyed about the performance was how it started to become a cycle with the characters, the book and the object.

Within each performance I thought that everyone really committed and put a lot of effort into their character. However, one individual performer that caught my eye was Hayden and I liked how he portrayed his character. His group’s performance was very good and it had a lot of taboo related subjects within their piece. However, right at the very start of their performance there was a transition within each character and I thought Hayden done a very good job in making that transition very spontaneous and it looked very effective. I thought the way he changed his physicality from going up right and positive to then going to a dark and negative physicality was very impressive.

 The day before this lesson we underwent a creative writing exercise where we had to write about something that was recently in the news. I decided to write about the death of Lee Rigby who was the soldier who was brutally killed by two terrorists. However, within our writing there had to be elements of taboo. Therefore, when I was writing I put a lot of detail into the death of Lee Rigby and also emphasising factual evidence.