Greek Project (Week 1)

Before we had started our play Orestes from the Oresteia Euripides, we had begun looking at contempry work and sections from the script. The first bit of the script we looked at was a scene from the chorus, in this scene the chorus were trying to convince Orestes to murder his mother Clytemnestra. We had to explore the ways we could take this section and make it contempry, so we spilt up into two groups in the class our group focused on advertisement and how it can convince people to buy things, which was great for this piece as we were trying to convince somebody to do something, the other group went with the idea of internet bullying, which sometimes can also make someone do something they don't want to unfortunately.  

We later did some work on life in Ancient Greece, we researched things such as how women were treated back then, what people wore, the gods and their impact on the people, how plays were treated as news for them back then etc.

Just before we started the project we looked at the first part of the script, this was a chance for us to see what parts we liked the look of and also how the play was going to pan out. We later went on to try different scenes with people and from there we started picking characters, I shall be playing Orestes one, we also spitted each character by their scenes, and in my scene I shall be returning from a long exile to find my father is dead and that my mother has killed him.

During our first lesson on the project we got into groups or pairs that we thought our character fitted into, then we were mixed with other people to start looking at statues, and how our character would look if they were one based on the scene we were in, then we looked at the materials we could be made from.

 

The photo on the right is the pose my group and I thought best fitted my character in his scene, we thought that kneeling down was a good idea because Orestes is mourning for his father, and the hand gesture we used was because Orestes repeats "To do what I must do" and we picture him looking at his hands as if to say these hands must kill my mother, which he eventually does. The material I chose at first was wet stone, but after doing more research I have chosen snow because when it is left to settle it is soft, wet and cold, but when pushed together it becomes hard, wet, cold and can numb your hands, I have chosen the harder snow as Orestes has been pushed together by the thought of revenge and this has made him cold and most definitely numb from the pain of losing his father, the wetness comes from his sadness towards losing his father.

We later had to make this statue bigger, and personally I like my bigger one (which is to your left.) As it looks like Orestes has lost all hope and he is screaming out to the gods "why? how could this happen," this links to another part in my scene as Orestes is calling out to Hermes and asking him to guide his cries to his fathers ghost.

After this we did an exercise called chair objectives, this is where one person would have to move their chair based on their objective, whether it be blame, forgiveness, restraint, protection etc. Then the other person would react to this using the chair, and they too would also have an objective.

 

We spilt of into our groups we thought our characters fitted with and started to create some chair objectives, I was with Abbie as she plays my sister in my scene. Before we started, we were told about when two siblings are kept apart and they eventually meet one another, that it has been scientifically proven that they feel a strong love for one another, one that a normal pair of siblings wouldn't. Now considering our scene, which eventually ends with Orestes seeing Electra after a long time we decided our chair objectives would be, love for Abbie and restraint for me, we thought this would work well as the youngest would be wanting the love from her brother, but he would be stopping himself as he has to keep everything under control and to execute his plan to kill his mother. 

 

Later on we started learning how to act as one like a chorus, as everyone will be in the chorus at some point, we moved around the space and copied the leader who would be the person at the front if we changed direction the leader would automatically change, I think this showed us how difficult it is to all be in sync without looking directly at the leader, but once we had gotten the hang of it, it worked really well.

 

In our movement class we worked on the first scene, which is where Electra is explaining how she saw her mother kill her father in the bath tub. The big thing to work on in this scene was the chorus, as we had planned to have the chorus on stage at all times, and that they would represent a modern time journalist, this idea was thought of because the media are always watching over what's happening and controlling peoples actions in a way. Me and Abbie were in the scene after this so we didn't take part, instead we helped Zack, Charlotte and Joe to work on the killing scene, we put in a lot of movement styles such as some lifts, which eventually looked really good with the chorus who were observing what was going on, but also using different movement styles.

 

For the final part of week one, we worked on two scenes, one where Tyndareous and Electra were arguing about what was to happen to her and her brother after they had killed their mother, with this one we had the chorus choosing sides depending on what we thought was right and what was wrong by either listening in closer, ignoring them or even literally walking to the side to back them up.

Our second scene was with Electra and Helen (Clytemnestra's Sister) in this scene Helen has returned home to find out her sister is dead and so she goes straight to see Electra and questions her, the chorus in this scene were like rats running about checking their surroundings, but also being there for Helen if she needed something like her slaves.