Dramatic Techniques in Loarca´s Blood Wedding

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When Lorca wrote Blood Wedding he carefully thought about the dramatic techniques. Lorca uses off stage music, stage directions, verse, symbolism, scenes and acts and imagery to entertain the audience and to make his play feel poetry.
Lorca used music as a way of discouraging his audience from the expectations of realism. Lorca said, “The use of music allows me to make the scene less realistic, and do away with the audience’s impression that what is going on is ‘really happening,’ permitting me to raise things to the level of poetry” (Lorca, trans. 1993, p. xviii). An example of this technique is in the beginning of Act III, where the stage directions say, “A forest. Night. Great moist tree trunks. A murky atmosphere. Two violins are playing” (Lorca, trans. 1993, p.78). Lorca sets the tone and atmosphere of the scene very well. The audience expects something tragic to happen and the stage directions give off this dark mood. The use of just saying that the violins are playing and not saying what music there playing leaves this to the audience interpretation and so each person who reads the book might think of a different song the violins are playing. Blood Wedding as a whole could be though more as a musical and Lorca as its composer and conductor.
Lorca uses imagery and symbolism to a great extent through the characters, blood, flowers, wall and knives. An interesting factor in Blood Wedding is that the characters do not have names except Leonardo. Lorca purposely did those so that the characters could represent a stereotype of how people were during this time period. Leonardo being the only character with a name represents the individual versus society, which the other characters represent. The knife is symbolized as death, hatr...

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...e audience distinguish the classes between the characters.
Finally Lorca uses soliloquy through the moon and beggar woman speech in ACT III. “So that tonight I’ll have Sweet blood upon my cheeks” (Lorca, trans. 1993, p.83). The moon foreshadows that tonight blood will be shed and some characters will reach the end of their life. The beggar woman who represents death foreshadows that people will die right here in the forest.
In conclusion, Lorca uses dramatic techniques such as off-stage music, symbolism, imagery and stage directions to a great extent. Blood Wedding has many symbols such as flowers, knives, walls and blood that create much imagery and make the audience much more interested. His use of soliloquy by the moon and beggar women is used so that the audience can understand what is going on and foreshadows events to happen.

Works Cited

Lorca, trans.1993

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