“Too Much Punch For Judy: Documentary response”- 10 words here The play that we read for this unit is Too Much Punch For Judy, by Mark Wheeller. It is a form of Verbatim Theatre, meaning that it is based on the spoken words of real people. This play is about the story of a young woman who kills her sister in an alcohol related accident. When I first read the play I couldn’t empathize with the story as I haven’t experienced such a shocking event before. In this essay I will describe, analyse and evaluate both my work and the work of other actors in my group, focusing on the mediums, elements and explorative strategies of Drama. In Hour One, we explored the play by using still images and thought tracking (explorative strategies). For Task One, …show more content…
Our task was creating a split scene in groups of 5, presenting Judy after the accident and in Retrospect. In the middle of the piece, Actor 1 (Bob) handed Actor 2 (Jo) and I (Judy) each an imaginary glass. We sat in a line, shouted “Drink!” once each, then in unison before going into a still image. Here I delivered my line at a fast pace (element) with a loud voice (medium) to show signs of intoxication. I exaggerated my body language while entering the still image by throwing my head back while sitting up and opening my mouth wide to mimic drinking. I tried portraying Judy being overwhelmed by alcohol, which leads to disastrous consequences later on. I could have improved by switching to a higher-pitched voice to sound more convincing in terms of characterization (element). We had a series of quick mid-sentence cross cuts towards the end of the piece, finishing with Actor 3 (Retrospect Judy) shouting “No!” before everyone falls forward onto the floor as Actor 1 slams a block with his hands (sound effect-medium). Actor 1 is expressionless but stares outwards menacingly, symbolizing death. Everyone falling to the floor in unison showed that the crash was inevitable, given Judy’s drinking habits. I think Actor 1 could have improved by turning his head slowly as he stared out to suggest that death is always looking for more victims. In this hour, I learnt that P.C Caten was helpful by assisting Judy through this traumatizing
The play, “Riley Valentine and the Occupation of Fort Svalbard”, by Julia- Rose Lewis is an exploration of the resilience of teenagers. The play is heavily symbolic and supports the dramatic meaning of the show. Throughout the Queensland Theatre Company’s interpretation of this play, the director, Travis Dowley, expresses forms of dramatic elements to articulate three types of manipulations. These manipulations include the manipulation of body and voice, space and the creation and manipulation of dramatic mood. Through these types of manipulations, it portrays the dramatic meaning towards the performance. Although, the use of space throughout Travis’s performance allows the audience to identify this dramatic meaning.
It is imperative to understand the significance of the profound effects these elements have on the audience’s response to the play. Without effective and accurate embodiments of the central themes, seeing a play becomes an aimless experience and the meaning of the message is lost. Forgiveness and redemption stand as the central themes of the message in The Spitfire Grill. Actors communicate character development through both nonverbal and verbal cues; their costumes serve as a visual representation of this development by reflecting the personal transformation of each character. In the case of The Spitfire Grill, set design is cut back to allow for the audience’s primary focus to be on the actors and their story. Different from set design, the use of sound and lights in The Spitfire Grill, establishes the mood for the play. In other words, every theatrical element in a play has a purpose; when befittingly manipulated, these elements become the director’s strongest means of expressing central themes, and therefore a means of achieving set objectives. Here again, The Spitfire Grill is no exception. With the support of these theatrical elements, the play’s themes of forgiveness and redemption shine as bright as the moon on
Literary theorist, Kenneth Burke, defined dramatistic explaination by the prescence of five key elements. This list of elements, now popularly known as Burke’s Pentad, can be used to asses human behavior as well as dicipher literary themes and motives. The five elements; agent, purpose, scene, act, and agency, have been found highly useful by performance study practitioners in translating texts into aesthetics. When systematically applying Burke’s Pentad to “Burn Your Maps,” a short story by Robyn Joy Leff published January 2002 of the Atlantic Monthly, the analyzer can realistically grasp the emotional and logical motivations and tones of the text. By doing so, the performer becomes an enlightened vessel for the message Leff wants to communicate. The Pentad can be described with simple questions like: Who? What? When? Where? How?, but asking the small questions should always lead to more in depth analysis of the element, and it should overall, explain the deeper question: Why?
whether it is the right or wrong thing to do. In this case, during a
Werner, Craig, Thomas J. Taylor and Robert McClenaghan. Critical Survey of Drama, Second Revised Edition: James Baldwin. April 2003. .
words so that the sound of the play complements its expression of emotions and ideas. This essay
Drama, and Writing. Ed. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 6th ed. New York: Pearson-Prentice, 2010. 40-49. Print.
Throughout Rajiv Joseph’s play, Gruesome Playground Injuries, the two characters, Doug and Kayleen, sporadically meet throughout the course of 30 years due to injuries ranging from getting “beaten up pretty badly” (Joseph 31) to going into a “coma” (Joseph 27). The play starts out with the two characters first meeting in the school nurse’s office with injuries of their own. This is the start of a relationship that is full of pain and healing throughout the years. Told in a very unique structure of five year increments, the play shows how injuries, a reoccurring image that may be self-inflicted or inflicted upon one, bring the pair together when either is in a dire situation.
Alan Bennett presents his characters in Talking Heads by writing the plays in the form of monologue. By employing this technique he has managed to create a rich and detailed World in which his stories unfold but, he only allows us to see it through the eyes of a single narrator. When reading a play that is presented in this manner it is possible to lose sight of the fact that you are only getting one person’s version of events and you may start to believe that you are having conversations reported to you verbatim. This is a clever mechanism because the narrators can often be unreliable and lead the reader to form opinions and draw conclusions that quite often turn out to be unfounded and false. The term “Talking heads is a synonym in television for boredom” (Bennett, 2007, p, 10) yet, these talking heads are certainly not boring, the settings may be drab and ordinary, the characters are not exciting or inspiring yet, the gossipy way in which the stories are told hooks the reader in. Fitting neatly into the genre of tragicomedy it is perhaps fitting that the ‘tragic’ comes before the ‘comedy’, certainly the dramatist infuses the plays with a rich dose of humour but the melancholy subject matter and the often quite sad and lonely characters always counter balances the laughs with a tinge of sadness.
Communication is a vital component of everyday relationships in all of mankind. In plays, there are many usual staging and dialogue techniques that directors use to achieve the attention of the audience. However, in the play, “Post-its (Notes on a Marriage)”, the authors Paul Dooley and Winnie Holzman use both staging and conversation in order to convey the struggles of modern relationships. The play is unconventional in how it attempts to have the audience react in a unique way. The authors use staging and conversation to portray to the audience that there are complex problems with communication in modern relationships.
Siegler, R., & Alibali, M. (2005). Children’s Thinking Fourth Edition. Prentice Hall Inc. Upper Saddle River NJ.
The criticism relies on two assumptions. One, that rhetoric creates reality, and two, that convergence occurs. With regards to rhetoric creating reality we are to assume that the symbolic forms that are created from the rhetoric are not imitations but organs of reality. This is because it is through their agency that anything becomes real. We assume to that convergence occurs because symbols not only create reality for individuals but that individual’s meanings can combine to create a shared reality for participants. The shared reality then provides a basis for the community of participants to discuss their common experiences and to achieve a mutual understanding. The consequence of this is that the individuals develop the same attitudes and emotions to the personae of the drama. Within this criticism the audience is seen as the most critical part because the sharing of the message is seen as being so significant.
On stage, these points were, looking at the opinions of a majority of both the audiences and the critics, presented successfully by Brook and the cast he worked with. From the prison guards who loomed in the background, clothed in butcher aprons and armed with clubs, to the half-naked Marat, slouched in a tub and covered in wet rags, forever scratching and writing, to the small group of singers, dressed and painted up as clowns, to the narcoleptic but murderous Charlotte Corday, Weiss and Brook offered a stage production that both engaged and amazed the audience, while at the same time forced them to question their role as the audience; no better exemplified than at the very end of the play, where the inmates, standing menacingly at the edge of the stage, actually begin to applaud the very people who applaud their performance, aggravating and confusing some, but forcing most t...
In this paper, I will be focusing briefly on my knowledge and understanding of the concept of Applied theatre and one of its theatre form, which is Theatre in Education. The term Applied Theatre is a broad range of dramatic activity carried out by a crowd of diverse bodies and groups.
Over the years, the essence of theatre has not only been to entertain, but to also allow the build up of a culture in a quickly growing uncultured generation. Regardless of the existence of so many other forms of entertainment, theatre has always established a commanding niche in most people’s hearts, and is undoubtedly the most realistic form of entertainment (Bruce 12). The acting bit of theatre performances makes things real and in their immediate contexts, allowing the audience to draw conclusions based on what they see. In a majority of cases, also, the play’s setting is such that there is description of definite subjects without which the play cannot make meaning. The above research takes into account A Number by Caryl Churchill. A great deal of issues and aspects can be learnt from the above play with diverse moral lessons, as well. It has long been proved that expression via acting is more direct than when the audience accesses literature in other means. This direct approach gives a broader meaning to a variety of issues in the play, which were not understood, say in videos. Additionally, the play A Number is full of theatrical ideologies with clear depiction and expression of every event. Theatricality and empowerment set this play different from other plays because of clarity in events’ sequence. The author also strives to express the idea of cloning in society as one main means of families’ downfall. This further comes with what literature calls the ‘fate of tragic heroes’, an indication of what is at stake when a person does things out of the ordinary to please him or herself.