Dramatic Interpretation of Death and the Maidan and They Dance Alone

Dramatic interpretation: 'Death and the Maidan' and 'They Dance Alone'

RESPONDING

The strategies that we have used in Death and Maiden, 1984 and They

Dance Alone are cross-cutting, non-verbal means role play and freeze

frame. We used cross-cutting in Death and Maiden, non-verbal means in

They Dance Alone, role play in 1984 and freeze frames in most of the

performances.

Cross-cutting is a technique used especially in filmmaking in which

shots of two or more separate, usually concurrent scenes are

interwoven; it can also be called inter-cutting.

We used this technique in the Death and Maiden piece of Drama where we

had five different scenes; two past, two futures and one present, and

we started the piece in the future then past, then present, then past

and finishing on future. This technique was used many times in this

performance and resulted into being very effective. It was effective

because in our performance we cut in and out of different scenes

showing Paullina’s life in the past and in the future, but depending

on what was going to happen in the present depended on which future

was going to happen. The two different future scenes were two

completely different outcomes; one being her talking to a councillor

about her week and her past with the doctors. She is still paranoid

that people look at her because they do not like her and she panics

about the slightest noise or incident which might be taking place, and

the other was her getting married to her partner. The future of

Paullina would only happen depending on her past, which was her

attending an opposition leader’s meeting which resulted in her being

found out and the other scene which was Paullina starting in a mental

hospital being supervised by medical staff.

FUTURE PAST PRESENT PAST FUTURE

Nonverbal communication includes facial expressions, tones of voice,

gestures, eye contact, spatial arrangements, and patterns of touch and

expressive movement. Research suggests that nonverbal communication is

more important in understanding human behaviour than words alone - the

nonverbal "channels" seem to be more powerful than what people say.

Non-verbal means is being other than verbal; not involving words:

nonverbal communication this could include involving little use of

language: a nonverbal intelligence test.

But for our non-verbal means performance we did not use any verbal

communication in any of the scenes. Our performance was one scene

because making the performance non-verbal decreases the chance of

engaging the audience into the scene. We used simple repetitive

movements and sounds to engage the audience which was very effective.