Saturday, August 3, 2019

Alan Bennetts Talking Heads inspired my initial idea. :: Drama

Alan Bennett's 'Talking Heads' inspired my initial idea. DRAMA PRACTICAL =============== Our group comprised of Jennifer Harney, Jamie Hollaway, Antonia Forsyth, Nick Hudson and myself. Alan Bennett's 'Talking Heads' inspired my initial idea. I had imagined two seats on stage with two people portraying an unusual event. The other actors would then act out the narrated story. However this was not met with great enthusiasm and so was immediately dismissed. Our second idea was more stimulating. We came up with the idea of a failing band who were looking for new talent a la 'The commitment', and were holding auditions. Jenny was immediately taken with the idea and imagined herself portraying the role of director. We soon had discussed this idea to death and were no longer inspired by it but dreaded the thought of how we would bring it to the stage.. The end of the lesson arrived and we realised we had done nothing but talk and had rubbished all the ideas we had come up with. We repeated the second lesson in the same way, however it was a little more productive. We moved from the idea of a failing band to an actress who was finding it tough being at the top. However two problems soon emerged. The first was that we were coming up with fantastic ideas that would obviously only work on film, and not on the stage. The second was the lack of insight and excitement for all the characters, other than the star herself, leaving everyone else feeling worthless and unimportant; the group was starting to split- this was turning into a disaster. We were able to salvage this by the lifeline provided by Nick. Although his idea also contained many problems that needed to be discussed, we were able to recover the fading spirit of the group. During the third lesson we became worried that we not getting anywhere fast, so we decided to change our approach. We remembered that in earlier workshops, when we had been stuck for inspiration, we wrote down random words and then just improvised based around the chosen word. The first to be used was squash, after the second attempt I was reminded of the metaphor 'When life gives you lemons make lemonade'. Although this was a slight deviation from 'squash, nevertheless the group was inspired ands so we spent twenty minutes discussing the idea. We then realised our idea had, once again, dragged us back into the fatal area of discussion, which we were trying to avoid! The fourth lesson we returned we asked for the help of our teacher (Mrs. Curtis)- we were aware of the other group's developments, and

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