We worked with two songs from Blood brothers; the opening and final song, both sung by Mrs. Johnstone. We got into groups and discussed what the purpose of each of the songs was and how we could add movement to it to tell the story and make obvious who was who by using mime. In this way the songs were both being used effectively as narration, and a good way of interpreting the song The first song is an active narrative, it tells you what is happening as it happens, so for example when she sings “we got married then we had a “do” Josh who played Mr. Johnstone got on his knee and placed a ring on my engagement finger. Then we started dancing with the others and people were taking pictures of us, “the happy couple.”
The first Photograph was taken in the first song when Mr. Johnstone has just left Mrs. Johnstone for a younger, thinner, childless version her of. ‘Amie’ who is in his arms. Then there is me, Mrs. Johnstone is the back holding a baby, left alone, and all the attention is on the new girl. We linked the two songs by having myself stay on stage miming holding two babies in my arms, Amie then gave me some money in return for one of the babies, so I handed her one then walked off to the back of the stage were Josh Dan Kate Adam and Harry stood with their back to the audience. I think that it was a neat change over and it had told the story in one. The story of the blood brothers had begun.
The second photograph was taken at the end of the second song when the twins had both died. The second song was a passive narrative so didn’t have one event happening after the other. We decided to start from when the boys first meet and we brought the first song we looked at in blood brother which was the kids singing 1-10 then you get back up again which was basically a war game. So we played that then from josh kicking a ball times completely changed he walked off to get the ball then he came back on to see Dan, Kate Harry and myself smoking and drinking and from 7 we turned 17.Dan (Mickey) then turned round with his back to me and when he looked back.
I was hugging josh who was Eddie and got jealous then started on Eddie with myself in the middle of them with my hand in front of Mickey’s face shacking my head, This then showed clearly who was who. I was Linda, Josh was Eddie and Dan played Mickey. Mickey pushes Linda away then pulls out a gun on Eddie then shoots I them sit next to Eddie on the floor crying looking at Mickey shacking my head then he drops his gun looking behind him where Harry Adam and Kate stood with guns pointing at him then shoot. We said that the three of them could have represented his guilty conscious or just simply the police.
Throughout the whole of this song Amie who played either Mrs. Lyons or Mrs. Johnstone sat towards the audience with broken hearted expressions as if she was telling the story and we were her memory, re-living it in her mind. I think this was really affective because in the space of 6minutes we re-lived the whole of a 2hour play in mime using the two main songs as the narrator. I was very pleased with them but could have improved the first one because we didn’t put so much thought into it.
