The story-line I constructed, with narration went like this. ‘As the King stood at the edge of his balcony on a bitter cold evening, a conflict below was ending. The sadness on his face grew deeper and deeper as he saw the blanket of bodies, both of his fine men and their enemies lying dead or wounded. Suddenly the chief warrior staggered to his feet, looking up at the king with his bright blue eyes he shouted we did it! ‘ This was then made into a movement in groups, no words were spoken just a strong used of facial expressions to set the mood.
In my group we decided to interpret the music using my story-line, as everyone felt it was interesting and suited well. We used a sense of dance, mixed with passion making sure the whole space was used with interlinking between the characters body parts. Levels still played a huge part to making the piece look affective. Our group moved slowly to create tension and curiosity, and one character moved at a time to state a sense of time and importance.
Our next task was to list a number of different themes that were in the play, such as; loyalty/betrayal, relationships, jealously, superstition, childhood issues, wealth, health, love, and some others. We were asked to pick five and prioritise them explaining why we chose them. My first choice was superstition as it runs all through the whole story and nearly all the aspects in the story link back to it, even the songs do. Next was betrayal/loyalty as it works as opposites in the story as one character is being loyal another is betraying them.
I put relationships as my third point, it seems an ironic thing as their mothers don’t want them to be friends but they want to be. When kids are told not to do something they do it out of curiosity and self control. I feel without relationships there would be no interesting story-line, even if there are bad ones as well as good. Wealth/jealously comes next, I linked these two together because they relate. Money is such a big issue; it’s what makes the brothers so different.
Being young money was no object it meant nothing but it changes when they grow up… money meant the better life, which sparked off the jealously. My number five was childhood issues, as its how the story begins and now and again due to the characters childhood things happen, both good and bad. We were then given a task which lead on from these and it was to still image each of our five prioritised points. Superstition was fairly hard to portray, but we decided to use the superstition of pulling faces and the wind changing to make people stay like that.
It worked well with one character acting as the wind, with two others side by side, one with a normal expression and the other with a stupid face pulled. In the still image of betrayal/loyalty we felt having two people back to back, but the loyal one at a higher status and facial expressions and body language showing happiness contrasting with the betraying person. In our third still image or relationships we had the two women either side of the stage, with two characters in the middle being ton apart with confused looks of angry on their face.
Next was wealth/jealousy and again we used the two characters at high and low status. However they were both unhappy looking at each other wanting one another’s life. We then used for childhood issues in a playground with one child being better than all the rest, showing off with confidence. The other kids were annoyed, pretending they didn’t care. We were then asked to add captions to the still images so the audience would get the drift of what it was showing without actually saying.
For superstition we agreed on ‘if the wind changes your stay like that’. For betrayal/loyalty we had one character saying ‘I betrayed’, in a quiet and guilty way and another said ‘I stayed loyal’, in the opposite tone of voice and quite loud. We felt it would be good to use a line from the book in the relationship still image. ‘My child’, worked well as it summed up the story, was short but at the same time powerful and effective. For wealth/jealousy we had one person saying ‘I have it…
don’t want it’, and another saying ‘don’t have it… just want it’. And for the final image we used ‘mummy says we can’t do that’, showing the boys know it wrong, but still do it anyway. We had to body sculpture a partner into a 7year old boy; I made my partner sit on the floor with crossed legs and his head in his arms and a grumpy face. I then moulded him into a 14year old this time he was stood up hands in his pockets and looking at the floor, sort of bored.
