Curiosity Killed The Cat - Bob's Drama Journal, 6/3/03

DRAMA JOURNAL - MAR 6 2003 Click here to go home
THE "WHAT THE HELL WENT WRONG?" ANALYSIS OF OUR PERFORMANCE AND WHAT WE'VE LEARNED...

Holly shit! I don't know if I can describe what went wrong without crying. Let me try.

Lets take a walk down memory lane shall we?.....
Originally we had the idea of putting people behind windows and viewing them via a sterotype and then viewing them in actuallity, with the removed windows. It wasn't a bad idea to come up with in the first lesson, or so I thought.

Then, without James for our next few classes, we (Rachel, Kylie and myself) had to modify the idea and swap things around a bit. After a few good thoughts were put together, the entire structure changed. We came up with the idea of having three ethnicities, Asians, Afghans and Europeans, and viewing them as most people perceive them, in an exaggerated form, and then viewing them again with the context of reality mixed in. So basically we were going to act out each of the three scenes twice, the first lot with the observer perceiving how these people act, exaggerating evry statement, almost like twisting a story when telling it to a friend. Then we'd have the same scene with the observer interacting with the two immigrants, in a more friendly manner.

All that was somethng I (mostly) came up with in the one lesson. I was on a roll. Go me. Then along comes the next lesson where we think we can improve it and add more dialogue and stuff. We did. Only one problem - the lights.

Come Thursday the 6th of March (today) we had 43 minutes (periods 5 mins shorter because of an assembly) to prepare and then it was showtime. Benney gave us a couple of ideas which we ended up using. So in the end we'd cut down one of the ethnic groups and had two, with an interview type thingy afterwards. I thought we had the cat in the bag. As usual, I was wrong, (it wasn't a cat it was rabid tasmanian devil). I'll be honest and quite frank when I say I haven't got the slightset idea how or why we fucked up, but we didn't deserve it, thats for sure. We worked hard, we came up with new concepts and ideas each and every lesson and we ended up being bitten in the ass.

I have to give credit where credit is due - the other groups did well. I liked the way that they handled it and used limited dialogue but the choice words they used were well selected. The one thing that I thought was really effective, and some of you may not agree, I thought when Tiffany and Ashkaan were walking towards "Australia" and citizenship (I think) and were going along nicely until Nick yelled "Stop", followed by words like 'discrimination', 'fear' and 'rejection'. I thought that was really good. Mel and Gemma's group had really good ideas too, but I think it was mainly based on movement, and that really worked for them.

All in all, I guess we've (Rachel, Kylie, and me) learned more from failing that we would've from succeeding, in the sense that we now have an idea of what works, what doesn't, what the audience whant and what they don't. Oh well, you gotta be in it to in it, and in our case you gotta be in it to lose it. It doesn't really matter though, we got up on the stage, did our thing and I guess in a sense we all won. There were no losers. We had a go, had fun and we learned from it, and that's what counts, isn't it?

-Bob

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