Using Stimuluses to Make a Final Performance :: Acting Education Drama Theatre Essays

Using Stimuluses to Make a Final Performance For our drama portfolio we were given many different stimuli to work with that all gave us different ideas for our final performance. I choose two stimuli and used them to develop ideas. My first stimulus I would like to talk about is a sentence about poppies that was given to us. We took our stimulus and brainstormed ideas. We looked at different drama strategies to employ that would help us understand the text. The sentence, which was about poppies made us concentrate on the aspect of war. Therefore death was the main idea but not necessarily due to war but to other reasons. Poppies are red and red symbolises blood, death, danger, wrong and love. As well as the performance consisting of pain an idea would be to also portray love. So we were thinking of a performance with a contrast of love and death. Loss will convey the blood death and danger so we should use loss as a main element within the piece. However, we were forgetting what poppies actually are flowers. This obvious aspect should be included, as a poppy is obviously a flower and death is an obvious element within war. They are both stating the obvious and therefore some strategies should be used to gain ideas from this aspect of poppies. We used hot seating on someone who is a presenter at a garden show. We selected some sentences about flowers and thought of using narrating to say them. At the same we created some still images that were related to the text to investigate the link between the poppies and the idea of dying in war. We now had a few initial ideas that could be developed further and used within our final piece. My second stimulus was to be put in the position of a mother. I was told that my son had been missing in action and I receive a letter from him which is back dated two months ago. We took our stimulus and started to create ideas again. We took into account the time period and how life would be different then. We concentrated on the parent’s and son’s relationship and the parent’s priorities. What would be the most important thing in their life at that moment in time? There were many aspects to consider so we decided to use hot seating as our first strategy. We also had to consider the conditions the son was living in as it was set in the war. It was important for the audience to understand the atmosphere not only with the setting but within the