Greek Blog 2 (4th - 8th)

This week brought us back from half term and so from being used to lie in after lie in we had to get back into routine which wasn't necessarily easy. I found that a lot of people were un focused as a result of having time off of college and being out of routine which did make life a lot harder to get down to work, I myself found I was a lot more tired that i usually am as I had possibly slept in a lot over the half term.

On Monday we began the week by looking at the themes of Blood and Light, finding out what sort of themes we all thought could be included in this category, these included

• Forgiveness
• Honour
• Violence & Revenge

From these we looked at what sort of things we could draw from it and which parts of the play they related to. Forgiveness I felt related to the ideal in the play the overall goal of the piece, Honour related to Electra and Orestes killing their mother for killing their father because it was what the gods wanted and would protect the honour of the family. Violence and Revenge relate to the main goings on in the play, the violence for the killing of family members and the revenge for doing so, the description of their mother killing their father with her lover is horrifying and incredibly violent. 

On Wednesday we had Alex as a new team leader for the morning she got us to look at working as a group, as one this was to help us develop ourselves as a chorus. First we led on the floor with a book holding our heads up, from there we concentrated on our breathing and working our diaphragms to get ourselves warmed up. After we were warmed up we did lots of different ways of working as a team to get different emotions across to do this we particularly worked on "The Bath" scene working on our character's that work around the actors as the chorus. We worked around the bath that Agamemnon was being killed in and did our own actions to what was happening as journalists which is what we are considering the chorus to be. 

On Thursday we mostly covered a certain scene which is the one between both Electra and Helen and how Helen is accusing Electra of killing her sister Clytmnestra, she carries on bating Electra in a series of accusations. Whilst this was going on I went off to the cafe with Bradley and we went through our scene between Electra and Tyndareos and made notes on performance on the script discussing what we thought ought to happen between the characters on stage during parts of the scene and including the chorus in this and tossed around ideas with what they could do. 

I had some ideas with the staging of the play, my ideas were to use a thrust staging and move the chairs from the platforms to around the curtains of the stage area leaving exits to behind the curtains in the two corners of the staging area. I then thought we should put the bed at the base of the tiered area and still have some audience on the tiered area looking down at the bed that Orestes lays on, I then felt that the mirror that Helen uses should be near one of the exits in the corners of the staging area to allow Helen to move in, out and around the stage area. I also felt that we should use the main exits to the theatre to be the main ways to get off and on the stage, that way it would be not only more clear to the audience but also lets the characters come off and on in their own way and give them time to bring the character to life with the changing of people as the characters. 

Overall I felt that this week was far more beneficial to both myself and the group as we learned a lot more about what we wanted from the characters and the play itself it also gave a lot of us ideas as to how we wanted to stage the play and how we  wanted the audience to feel about it and it's themes.