Greek Blog 3 (11th - 16th)

This week be began by looking at the themes of the play and how they contributed to not only the characters but the play itself and how it eventually ends. To do this we looked at drawing five pictures from scenes in the play that to us were important mine were of:

1. Agamemnon dead in the bath
2. The people of Argos
3. Baby Hermione
4. Clytemnestra's hair
5. Agamemnon's grave

To me these were quite significant, the first one was because in the script it is an incredibly descriptive scene and a horrific one at that, it describes how Electra and Orestes' mother and her lover kill their father in an attempt to gain power over Argos for themselves, the second one I chose because the people of Argos are represented by our chorus who are a big part in the play and explain a lot of the story to the audience, the third was because although baby hermione is not as featured in the play as the other characters she does become the object of attention with the ending when Orestes jumps off the cliff with her in his arms, the fourth one was because of the scene between Electra and Helen when Helen is bating Electra and I chose this from the moment when she picks up a bit of Clytemnestra's hair and turns to Electra and remarks "is this her hair?" and Electra nods "her hair was so much softer than mine but it never shone so well" to me this was a very tense scene and needed to be included in this, the fifth one was because i felt this was almost a symbol of the play itself and was a big yet small part of what goes on in the performance. In Movement we worked on the chorus again, we used the bath that we have been given for the performance from the design department. We also began using what we had done from the week before of using the thought of an emotion with each movement and using that as our movement in the scene where Clytemnestra and her lover kill Agamemnon.

On Wednesday we began with Alex again and did the breathing concentration that she does, I find this very helpful as it allows me to focus and concentrate on what lies ahead on the day. From there we looked at some videos from the national theatre website on greek theatre and how staging is the first thing you should think about in greek theatre and to have an argument within the chorus is both interesting and causes conflict within the performance. Status is also an important part within Greek plays because it shows who is who and where everyone stands within the play, such as the difference between royalty and the gods and the royalty and the chorus, these help to show where the necessary tension within the play lies. During our time with Alex we also worked on using words from the play and creating movements that worked with the words and then saying the words to the actions in different ways, my way was to whisper it which gave the overall feel to it a bit of an eery feeling.

On Thursday we began by starting on certain scenes, I wasn't a part of these scenes so Bradley, Dan and myself went off and read through the scenes that we were in, by doing this we also discussed how we could stage this, most of the staging for the scene that Bradley and myself were in had already been blocked so we knew what we were doing with that and were happy with it. The scene that Dan and I were in we hadn't blocked yet and so we discussed ideas of how we would stage this, in the scene I am talking to Dan and telling him to sleep and talking to both myself and to him, the scene is staged on a bed and then Dan travels around the room talking to Menelaus who comes in and talks to him. For this scene we felt that we would need the entire cast of the scene to create it as it seemed a very much instinct needing piece.