A Painting by Paula Rego called The Family - The Stimulus for our Dram

A Painting by Paula Rego called The Family - The Stimulus for our Drama Piece INTRODUCTION In this essay I will be discussing the work that I have done in the first module of performance studies. The aim of this module was to develop technical skills in dance, drama and music and using the performance process of improvising, rehearsing and performing and then applying these skills to four performance pieces. We carried out several skills workshops to help develop confidence in all 3 thematic areas to a more even consistency as some members of our group had never done dance, music and some hadn't taken expressive arts GCSE. In this module I developed skills in all three areas, some completely new skills (for example in dance) and those skills, which I already knew but developed them to a higher standard of performance. I also learnt the processes of constructing a performance piece in performance studies and skills that are applicable in all three thematic areas. I will elaborate on how I have developed these skills during this module in this essay. THE DRAMA PIECE The stimulus we were given for our drama piece was a painting by Paula Rego called "The Family" which contained a lot of ideas for interpretation, especially work on proxemics, which we had previously studied in our skills workshops. "The Family" shows an ambiguous relationship between men, women and children and the variation in the 'traditional' status of a father, mother and daughter figures. It is important to bear in mind during stages of improvisation that character and plot development are not always the most essential part of a drama piece. More advanced performance skills should be taken into account, such as tension, proxemics and physicality and the subtext created as a result of the effective use of these techniques, which our drama piece evolved around. We decided that the most direct way of communication was to produce a distinct sexual subtext between two characters, and in our case this was the father and the daughter. Initial brainstorms we had were focused on light, physicality and gesture in the picture and we didn't want it to be 'story - led' as we felt this would be too simplistic and wouldn't allow us to explore our skills and techniques as performers. In the early stages of improvisation, we decided that tension was vital in our scene, so this had to be created by si... ...med our dance to a structured rhythm sequence to show the evolving of the evil dominating the pure and good. But as I said before, there seemed to be no real motivation behind our piece. I did feel thought that although we had no dialogue, it was unnecessary to do so and I think that the studying of Boal and Pinter really helped with this. I think that, as a group we realised that plot and character development weren't important at that stage. By not having any characters but just acting the gestus of our role, we portrayed the mannerisms, which as a result created tension because of the content of the scene. I do feel that because we didn't have characters such, the other skills we had refined were lacking. This is the one piece that I actually would like to do again as I don't feel we devised and performed this to the best of our abilities. I think I would've liked to keep the music and dance pieces but adjusted the drama to include the kind of energy we had had in the drama piece where the piece was 'loaded' with subtext. This I feel was not dramatic and didn't convey the ideas to the audience that we wanted to. I don't believe this piece was as successful as it could have been.