Drama coursework: Slavetrade - Development Mar 06 11AMc For the first task (first three hours) of the development lessons of the Slavetrade

Authors Avatar

Greg Cameron             Drama coursework: Slavetrade - Development                     Mar 06

    11AMc

For the first task (first three hours) of the development lessons of the Slavetrade we were to continue from the ideas and tasks we started in the response lesson, we were to develop theses and look into more depth to the emotional strain that the salves were put under and the conditions they would have had to suffer whilst being captured and beaten and when they were at work on the slave farms. For the first consequential task I was in a group along with David Timmins, Glenn Jenkins, Nikhil Sen, Simon Laird, Stuart Wood, Dean Parmar, Daniel Mullooly and Chris Freeman.  In this task we decided to enact a scene where the slaves had been marched across Africa and were being taken to England to the slave farms. Daniel Mullooly, Nikhil Sen and David Timmins were all the salve masters. Chris, Dean, Glenn, Simon and Stuart played the parts of the slaves. In this particular scene I was to play a former slave narrating a flashback of an event in his life, this particular event was his capture and sentence into slavery, Chris was to play my character in the scene seven years previous. My character is called Jemal and Dean’s character is called Jabbo. We chose to only identify and name two of the slaves because these were the main focus of the scene they were the two main characters of the piece and the focus was on the relationship and situations that had and were in. The other benefit to this idea was that as we had nine people within the group we did not have enough time within the scene to allow everyone to have a main part and also this would have hampered the realism of the piece as not all the slaves would have acted in the same way, some would have accepted it and just allow what happened to happen and some would try and fight it, this gave us the broader range of characters and allowed us to show both sides of the situation for the slaves. My role as the narrator was to describe  the way the ‘white man’ came and took my people out of the village, marched us across Africa to the slave ships and portray the mental hurt of what I suffered has/is causing (caused) me as I recall it.

The scene (Act) begins by the slaves being marched by the slave masters across Egypt and we showed this by having Chris, Dean, Glenn etc walking across the front of the stage and up the side stairs on to the stage itself, we did this to symbolise being marched across Africa onto the slave ship. Chris (me as Jabbo) was to be the weaker of the two main slaves as he was one of the youngest and so as he was being marched he was struggling to keep up and so was stumbling up the stairs and dragging his feet etc and making gasping sounds. At this point David (slave master) whips lashes Chris around the back three times for being too slow. Dean then called out for Jemal and Chris lets out two loud screams. We used the second scream as the sign for everyone to freeze in their position and also as my cue to become animated within the scene and begin narration. In this narration I am trying to show how recalling the memories of what happened (in the events that the audience have just seen) affects my tone and expressions, as the scene shows the suffering of the slaves for not being able to keep up with each other (more specifically Chris/Me as Jemal), I had to lower my voice so that it created the soft emotional tone, in order to show my anger I raised my voice slightly when I began to talk about my village being burned and my people being killed, this showed to the audience that I was angry at what had happened but the fact that I was still talking slowly and softly showed that what I was takin about made me feel upset and hurt. In order to show how much it affected me I needed to show the emotion with the eyes, in order to do this I felt that I had to feel something that had hurt me in my past in order to portray and convey this emotion into our scene. By doing this I was able to recall events that brought a slight tear to my eye and then I imagined what it must have been like in those times and how I would have felt in that situation, and how I would have felt losing my home and family and how I would have felt being beaten by someone who was not so domineering and powerful but instead weaker and less of a man than I was ( as was the situation and truth of the Slavetrade era), I became quite emotional as my narration went on, an in order to make the scene seem real enough I did not pre plan what I was going to say, I had a rough idea of what I was talking about but I felt that in order to show the flashback of memories once shut out I decided that I should totally improvise.

Join now!

The benefit to doing this was that I could slow my speech down and take the time to think about what I was going to say through the narration and the pauses and expressions I made when I was thinking all added to the emotion and power of the speech and scene. I also gave the introduction tot eh main characters myself (Chris) as Jemal and Dean as Jabbo and we felt that this was the best way to show the relation ship between our two characters (best friends) and so overcame the issue of having to stress within ...

This is a preview of the whole essay