How did your role emerge, and how was it communicated?

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Drama

How did your role emerge and how was it communicated?

Through the process of exploring our stimulus of ‘Scream’ by Edvard Munch, we came up with a lot of ideas for story lines all based around the idea of being trapped. Therefore we aimed to show a range of aspects of being trapped.  Due to the complexity and range of depth we could go into, we came up with many different character roles. The performance was mainly focusing on the theme rather than any individual characters, however the characters we created were designed to affect the audience’s responses and inflict emotion upon them. We also used a range of genres to create the performance, which resulted in a variety of roles being created. However, not all the people within the scenes were representing an individual character or role, but for example, the poem scene which everybody featured in, we were not becoming individual people, we were becoming an emotion.

We came up with the idea that you can become trapped within an eating disorder, and I then volunteered to research into the life of an anorexia sufferer. At first, we decided to make this scene a monologue, but after trying out a few ideas of how to portray her, nothing really seemed to bring across the mentality an anorexia sufferer goes through. We decided to investigate more into websites on the internet, where I discovered some survivor stories. Many of these sufferers referred to anorexia as another person, which is where our next idea came from. We tried this out and therefore came up with the cleverly named character of Anna. A physical representation of anorexia, which worked really well.

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I played Sophie, the sufferer, and thought that by giving her a brief monologue at the beginning would allow her to explain how Anna affects her in her day to day life. As the role began to emerge, we thought it useful to take Sophie on an emotional journey so we could really understand the character. We aged her at around 17, which was obviously easy to relate to, as all teenage girls are somehow unhappy with their body image. To communicate this to the audience, I wore a baggy jumper and kept a very low status compared to ...

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