Still Images
In pairs we had a sculptor and a model. When I was the sculptor for the first image, life in the village. I wanted my model to have an enthusiastic expression on his face. I gave him a large smile and told him to have wide eyes. His body posture was high, looking upwards to his father, who might’ve been working on his own farm/household. I did this to show the audience how the slave’s lives where like before the Europeans came and captured them.
We worked of four images:
Life in the Village, Rumours of the Europeans, Capture and Moving towards the Ship.
We then put the pairs into larger groups and combined our images together, making it seem like a village. In our groups we added another two images: On the boat and at the auctions. At the auction still image, I was put into a low body posture holding onto a slave boy who was being dragged away, my face was screaming. We did this to show the audience the separation of family and friendship at the auctions
Thought Tracking
For though tracking we put the whole group into a certain area of the studio it wasn’t very large but we had to fit 20+ people in this space, we all had to make our way into the space provided making sure we didn’t step on people, but as more people came it started to become increasingly harder. When we were sitting down, we were all cramped up into the small area we had to thought track. Mine was “Where am I? Why are there so many people? Where, where are they taking me?” The thought tracking gave the audience an understanding of how the slaves were feeling during being cramped up in such a small place for a very long time. This would help them connect with the performance and what actually happened
Characterisation
My character was a veteran hunter who was looked highly upon in the village, he had a high posture, and he walked with a limp due to an accident out hunting. When he confronted the person who betrayed the village, he made himself higher than he should be, giving an impression of being large. When he shouted at him, his voice started off being very quiet upset ‘why?’, but as he carried on I got louder as he wanted to know why the person could do such a thing to his own people
Narration
Our narration was during our still images, it was to set the scene that our slaves were about to go into, one of our groups was “The Villagers have heard rumours of the Europeans, they’re paranoid. They can’t trust anyone…not even their own family.”
In our narration we used an echo on the words; Rumours, Europeans and Paranoid, This would give emphasis on the words, we did this so the audience could get a clear view of what was going to happen in the piece instead if not understanding what’s going on.
