Drama Exploration - Gender Issues

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The way in which I have responded to the material I have been given is very well and progressive. I was first of all very confused how to develop any of the case histories in terms of characters. One of the similarities I found with all the case histories is that there seemed to be all perfect families who were completely happy with their systems of life and wouldn’t want a thing changed in the world. This made it hard to develop a story line according to the case histories which was interesting and very well portrayed the issues with over working mothers, one gender thinking they are better than the other and so on. But before all this we were in groups of 3 and the teacher gave us his own case history. This was about a family of 3 where one parent who always took care of the kids got a promotion at work or instead got employed. Here it was easy to develop structured sequences because straight away we had some ideas of how to start. My idea was of a family where the dad works non-stop and he comes back home with his child jumping all over him and the wife says she can’t take care of the child on a certain day so he has to do it. This then turned into an argument but the husband eventually agreed. This was a very tense moment so far. Eventually the husband did not live up to his work and the relationship with his wife gradually fell apart. They did not talk much at home and ignored each other. Everything in the atmosphere was very tense.

   Chairs

Derek

Jamal

Lucy

Table

Before that I had to deal with a situation where the husband got a promotion at work but the wife didn’t want him to take it because it would mean he wouldn’t have time to take care of the kids and she would get inconvenienced with her job. So she was saying her job was better than his job. He then had to tell the boss he couldn’t take the promotion. Here we mainly had to show tension in the house hold. It went from good, to bad, to terrible (this is in terms of tension).

After this we were made into groups of around 5, this is when we were given the 3 case histories on a sheet of paper to read and then work on. These case histories were Mary and Adam, John and Cathy, Shirley and Mike. One problem we had was in the case histories there were only around 2 or 3 characters mentioned. But in the end after coming up with a few ideas collectively as a group we managed to work our way round it. Personally I was very surprised and fascinated by the material we were given. The stories weren’t ones you hear everyday. They were all unique in their own way and to make them work I had to be very imaginative. What I did mostly was to be very positive about the stories and make sure I find all the good points and concentrate on them and not bother thinking about the negative points. This worked very well.

The ideas we came up with as a group and individually were very poor to start off with. For a few lessons sir wasn’t there so we ended up completely doing and coming up with the ideas on our own. So we had no boundaries and no one to ask. So because of this we became careless and started coming up with silly ideas instead of focusing. The first play we had come up with involved a house husband and his wife. The husband cheated on the wife with a woman from his work place where he works as an insurance salesman every afternoon. Due to this the husband and wife never really spent any time together as the wife worked in the mornings. The part we went wrong was when we decided to play kids who were very young. This was pointless as they were kids and did not do much and couldn’t even talk properly. So this was just a waste of characters and time instead of concentrating on good drama. We eventually got rid of this play.

Chairs

Shirley

Mike

Tom

Table

After this we decided to start again but gradually build up slower. We definitely knew that in our play the main things we wanted to show was tension in the households and an over powering gender. So we came up with a few more ideas and then put these ideas into still images. We started developing our ideas by doing various photos of what we thought the most important parts of our role-play were going to be. We ended up making 4 photos which showed basically what our role-play in the end needed to incorporate:

Picture 1: Mike the husband at one side of the room and his wife Shirley at the other side of the room, with their son Tom in the middle.

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Picture 2: Mike at home making Tom’s dinner before Tom goes to play school.

Picture 3: Shirley at work

Picture 4: Mike is really happy after getting the promotion from his Boss. We then further developed these into structured sequences by making random scenes using our photos that could be in the play. But not doing it in any particular order. We started off with what we thought could be a last scene when the husband and wife have an argument. From there we made what could be a starting scene where everything could be fine and the person first ...

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