Drama work on the theme of oppression.

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Drama GCSE Unit 1

In our first unit we looked at opression (mans Inhumaity against other men) in general but we mainly looked at opression in Nazi Germany from 1936-45. We discussed things such as the death camps all over the world and we collected information about this and other types of opression over time.

Over this Unit we used many different techniques to help us portray opression in a variety of ways.

Whilst looking into opression, we were shown things to trigger responses from us all. One of these things were pictures from the Miami Holocaust Memorial built in memory of the thousands of jews killed during the reign of Adolf Hitler. Seeing these pictures gave both me and my class mates an idea of how bad things were for the jews. Although these pictures

gave us a slight idea of what was to come it made the class realise that this unit was very serious. We also looked at other aspects of oppression from different eras and cultures.

For me i believe oppression is rich and powerful stopping the "lesser People" from having their say. There are many examples of oppression over time such as the slave trade, Hitlers genocide of the jews and to the present day Robert Mugabi and the way he treats the public of zimbabwe.

We have explored these different "versions" of oppression in many ways in the studio. We have done freeze frames in which we worked in pairs and in each freeze we had to show our power and dominance over our partner. we then looked at each of the freeze frames and analysed them. i particually liked Hollys and Lillys set of freeze frames because i felt Holly used her body to show her dominance. For a small girl Holly used her stance very well.She had her feet streched out to the width of her shoulders which made her look bigger and stronger than she actually is also she had her shoulders back a bit which emphasised her posture. Also this was helped by Liily being on the floor which helped show everyone how small Lilly was and how big Holly was.As for lilly, for me it was all in the eyes. Whether she was being oppressed or whether she was the oppresser although she used her body well to show off her power or weakness it was all capped off with her eyes. Lilly is one of them people who can bring out any emotion in her eyes whether it be sadness or anger.

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We also used still images and then went into spontaneous improvisation, this gave a great effect as we could get a true understanding of what it felt like being oppressed.We did many spontaneous improvisations such as the freeze frames (mentioned in the last paragraph) and the German SS Soldiers sorting out the jews into groups.We had 3 Soldiers (our head soldier Luke, And the two side soldiers, Carrie-Ann and Me) and the rest of the class was in a line, Our head Soldier then walked past each person and decided whether they were to do hard labour, work on ...

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