For our module 3 piece we chose the topic of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. As a group we decided on this topic as it was a high point point in world history so we believed there would be a vast amount of sources for us to research the information we needed from.
The first thing we did as a group was research on our idea to find out a lot about it, to begin and make a plot. This work doesn’t relate to module 1 or 2 work as it is a completely different idea.
The genre we worked in was tragedy we decided on this genre as it was well matched to our idea and research, also our stimulus influenced us to use this genre. We decided to work in this genre because we were using facts we felt would make a better effect on the audience, this is because the facts made the audience think about the issues in a serious and developed way. I felt the audience could feel what the characters are going through during the stages in our play with the characters more as they were believed to be more realistic. Tragedy was the genre that all of my group felt confident with, we felt that we could all cope with that and that would be best suited towards how we act .We thought that this genre would best suit our research and the picture because it would help us to get our point across of how serous the issue is. We didn’t try any other genres as we felt this genre was a good genre to use and didn’t have the time to swap around after doing so much research on the piece involving this genre.
The style we worked in was eclectic because we used naturalism and abstract theatre, we decided on this style as we had already started doing the practical part of the module 2 and that what we had done was naturalistic abstract as so we decided to use this style throughout. We didn’t try to stay in just one style as this was the one our group felt most comfortable with.
By the term eclectic I mean that we used abstract conventions with naturalistic acting. However, in a number of our scene’s we decided to have stylised acting. There are a number of reasons why we did this; because we wanted to highlight these scenes to our audience as we thought they were important to the piece. Furthermore, we wanted to represent many characters and we thought the best way to do this would be by using stereotypes.
The plot of our story basically was what happened in the Rwandan genocide and how it affected both tribes Hutus and Tutsi’s and how terrible and sickening the things that happened actually happened. We came about deciding on this plot as the stories on our research of survivors from the Rwandan genocide spoke about the horrific events they endured or witnessed and we used their stories as a guideline also we felt the events we used were very important parts of what happened in the genocide so the audience would get a clear picture of the story.
The way we chose who would be which characters was quite easy as we planned what would be happening in each scene and then improvised it out with the characters needed and if all our group was comfortable with the character they had just improvised that was the character they then were making sure it was matched to that persons capability.
However, there were certain characters such as the show host we felt needed to be a strong character, the group nominated jack for this part because he could make the show host a fairly strong character. Characterisation was very successful for all of us we felt in the lead up to the exam as we showed the right emotion when needed, I’m sure the characterisation could be improved a lot if we would have had more time to make the piece we could of polished our characterisation a lot more.
My main characters speech
I was laying there amongst all the hundreds of dead bodies, the man beside me (pause) I did not know him though I feel as if I did, I could taste his blood on the tip of my tongue feel the coldness of his dead body and see the sadness in his eyes, for me this was the only way I could survive.. Lay there with the dead, pretending to be dead. Through my line of vision I could see my brother and aunt macheteed to death, (pause) I stopped looking around and just stared into the eyes of the man besides me that was much easier , I’d been there 3 days but these bodies had been there much longer( pause) The stench was unbearable, to think the only way to live my life was to lay amongst hundreds of the dead is unreal and heartbreaking. Each hour at least twenty more bodies were put in this god forsaken place, my initial plan was to lay there and wait a couple of days then make a run for it, however there has been guards 24/7 I’m running out of ideas and haven’t eaten in days.
In this speech I used pauses for a dramatic effect as I was showing my emotions with it being a very sad situation and I wanted the audience to take in and think about what I was telling them.