Rwanda Evaluation

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Rwanda

GCSE Paper 1 Unit 1

Evaluation

        

In this topic I looked at the Rwandan Genocide through the eyes of refugees, child soldiers, the problem from the West’s point of view and the first hand witness accounts. I most enjoyed exploring refugee problems, because it made me use different drama techniques to the ones I am used to, and acting out witness accounts because we were given the opportunity to use abstract drama, which I find harder that realism but enjoy a lot.

We as a class were given a wide variety of tasks that needed different dramatic techniques to help them get the desired point across to the audience. Among them was the refugee soundscape, the whole class frozen image of child soldiers and the split-scene depicting the ignorance of the West. I found these tasks challenging, and they made me dig deeper to bring out more emotions in my acting. During the refugee soundscape, I found that I had to really feel the emotions of fear, despair , exhaustion and panic to be able to portray the feelings properly through vocal expression, and help add to the layers that were drumming, stamping, heavy breathing and screaming. All drew a picture of a dusty road on a hot day with thousands fleeing for their lives, overcome with exhaustion and fear. The pitch of my voice gave away the fact that I was a child, and as we reared the climax of the piece the whole group raised the tempo, pitch, pace and volume to show the change in atmosphere.

In the class I think that Channon Daly used inventive ideas to add to the tension, and she thought outside the box, which gave her group an extra edge to their performance. I also thought that Lilly Walters performed well, but on a much more general scale, because she has a more individual style. She seems to be more at ease when acting, slipping from one technique to another, making it look easy, and helping the group to stand out when performing.

During our lessons, we were given various stimuli to provoke acting talent and use of drama techniques. These ranged from photos, film clips and first hand diary accounts. I found that the film clip of the refugees helped me to picture the scene for myself when performing the sound scape. It also helped me to draw more vocal expression, but also more active body language and facial expression during the three scene improvisation.

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Another stimulus that helped me a lot was the witness account of hundreds of dead bodies floating down the river, made seemingly alive by the current. The imagery drawn by that inspired me and my group to create an abstract piece that was different from everyone else’s. As were mute for most of it and mimed out what Emily was saying made the atmosphere slightly eerie, while our body language was floating and graceful like ballet dancers, which w thought the bodies would have looked like. On some words there was decisive body language and some things were repeated to ...

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