‘‘Haunted by the past’’
For our devised drama work, option 1, in January 2007, we were given two stimuli:
- The famous painting called ‘The Scream’ created by Edvard Munch in 1893
- In class we listened to ‘The song of the Hebrew Slaves’ featured in the ‘Nabucco’ opera by Guiseppe Verde (1813-1901.)
I decided to use Google images to see a larger picture of ‘The Scream’ in colour so I could use the colours to inspire me. I felt that a picture in black and white doesn’t have the same affect on an individual- the coloured image gave me the idea of using blue and orange lighting in our performance. Subsequently, in our scene of the terrorist attack, I wanted to find ideas on what types of speech terrorists would use- to do this I watched a programme on the discovery channel called, ‘Seconds from Disaster’ in order to motivate me. ‘The Song of the Hebrew Slaves’ is a famous song about the slaves’ homeland- these people are haunted by memories of their past loved home and when I first listened to it, I thought it was very slow and the pitch was low, therefore showing it was quite sad and mournful. I thought that ‘The Scream’ portrayed isolation and fear however as the figure is alone, holding his hands to his head and his face is slightly pulled downwards- the figure seems pressured, strained and anxious. We used these observations for our performance, having written down on the recording sheets our initial ideas, we chose to base our performance on the theme of lack of control, because the figure in Edvard Munch’s painting appears to have lost control and the Hebrew slaves had no control over their desires of returning to their homeland. In addition, we thought that to make show our idea was abstract and different from any other group, we should think more deeply into ‘The Scream’ painting…
