When the tour guide first walks into the house with the audience the remaining two characters are frozen in position in the great hall. Once the tour guide places the audience on the balcony where they are supposed to be he takes up his frozen position on the floor of the great hall. After 3 seconds we move into different places where eerie music starts. The eerie music which is playing was created and composed by us. It is in a three part harmony which is played on keyboards. We wanted to use this music to symbolize pre-emption of death and unhappiness within the family which will occur later in the performance. While the music is playing we use isolation of the body to create symbolic movements of sadness and moving apart. The music lasts for about 2 minutes where it suddenly stops and is continued by our voices in the same three part harmony which we used for the music except speeded it up and extended slightly. The harmony represents unity within the family as even though the mother and the daughter don’t get on they still love each other, the music then cuts in again which shows that sadness and death are going to over power them. The music works really well with the story as it provides different textures and something unusual for the audience to concentrate on.
Once this scene is finished we then do a dance in the great hall. We thought that putting a dance in at the beginning of the performance would be an easier but effective way to communicate with the audience that something was wrong in the family. It also adds more abstraction in our piece which is what we wanted.
The music used for the dance is called…………………………….. , The main instrument used in the music is a piano. We thought that this would contrast well with what the dance symbolized as the piano music is very fast and gives the felling of happiness and excitement. The dance doesn’t symbolize this at all. We picked happy music as it shows the inner feelings of the family; the happiness is how they want to be. What we wanted to show in our dance is the broken up relationships within the family. One thing the dance shows is that the mother and daughter don’t get on. We show this by using weight dependency. The father stands behind the mother pushing her towards the daughter, the daughter catches the mother then they both break away. We show there dislike for each other in a more simplistic way by the positioning we take up of the dance floor. The father is always in the middle keeping us apart but tries throughout the dance to join us together.
The dance ends with the father falling on the floor into the mother’s arms. This represents his death. The daughter then reads a poem which is echoed by the father as if he were a ghost. During the poem there is very sad music playing called……………………… We picked sad music as we felt this was an emotional time in the performance and we wanted the audience to feel emotion.
A Bustle in the house
A bustle in the house,
The morning after death,
The solemnest of industries,
Erupted on earth.
The sweeping up the heart,
And putting love away,
That we shall not what to use again,
Until eternity.
We now move the audience into a smaller room in the mansion as we wanted the audience’s attention to be mainly on us rather than the room. In this room we do freeze frames of the father’s life which we turn into acting. The freeze frames symbolize his life flashing before his eyes as he is dieing on the floor:
- The daughter birth
- Teaching her to read
- An argument between the mother and daughter
- The father coughing (a symptom of his illness)
- The mother writing her diary
- An argument between the mother and daughter
- The father dieing.
We have the same argument between the mother and daughter which symbolizes that they are always arguing. The father dieing at the end in exactly the same position as he was in when in died in the great hall represents that the flash backs were memories of his life.
The flash backs work really well in our performance as they create different texture, rather than going straight in to acting the freeze frames give the audience time to think about our performance and what the freeze frame may mean.
