The Response Phase for Romeo and Juliet

We were given a text ‘A Midsummer Nights Dream’ by William Shakespeare to work on and develop towards performance. We used this text as previously we had worked on another Shakesprean play ‘The Tempest’ and had enjoyed this, so we thought this would be a good opportunity for a follow up. The main themes we explored and discovered in ‘ A Midsummer Nights Dream’ were oppression, freedom, power and various forms of love; Passion like the love shown between Theseus and Hippolyta, Parental Love resembling the love shared between Egeus and his daughter Hermia and finally Unconditional love the same as the love shared between Lysander and Hermia; for this play I was put into a group of four- two males and two females, then we were given a scene to work with and develop in our group, our particular scene was Act one- the court scene for which I was given the role of Hermia’s father Egeus. To help develop our characters further we used explorative strategies, these were, freeze frames, hot seating, role-play and a tableau as well as marking the moment and thought tracking to give our character more depth and background.

           Tableau

To show the theme of we used ten people for this strategy of mixed gender. The tableau consisted of five people standing in a row on a chair; this was to symbolise their roles as the oppressors as they were socially higher than the other five who were standing on the floor with their heads down, these were all diagonal with one another to form a triangular shape so that none of the characters were blocked from view. We used a series of three freeze frames to show the change of theme from oppression, to equality and then finally freedom.

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The first stage was all our heads down and the leaders of the two groups turning round, then the second stage was all of the other participants following the example set by the two leaders lifting all our heads up and around to give the idea of , then finally the last stage was all of the characters embracing one another to show that we were all free of responsibility and captivity

Role Play

For this strategy I was put into another group of four, containing three white males and one white female, we were then given the theme of ...

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