Childhood Memories

The practical work our group performed in October 2007 was a devised performance meaning we took for example a poem or part of a script and based our performance around it. Our devised piece of work was based on childhood memories. In this essay I will evaluate my own contribution and researches I have done. I will also examine my group’s devised work and another group’s devised piece and compare the two and find similarities and differences, my performance was called the Monster Mash and the other was called Anorexia.

My contribution into our performance was very large as a directed probably the most of the play but others were involved and gave me ideas to improve the performance or let them change to how they felt what would look better and honestly I do consider that it did develop our work quite a bit. I also wrote most of the script and made sure people knew what to say. On top of that I wrote the cue sheet for the lighting and sound.

To assist me in the devised area of the performance I looked on the internet, and in the library for poems and extracts scripts to do with childhood, the most useful material I used was a poem named Remembering The Child by Peter Bennett, the poem was all about the poet remembering his childhood and all the fun times of him imagining all the games he made up. Unfortunately our group did not have time to use this poem so we tried to devise our piece on The Witches taken from the story, the witches by Roahal Dahl.

Our devised performance set in the mid late 90’s which in my view is fairly contemporary as you could see by the way the characters responded to the environment and to each other. The other play was more modern than ours around 2005-7 as the issues involved in it were more modern day as you wouldn’t see them as much as around ten to fifteen years ago. Anorexia’s similarities to our play were that the historic period was fairly close and the biggest difference was our culture.

The Society of both our plays were slightly diverse, with the monster mash having an elderly married couple with the husband not really bothered about anything his wife is involved in where as the wife is very inquisitive and spiteful towards children and two child friends who are looking for trouble without realising it, they are also incredibly imaginative by thinking their neighbour is a monster. Where as in Anorexia most of whole cast were teenagers as it is mostly the young adults and teens, with a mother who is very interested in the care of her child and there was also some multi-role playing with the bullies which were just minor cameo roles. You can see the contrast between the characters because of the way they act and the way they involve with each other.

The culture of Anorexia is all about the title, Anorexia and teenage life today. This was shown through the scripting and the monologues that used powerful language and the acting of the cast to show what it means to be a teenager as they are teens themselves. In the monster mash our culture was heavily based on child imagination one could see this through the wording and plot of our devised piece.

We chose to use the style of a naturalistic background with some comedy and light heartiness, the reason we used these styles were to try and give a feeling of ordinary setting with the children giving a sense of the abnormal for the audience. The other performance was naturalistic as it involved a very serious issue in the world today; it was probably used to pull at the hearts of the audience to make them feel sorry and become of the issues of young people today.

To conclude I have learnt from this experience that I don’t need to use funny accents and a lot of comedy to put forward such a powerful piece of drama, I also think in the future I will defiantly contribute as much as I can and let other people put forward their idea.