Final Performance Reflection (Unit 1)

After learning and taking in a lot of skills over the course of our first unit in Drama we ended up doing a performance based on one or more of the scenes that we had practiced in our drama classes during the unit.

My group consisted of myself, Federico, Laith, Sai and Tommy and our piece was based on the bus 174 incident along with Carlos getting kicked out of his home.

My character was a frail, daring and lost teenager called Carlos and my situation/scenario was I was scared to death of father although I loved him dearly but I had lost all the money I had earned at 'work'. I knew that my father would kill me if I reached home with absolutely no money. I was a very delicate character that did not really have any mental capacity to face an angry father. As a character I had a lot of distinctive lines that showed
a) I was scared to death of my father yet I love him
b) I was a troubled teenager who had no purpose in this world
and finally...
c) I was no big gang member in fact I was delicate and quite frankly scared.
A few of my lines that were an example of the above...
1) "How am I going to face my father"(scared of my father)
2) (When Laith attempts to interrogate me) "I WANT TO GO BACK TO MY FATHER"
(my profound affection for my father).
3) (Thought Tracking) "How could I lose that money?, How could I be so careless? and is that a gun in his hand?"
(this shows just how lost I was (losing the money))
Along with these lines that I said during our performance I was quite restricted in my posture as again I was a "delicate gang member"and my toes were pointed inwards just to show how restricted I was. The fact that for most of the performance I had my head in my hands and most of my gestures were extremely hesitant was a massive clue even before any of my dialogue that I was a troubled soul. I did not utilise my accent change 'talent' to much which is something I wanted to do but I am not disappointed I didn't. I feel that I did a good job portraying the person I wanted to be although I did really well I still feel that I had room for improvement (accent change).

Our beginning was a quite a slow start yet it built a lot of tension in the audience. The beginning consisted of me (Carlos) and Tommy (Drunkard) in a bus occupied in our respective lives and again it was quite silent besides from the bus driver (Sai) yelling out the stations and stops. Entering angrily and not very silently was Nascimento (Federico) who first angrily dropped the money for the driver to pick up and then strolled to the back seat hesitantly yet confidently. The middle then came when we started to use 'tableaux's' (freeze frames) when we used the drama technique of thought tracking. The middle then sauntered along into the climax with Carlos getting fake killed and then controversial death of Nascimento we came to quite a depressing end where we tried to portray the lost streets of Brazil and I feel that we did in the form of a bit of role play between Carlos the lost yet daring teenager and the lost clearly not confident police officer (Laith) had a face off where eventually the faster teenager got away. The end was when I broke away from the police officer who had absolutely no care for the innocent person he killed barring in mind he also killed Nascimento.

I feel that as a group when I thought we were not being productive we actually were and the fact that our group looked like a group that could not pull anything substantial off and then doing the opposite and pulling off a brilliant performance was one thing I felt that worked really worked well for us. Another thing was we made sure no scene was boring and we utilised both space and time extremely well and that is another thing I feel very pleased about. Finally another really good thing was the fact that we had made sure a character's were all very believable and relavant to whatever performance we were doing.

Overall I am extremely pleased with our performance as both a group and individually. There was room for improvement like utilising the role of our characters a bit more but overall it was an extremely good performance. Our performance made me feel that we wrapped up the first unit in very good style.

Shawn 10C