In this Unit we explored “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” play, in all different routes to cover every inch of the play in greater detail, for example using comedy and tension to create different atmospheres. We explored the tension in one scene of the play and comedy in another scene which is called ‘Tableaux’. The class was split down the middle into two big groups, one with the scene of tension and the other with the scene of comedy. The group with the tension scene positioned themselves differently to explain to the audience that they are all inside of Christopher’s head, exploring the emotions that he is feeling inside with all of these little problems eating away at him. They also had one character on the side to act out as if they were Christopher; what is happening outside his head. All of the actors added movement into their pieces of work to capture the audience’s attention and they were all in the same role together one after the other, all in time and as a unit. Each actor that played Christopher remembered all the prime numbers that Christopher says just to calm himself down which was original, all of the actors changed their voices so they all weren’t the same ,it made the performance enjoyable to watch and eye capturing. Your eyes were drawn to Christopher.
In another lesson, we were exploring quotes from the play that were placed around the room which we had to act out. We all had to use an essence machine to represent the quote that we had been given. We chose to do Ed looking for Christopher and the dog being found dead and the last scene we chose where Christopher finds the letters which were written by his mum. I chose these scenes because I thought they had the most emotion and they were powerful, effective scenes. We started off with Ed looking for Christopher, I acted as Christopher and Chankave acted as Ed. We had Chankave (Ed) talking aloud to me (Christopher) to symbolise that Ed is looking for Christopher but we made Christopher not say anything as if he were scared and hiding away from everyone. The next scene we completed had been of Ms Shears and Ed and Christopher on the front lawn, Christopher was bent down on one knee to show his care for the dog. We also had Ms Shears shouting at Christopher to get away from her dead dog because she had thought that Christopher had killed her dog. We had put Ed next to Christopher as if he were reassuring him, because he had a lot of care and love for that dog and he wanted to find out who killed it. He had started investigating what happened to the dog. We used movement to comfort the speech and we changed our body to something that would best fit the characters emotions at the time.
The task in the lesson we did next were to create a scene about how Christopher had felt in this situation. We explored the scene where Christopher were on the train, naming what he could see, he had said that he saw “Cows with brown spots”. We used our bodies to make it look abstract to the audience eye. We added twists and turns to being our work alive to highlight Christopher’s true emotions to the audience. We also listened out of what Christopher had said and added gestures such like when Christopher had said “Could not see” we put our hands over our eyes, one after each other to symbolise that Christopher couldn’t see. Where Christopher was talking about what he could see and how he felt, we added masses of body language and coordination to capture the audience’s attention. However, we thought of lots of different