Writing in role 1

When is this year going to end? I seriously can't be fucked anymore. I don't care if I can't name all 53 states or if I don't know who the second president was. Is that really going to help me in my life? I mean I don't even know what I want to do with my life so how can I do well in my classes. I don't know what I'm going to use that knowledge for. It's my brother who is going to become a big shot. He's three years younger than me and already has offers from college. 

I tried to study, I really did. But it didn't work. I sat down in the library and tried to read a book. It was so boring. Word after word after word  nothing went in. I even tried to join a study group but the new Call Of Duty came out so, you know, priorities. All I want to do with my free time is kill noobs on Call of Duty. Maybe I should join the Army. 

Mamma cut me deeper.

For Mamma cut me deeper Amanda is going to take the lead. Her character is going to be an overachiever and constantly studying to try and better herself. For the song she wants to show her transition in life and how she is struggling but because of her reputation no one thinks she needs any help.

For the song Amanda has set the scene in a study room where everyone apart from my character is sat studying. I did not feel that my character would be studying as he can’t be bothered to try and achieve anything in life. As such in this scene I am going to be portraying the teacher supervising the students.

The song starts with Amanda sitting in the centre of the stage surrounded by the rest of the group sitting on chairs. My character walks around interacting with individual characters and supervises the room. Amanda then passes a note which i intercept to before it reaches who it was meant to. This represents that Amanda is panicking under the pressure of exams and can't concentrate enough to study. I believe this is because whenever she tries to achieve something in her subconscious prevents her from it.

The overall movement of the song is suppose to represent what is going on in Amanda’s mind and how she is over thinking everything. In the movement we represent everything that Amanda’s character wants from life and how she hopes she is going to be successful and looked up to. We show this by showing her as a winner and giving her a award.

Amanda’s song is a very depressing one. The original idea I had for it was about a teenager who is a homosexual but his/her mother is a devoted christian and won’t accept who her child is. I took the title of the song ‘Mamma cut me deeper’ to mean that no matter how badly the character is hurt, their mother has hurt them even more by no accepting who their child is. If I were to perform the song I would make the character sit in a blacked out room lit only by candles with myself sitting in the centre of the candles. I would have paper thrown across the floor with demented and disturbing drawings on them about self harm and suicide as the interpretation of the character I got was that they are very depressed and thinking of a way out.

The movement for this song is very metaphorical, for example when we all circle Amanda, this is a metaphor for how she is being overwhelmed by the amount of work she has and how there is no escape from her responsibilities. We also show how she could achieve is she had a bit of help by creating steps using physical theatre and helping her up these steps to get into first place. We wanted this movement to be very physical and representative of how Amanda’s character is being overwhelmed.

War song

For ‘war song’ I had took the lead and had to decide the scene I want to set. I decided that I wanted the scene to be a reward ceremony. When I came up with the scene we were still doing scenes between the songs and it would be clearly shown that we are at a reward ceremony but now because we are only doing the songs, the songs set isn’t going to be as clear to the audience as it was when we had the scene.

The scene I wrote showed my character as an outcast who is being bullied in high school. The scene would start with me walking in and being met by ridicule and harsh words from Liam and Harry’s characters. In this scene I wanted to establish that my character is a victim being bullied and that the reason he has not been able to achieve anything in life is because of the way he has been treated through his school life.

For ‘War song’ I wanted to focus more on what the group would be doing instead of focusing primarily on myself. To do this I separated myself from the group as I stand more centre stage whilst they all sit stage right. Whilst I am singing The group do simple movements that represents what I am singing. For example when I sing about not caring when or where I’m going, Harry and Liam hold up pictures of a globe and a calendar. This is very similar to the works of Brecht.

I took a lot of inspiration for the scene from this link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR-lYKDvIlk

In this performance of the song, there is only the singer. This being different to mine which has the rest of the class in. I took a lot of inspiration from the movement the singer does. Such as how he moves to the beat and the action he does on certain line such as when he points to his shoes when singing about converse and waving his arm around when he sings about slicing someone up with a knife. I also took inspiration from the clothes that the singer is wearing. It gave me an idea about what i want my character to wear and how I want him to act.

To come up with the sequence of movements I want in the song, first I had to design what I wanted the stage to look like so that I had a rough idea about where everyone is going to sit and how I can have them move together. After i achieved this I could start to picture the song. After I had a rough idea of what the stage was like I proposed my idea to the class and had their help coming up with the movements for the song. We had the finished movement after about an hour and we showed it to Ms Cordell, she gave us some more tips for the movement and we went back to work to create the final movement.

What I want most from this piece is to make it entertaining and funny. I want the audience to be humoured by the song even though it has a very dark story about a teenager who has messed up their life so all they can do now is join the army, and because of the way the character describes himself ‘pale and weak’ he probably wont last long in combat.

Notes