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.