I will start out with me. Who am I? Well, to be honest you don't need to know all that much about me except that my name is Ida and I am studying Drama, Theatre and Performance at Roehampton University in London. I have just started my third (and final) year and already after just two weeks I am up to my ears in work and reading!!
An important question now, what is this blog for? Over the next twelve weeks (10 now my first two weeks are up..) myself and six fellow drama students are embarking on creating the best performance of our three years at University, and through this blog I hope to keep my lovely readers up to date on what is happening and how the process is getting on. This, I hope, will contain as little outbursts of stress and emotion as possible, although going by my last two years at University that is very difficult to avoid. However I have great hopes for this performance and a lot of faith in those I am working with, so lets hope that sticks.
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| Shared Experience |
Having spent our first hours researching into the style of 'Shared Experience' the group concluded that we needed to find a text or an author upon which we could base our performance. We went off to separately research into different areas and returned to discuss and present what we had found. Here were the ideas:
1) We looked at fairy tales and thought of possibly basing a performance around the original Brother's Grimm stories. We found that there was quite a dark side to the stories and thought that underneath the happy tales there was a lot to be expressed.
2) Mythology. Trying to break away from the ever performed Greek Myths we looked into Chinese, Egyptian, Roman etc but found that many of them actually had similar ideas to Greek stories.
3) Gothic novels. We looked at a range of titles of novels including The Monk, Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jane Eyre. We found that these stories contained so much expression and emotion that would normally go amiss on stage but by using the methods of 'Shared Experience' we would be able to do justice to the anguish and pain the characters feel.
4) The Bloomsbury Group. I had found a book titled 'Women of Bloomsbury', and considering our group is made up of females (something we had discussed previously) we thought it could be interesting to look into the lives of these women who were surrounded by men. The group had a complex past and people such as Virginia Woolf lived with and hid a lot which we felt could be justified on stage.
5) Mary Shelley author of Frankenstein. We discovered that Mary Shelley had an interesting past - living with a married man, loosing all but one of her children not to mention being one of the most well known female authors of all time. We felt that her dark novel could parallel with what we considered a difficult and heart-breaking life.
We decided to take the research of both The Bloomsbury Group and Mary Shelley further. Together we watched the movie 'The Hours' which depicts Virginia Woolf and two other women who embody the story of her character Mrs Dalloway.
We then looked more into Mary Shelley's life and followed a timeline of the events that shaped her life (and possibly her novel).
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| Mary Shelley |
I hope that I have interested you enough to want to continue following my weekly updates about how we are getting on.
Ida
