In my group’s piece, me, Jameel and Ashan used the stimulus of a poem and the image and story of the young Syrian boy, Aylan Kurdi dying and being found on the beach by a Turkish police officer. This stimulus disturbed me the idea of child and father having to leave as they had been forced out their home truly sickened me, the scenario is difficult and truly emotional to try and perform. Even though it disturbed me , we were able to form our central question from it. We want people to question relationship a father and son have and what happens when pushed to certain limits.

This question came from the stimulus, the idea of a father and son being forced into an uncomfortable situation and then conflicting with one another in that situation. We were able to take from the stimulus the scenario of an abusive father, played by Jameel, and a child about the age of 11, played by myself and a social worker, played by Ashan, taking the child away from the abusive father. Our initial ideas were to make the scene with the child getting hit by the father, then the social worker talking to the child and the father, then the social worker coming back the next day and taking the child away from the father.

When we first attempt doing the scene it was done to fast and took 2.30 minutes, so we needed to add more to the scene. We were able to extend the scene by doing pauses in between certain scenes to help create tension in the scene and to make scene longer. Also by creating tension in the scene we can further draw the audience in  and get their attention. We were able to further develop the scene by adding in those improvements I was able to do this during the scene when I asked by the social worker, Ashan, if i had a good relationship with my father. I said “good”, then stayed silent for a second or two and then said “right now”.

Item 1

The scenario that we came up with was the idea of a child being taken away from his father, who is abusive, by a social worker. This was our first idea and everyone within our group thought it could work so we kept with it and it seemed to be something unique to take from the stimulus as most other groups just thought of the idea of being a refugee and having to leave home and used that alone. We did alter it slightly by having a split scene where the child calls the social worker for help, the social worker also talks about how he lost his children and can’t believe that someone else is treating their child like then arrives to the house of child too late and sees the child is dead and kills himself.

Ashaan played a Social worker roughly 35 years old. He also has a history of losing kids as his own children died so he takes his job seriously. Jameel played the father who is widower who is in his 30s. After his wife died he became depressed he ends up becoming an alcoholic and eventually ending up affecting his work and getting into fight, which causes him to be on probation. The his wife died talking to the child while she driving and crashing the car which killed her. The father then blames the child for the mother dying and starts to abuse him because of this.

The child played, played by me, is the of 11 and is in year 6. He is abused by his father because he was talking to the mother before the car crashes and is therefore blames for the eventually death of the mother.

With more reps and pratice we had, I felt i was able to become more comfortable and develop the character further during the performances as time went by. Having to talk like an 11 year old and have the personality of one became easier to do as it went on. My character wasn’t really based upon much research. I remember reading the book ‘moon pie’ when I was younger and how the daughter of the book couped with having an alcoholic father and how at such a young age she didn’t really undestand much, so keeping that mentality of an 11 year old and how they still have a sense of innonece and no understanding of a situation such as this.

To communicat this to the audience, I talked alot slower when i said certain things, I was quite fidgity like an 11 year old. I also made my voice a bit higher when speaking to communicate to the audience that I was younger in the scene despite my huge/tall stature. When I had to start talking about unpleasant things like being abused by the dad i would hold longer pauses or tell the social worker to leave when he asked those kind of questions in scene.

Using improvisation was good because we just had to remember what happened in scenes, we didn’t actually need to remember any lines.  So every time we performed or practised our scene, Ashan was a good example of this when he played the social work because every time he asked the child a question he didn’t word it the same but still remembered the type of question he need to ask.

I think we were able to communicate our question very well. In the scene it showed how the father and son’s relation was tested and how eventually the father grew apart from his son. however we made a late change in the scene which we didn’t get time to practice,  so in the last scene it didn’t come out the way we wanted it to.