Greek Tragedy Week 1

This new project I'm doing is all about Greek theatre, Greek Tragedy to be more precise. The play that I am studying and performing is Orestes from the Oresteia by Euripides.Over the past weeks before I started the project I've been doing essays on Greek theatre to help me increase my knowledge on not only Greek theatre but the play itself.

Casting Process

Before we started the real rehearsal lessons on the project we did casting for the parts, because there was too many of us Karen (who was doing the casting) split the lead roles, which were Orestes and Electra; brother and sister and the 'hereos' of the play. The roles were split into four seperate roles in different parts of the play. The four roles of Electra was the different stages of her emotions. Electra 1 is numb, as she's the one who witnessed her mother and lover killing her father. Electra 2 is grief, as she's now mourning her father. The last two Electra's were pretty similar, but Electra 4 is more sinister as it's the end of her journey and all of these horrible events have happened to her making her feel no emotion and withdrawn from all of humanity.

The character I preferred to play in the beginning was the mother, Clytemnestra as I felt her character would challenge me the most but instead I was cast as one of the main chorus members, who will be in the chorus throughout the play. After reading all of the chorus scenes and finding out that the chorus plays a huge role in the play I feel like the chorus would challenge me more than any other role I could have gotten, as the chorus members are going to be portrayed as journalist with Tyndareous the newspaper editor to give a modern twist to the play. So I'm really making this character my own, creating my character profile, i.e. my character's name, my background, my personality and where I want to go in the future.

Knowing Your Character

During our first lesson on the project we got into groups or pairs that we thought our character fitted into, for example the chorus and Tyndareos would go together as they are always together and want to achieve the same thing; getting the best story for their magazines/articles. Then I went into a group and we picked one pose from a word that best shows my character. I picked the word mischevious. I showed this by turning my back to the audience and looking over my right shoulder, with a little smirk on my face and my eyebrow lifted up to make it look like I'm challenging you to write a better article than me. Then I had to do a second pose but this time I stood straight, with my head held high to give off the feeling of power, but still keeping the mischevious smirk on my face. One question we were asked was, 'if you had to make a statue of your character what material would you use?' For my chorus member I picked marble, as marble is strong but not unbreakable, showing that I could be destroyed no matter how much power I have at that moment. Some other people that played the chorus chose stone as you are toying with people's lives you have to be stone cold and not show any of your emotions, such as guilt.

Group Exercises

One of the excercises we did as a group was about working and moving together as one. We moved around the space and copied the leader who would be the person at the front if we changed direction the leader would automatically change, I think this showed us how difficult it is to all be in sync without looking directly at the leader, but once we had gotten the hang of it, it worked really well and felt powerful.

Another excercise we did was called Chair objectives. This is were we used the chair to show our emotion physically towards another character. E.g. blame and protect, forgive and punish. I came up with the word Persistant, as we are the journalists and they never stop until they get what they want. And the other word we used was Deceit as journalist twist the truth and decieve to make their article interesting enough to get published. We did a number of movements to show us trying to get to Tyndareous first to give him the story. Some of the moves we did was standing up on the chair and blocking the other journalist out and the other journalist kneeling on the chair but sticking their arm out to stop the person from passing to get closer to the gossip going on.

Starting the Scenes

For the final part of week one, we worked on two scenes, one where Tyndareos and Electra 3 were arguing about what was to happen to her and her brother after they had killed their mother, with this one we had the chorus choosing sides depending on what we thought was right and what was wrong by either listening in closer, ignoring them or even literally walking to the side to back them up. We all had to go to both sides at least once to show the audience that what they're both saying is logical in their own way and that the journalists have to get both sides of the story.

Our second scene was with Electra 1 and Helen (Clytemnestra's Sister) in this scene Helen has returned home to find out her sister is dead and so she goes straight to see Electra and questions her, the chorus in this scene were like rats running about checking their surroundings, but also being there for Helen if she needed something like her slaves. Showing the chorus as journalists and looking for clues to write about.

Conclusion

This week proved challenging because we were thrown into a new play and Greek theatre is not as easy as contemporary theatre is, as there's just so much elements you don't know about. However, I so far am enjoying this challenge of a type of theatre that I have not yet done before and am looking forward to learning more not only about the play itself but also about the type of theatre that it lies within.