N2C THEATRE. - ‘Guernica’

When the N2C theatre group session started after my BTEC drama lesson, and although this isn’t part of my course I felt it helped with gaining and refreshing basic drama techniques and skills. We were told to create a simple market tableau  that went into a simple scene with no major dramatic elements. We were then told to do this in reverse so - from midday to morning. This made us realise that nothing majorly dramatic has to happen for a scene to be effective, but if you create the right amount of ‘business’ a scene can look interesting as well as being effective. Mr Chipp, then put a picture stimulus on the board. The picture ‘Guernica’ by Pablo Picasso.

Then as two separate groups we were told to pick an aspect of the painting and then recreate it. I chose the woman that’s craning her neck upwards and crawling in a fleeing manner. We then had to create a piece of movement that mixed our market scene to a part where the planes of the Guernica bombing came over and we almost slide into the tableau of the recreation. We did this with the group split in two. We decided that when the music came on, we’d separate from our busy market movement that Emily would walk forwards, and soon we’d all follow with our heads up following the bomb from the sky as it falls to the ground in synchrony. As  soon as all of our heads reached the floor line, we fell down in canon, to show the weakest citizen, to the strongest person who was Adam (from the year below) who was representing a bull. As soon as he fell we all lifted our heads, and the struggle began. we coughed and spluttered. Dragged ourselves around the floor until we were mimicking the Picasso painting in a freeze frame which is where that performance ended. 

He then told us to sit in a space where no one else was within a meter of us. He turned all the lights off and started to speak an improvised account of the Guernica bombing. He then said to think about the character we’d just been previously acting and then speak our own improvised account of it. He then made us repeat it over and over. Then, he arranged a small row of 3 chairs with a very low lit light on  them. We were told to stay in silence to keep the atmosphere dark, and one by one we went up and retold our stories as a monologue. I really liked this idea because it helped me keep focus and I was already in character so repeating my story was a lot easier, even if it wasn’t exactly the same. Watching everyone else’s also made you think about how different characters would be feeling, mothers, children, soldiers. I really liked how individual it was because you knew it was all your thoughts.