The Oresteia - The Chorus Speaks; Blog

Blog Report

In week one we were given an insightful introduction to Greek tragedy of which was helped by my contextual research on the history of the ancient Greeks. We studied the use of voice in a chorus group and how there are many different ways to read the script in Greek theatre. One way to read the script was to have everyone read at the same time. The outcome of this was a very un organised clutter of mixed pitched voices which, in my opinion, gave me the impression that I was in a church and we were reading a prayer or we were part of a cult group who chant and repeat. This gave me the emotions of eeriness, evilness and creepiness but also sadness and loss and as thought the voices were trying to fill up a hollow whole of which life has escaped from. These stirrings that I felt from just this reading showed how effective the chorus can be even for one line. This; in turn, shows how the use of voice can create power and impact the audience. If I were to contemporaries this I may adapt the setting of a funeral where there has been a death and folk are mourning which would relate to the emotions it made me feel but maybe physicalize the dropping of the coffin into the ground by having one person as the coffin and the rest of the group being the rope lowering the coffin into the 'dirt'. This visual, initial response I had could use Frantic Assembly's lift which would also be a contemporary use of physicality in an otherwise ancient form of theatre,

Following on from the above, we were put into groups and given a scene where we had to use physicality and voice which we have previously been educated upon in order to contextually contemporaries the script of which we would be conjointly performing in nothing shorter than a weeks time.  We were given scene 1 which is about the voices or conscience inside Orestes  mind spearing him onto killing his mother due to her and her lover murdering Orestes father.

'Let all who have prayed for justice'

We read through the script and highlighted the key words we thought were most suited to being physicalized whilst representing what was happening in each line. For the first line in our script we chose the word 'prayed' because Orestes may have begged or prayed for justice to be carried out against his mother for what she did to his father. To show this we all walked around the room and became someone who was praying for something to happen, we collaborated together and crouched down while still praying. This gave a really clear representation of prayer but I decided, to make it more visually impacting, to stand up, spread my arms out. I actually visualised the Christ The Redeemer statue in Brazil. With this line physicalized, we needed to decide how we would speak. Ideas such as whisperings, prolonged usage of the 'ssss' sound and over exaggeration were a thought, but I believe Katrina or James came up with the idea of speaking like a 'common' school child using 'chavy' accents to read the line. We experimented and decided on the school kid accent and used it throughout the scene. In my opinion, I believe that sounding like school kids in a play which is about murder and death makes the experience for the audience very disturbing and creepy which would formulate an interesting reaction with the audience. This shows how we are contemporising the script for our modern day, teenage target audience.
Further contemporising our scene physicality and voice, we decided to not just sound like school children but to become school children throughout. We created an introduction to our scene which is set in a school playground. We experimented with what we could do in the space and how we could set the scene and we decided to have school bags, walk to the back of the stage and place our bags down. We played with slow motion when rising back up from the crouching position. I believe that this worked really well in showing the setting is in a modern day school playground which shows how we have further contemporised the text and the use of slow motion whilst standing up and then facing the audience should make a smooth transition into our spoken chorus work and be very creepy with should coincide with the school children theme and create a strong impact with the target audience and be very visually intriguing.

An idea I had during this line;

'That opens deadly flowers'

was for everyone to become the flower petals. I envisioned the cycle of a flower opening in spring and the movement of the petals in the wind. In order to achieve this we moved from our position at the end of the line;

'Cut through the tap rot of the vendetta'

which was James and I slicing our arm down the body of the girls. We speak the line and then turned our backs on eachother to create a circle of outwards facing 'petals'. We leaned over forwards and then majestically continued leaning forwards and backwards to physicalize the motion of opening of the flower. I think this section looks visually attractive and really physicalizes the key metaphor which should allow the audience to understand what the chorus is trying to portray clearer.

What We Modernised Through Physical Theatre

For the all boys scene we used Jacques Lecoq
technique where we choose an animal and physicalize it. Looking at the script, the theme of it is very dark and sinister and based around murder but the way it is written is as though the character; the chorus, is like an ant. A multitude of ants that are submissive and have leaders and who live in dirt but who work together to kill their prey using words to distract them until they 'surprise him'. With this, we decided that we should all physicalize insects. We did this by going from a zero emotion human state, walking around the room, and slowly becoming more and more insect like until we were at peak insect with our bodies hunched up and facial expressions really over emphasising a sort of hunger for the man were about to murder as it were. This shows how we have used a modern technique to contextualise our piece for contemporary use.

Link to information about Jacques Lecoq and his techniques - http://www.europamagna.org/pageshtml/Pgtheatre/SCOUT/StageIUFM/jlecoqeng.htm


What I Did Vocally In My Performance

For the opening scene, we all did a little exercise using the voice where we were tasked to carry out a series of characterisations such as;

• Happy Plastic
• Informative
• Spider/Insect

Happy plastic is an over exaggerated but fake way of talking in a really happy way. I said the line;

'But our own grief makes it easy'

This line is not very happy at all, its theme is of sadness because they have grief and are suffering therefore plastic happy which is this fake happy adds a sort of sarcastic tone to the line making it relatable to our audience.

The informative voice was used at;

'We come at the command of Clytemnestra'

and is used because I believe it makes the line as though the chorus is convincing in a salesman way. The chorus are informing the character on stage about who they are and why they are here and are trying to sell themselves to the character so they are trusted like a salesman trying to become trustworthy so the consumer will buy their product. The thing that makes it sinister here is the 'product' the chorus are selling is themselves and its because they are in great grief and pain. I believe that this will shock the audience and make the scene even more darker and tragedy like.

The spider/insect like way of talking was inspired, once again by Jacque Lecoq's technique of becoming animal like, but this time I used the voice and slowly went from being human and neutral to creepy and elongating my words to sound what I believed was spiderlike. I used this for the line;

'the rips in our skin are fresh'

I envisioned spiders ripping through their prey so using the voice I can add to the physicality to make this line sound very nasty and 'creaturesque' which should in turn have a large positive impact on the audience and as a chorus sound powerful.

Overall, with the voice side of this project and every other factor I have recorded in this blog, I have been successful in achieving the criteria of creating a contextualised contemporary performance from an ancient Greek play, The Oresteia using physical theatre.