Medea

When we were introduced to Medea we noticed that it was a different type of text to what we normally did. We were put into groups of 2-3 and we had to read the sections we were given by Sharron and split those sections into lines for each person in the group. My group had a section of being the voice of Medea. In my group there was Dedan, Segun and I. We all picked out the lines we wanted to say and we put it all together.

During one of the lessons with Sharron, we were given 5 minutes to practise our lines with our group before we came together and sat on the floor to read the whole script together.  Firstly, we started off by normally reading our lines without looking at the script to test our memory. Then, we stood up and in chronological order and we said our lines using clear voices and our diaphragms. This was to help us practice our articulation and projection.

After practising on Monday’s lessons with Sharron, we were told we had to put our own interpretations of the sections into a whole group performance for our assessment. We were all quite confused as to how we were going to do that. In order to get used to the stage directions and the balancing of the stage, we played a game to get to those stage directions. Sharron was shouting out the stage directions and we had to run as fast as we could as a bundled group. This informed us on where to go and memorise the staging. Then we got together and came up with ideas of how to combine these little sections into a whole script which in my opinion was quite confusing. Due to the fact that there were about 23 of us in that room it was hard to get ideas in because we were all speaking over each other and others weren’t concentrating so it got a bit frustrating but in the end we managed to come up with a performance ready for Sharron to see and assess.

I thought that our performance wasn’t as neat as it should be because it was quite last minute as on the day of the assessment nobody knew we were even going to be assessed. There were some students who hadn’t learnt their lines yet so they had no choice but to use the script which made us look unprepared and unprofessional. Moreover, the transitions weren’t quite clear to some of us however we all managed to remember our positions throughout the performance.