The main focal point of this lesson was around the play ‘Blood Wedding’ translated from the Spanish, ‘Bodas de sangre’ by Federico García Lorca. However, the lesson began with an exercise in which we had a partner and had to touch foreheads and rise, fall and turn, all while remaining in contact with each other’s bodies. I believe that this exercise helped with my concentration and awareness, as I was constantly keeping track of how I was connecting to my partner. When we had to develop these simple moves into a sequence which displayed two people meeting and falling in love, we went through some movements in which we tried to display feeling through lingering glances, helping each other up and doing a little twirl. In hindsight and after being shown some other partners’ sequences, I think we should have included a few signals and movements to make a more creative sequence to show without a doubt that we were in love.
After this exercise, we were given the name of the play ‘Blood Wedding’ and had to discuss with our partners any ideas of the play we could garner from this name. This was followed by being shown table of objects as stimulus indicating some events of the play. These included a knife, a stained wedding dress and underneath it all, a red cloth. I inferred from these objects that the play included an unhappy marriage which may have led either the bride or the groom to commit murder, perhaps one another or there could have been another lover. Using these ideas, we were put into groups where we quickly came up with a three-image sequence presenting our ideas of the play.
After a discussion, one of our group members had decided that the name and stimulus could indicate a marriage of incest as she inferred the name ‘Blood Wedding’ to mean two people of the same blood getting married, and therefore society being disgusted by it and acting against it. Therefore, our group came up with a sequence using the first exercise’s movements to create an abstract storyline showing the couple in love with on-lookers disgusted who then pushed them down mirroring society trying to suppress their love, followed by one getting killed and being shown to the lover. I think that our sequence went very smoothly though it could have been improved by somehow portraying our story with more clarity as the circumstances weren’t really clear to the audience, as you could just assume that it was another Romeo and Juliet story from our first image.
After our performance of this, we were told the actual story, (oddly: not incest) after which we read a scene together which a scene with the bridegroom and his apparently unstable mother. From this scene we had to create the son’s entrance to show how he was reluctant to let his mum see he was leaving. My partner and I decided to take a bit of an exaggerated inference from this, but with hindsight, it may have been better to show his reluctance a little-more subtly, perhaps by just using recognisable signals such as trying to search for something without being noticed or by slipping in and out without being seen, with wary glances towards the mother.
Finally, we were set the task in larger groups to show the main events of the play with three clear images with movement in-between which is shown in this clip:
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