Stimulus of the week - newspaper article

For this week we focused on newspaper articles as our stimulus.

For our first session, we were given various newspapers to look at and choose and article to work with. The article we chose to work on was "you're next, Briton told Jihadist's threat to hostage after second US journalist is beheaded in the desert" 

We decided to focus on the words "you're next" as this doesnt tell too much about the story and we could expand it from there. We then decided to use canon and each of us would fall back in to the next person whilst saying "you're next" to symbolise people dying. After that we created a circle continuing to say "you're next" whilst walking to round in the circle, this was to represent a person's mind and what mental state they must be in thinking they might be next to die. We then formed a line and held each other's hands as we began pulling from side to side to symbolise being beheaded. To finish our piece we all held our heads, screamed and then dropped our heads.

We wanted to show the story of people being killed in a more stylised and physical way rather than simply acting out the scene. We also incorporated Berkoff's style of using the body as the object, for example, we became the knife at the end.

If I was to do this piece again, I would add more facial expressions within our actions as, although it was supposed to be very non-naturalistic, we wanted the audience to feel the pain too and our faces did not show that. I would also change how we fell to the ground s it was very stylised and 'neat'. I would have made it more heavy and 'floppy' as a body would look after being killed.