Ðrama work centered on a mystery bag

This section of our drama work centred on a mystery bag, we made various scenes and sketches about it, this acted as preparation for our final piece. Our first lessons work with the bag was brainstorming its possible owners, uses and just using imagination to create some sense of mystery about the bag. When then, in subsequent lessons had to create short plays about possible owners and uses of the bag, and also how it had come to different people. Among these one of the plays I performed was of a lawyer, losing the bag containing all of his important papers etc, for this short scene we had to find and bring in a piece of music to accompany it. Another thing we did that incorporated the bag was a set of five still images depicting an action scene that focused on the bag, for this we also used music to help create a certain atmosphere. All of this work was groundwork for our final piece, our guidelines were as follows: Make a five – ten minute play about the bag that incorporates a piece of music and one or more drama conventions. In planning our play we brainstormed and developed different ideas, and then picked the one we thought that we could act out best and the one that could be developed most. The idea that we chose was one that had already been discussed in class, but not been looked into any real detail. Here is a brief description of our play: Beginning: A museum with a guide showing visitors around the old artefacts and treasures, they come across the old wreckage of the Isabella II ship, the guide tells of how the ship sunk, they then move to watch a short video of how this happened. Middle: We act out the video of how the ship didn't sink accidentally, and how really the ships captain and his conspirators sank it on purpose in order to gain the insurance money. Ending: We come back to the museum and the guide finishes things off by showing the visitors the captain's bag that carried the plans and blueprints. We soon came across a problem in making our play; we only had three people in our group but over 10 characters (some only extras). We managed to overcome this by using different props and costume to distinguish between the people. Another setback that we came to in making our play was trying to act out being on a ship etc without having a great deal of furniture etc with which to make our set. I think that our final performance went quite well, our only problem was improvising with being on a stage, we hadn't practised like that, so we had to adapt, but other then that it went well. The audience seemed to think that it was ok, no one boo-ed and we got clapped at the end. I think its possible that if we did the play again then we could improve it; spacial awareness and positioning could have been better, but other then that I think our play was good. All in all I think that our performance was done to an adequate level and I was quite happy with it.