Drama: Take One

Throughout the first couple months of school we have been given various assignments, but none of them have involved much dramatization...until today. For the most part, we have been learning about various methods of performances whether it may consist of storytelling or miming, but not so much of acting and dramatizing. And so our instructor started us off with a simple exercise that consisted of eight lines. Within these eight lines, we would need to convey a sense of setting, character, and situation. I decided to work with someone different, someone new, someone that I have yet to perform with and so Kavita was my partner.

We decided to portray the mother-daughter scenario. I portrayed the mother who was getting ready to leave for work while Kavita was the daughter who didn't want her mother to leave thinking that her mother was about to abandon her forever. During the actual performance, I had forgotten one of my lines and had instead jumped ahead to a different line. After doing so, Kavita quickly whispered that I had read the wrong line and we just continued as if nothing had happened. Despite this mix-up we tried our best to stay in character so as not to distract the audience and detract from our performance. Afterwards, our instructor commented on the fact that my suitcase had suddenly disappeared once my "daughter" had latched onto me. I had completely neglected our first lesson about pantomiming with the fact that we need to be aware of our "props". As a result, she said that in such a performance where pantomime isn't key, it's always best to use an actual prop rather than having to worry about correctly pantomiming the objects.