Striking Stimulus

As an IB requirement, all theatre students are required to create a pitch based on a provided stimulus. This stimulus can be in the form of images or music. And so we were all assigned to find a stimulus at home and think about how we could possibly create a performance inspired by this stimulus. It was difficult to find something that we could potentially manipulate into creating a pitch for a performance. And so I decided to bring in a piece of instrumental music from the soundtrack of The Holiday.

After we all presented our various stimuli to our group, we decided on using Kavita's stimulus which was a song titled "Compassion" performed by the Bombay Dub Orchestra. As we listened to the song we thought of creating this morality play consisting of a dream sequence which starts with a man who travels through his past in his dream. He would fall asleep at his desk at work. During this dream the audience witnesses all his lost opportunities such as the job he should have taken and the studying abroad that he should have experienced. Because he had failed to grasp these opportunities, he's now stuck at the typical nine to five desk job which he resents. As a result of this, he wakes up at the end of the dream, quits his job, and goes out to pursue these lost opportunities.

We discussed how we would use black box theatre for this minimalist approach. The settings would be fairly simple as we would use a bench to symbolize a courtyard and just a desk and chair for his office space. Lighting would also change with the mood as it would start out with dull colors of grays, purples, and dark blues but would progress with brighter colors as this man comes to his realization. One critique that we had was that our pitch focused too much in terms of lighting and not in illustrating an image of what the performance would consist of. Another critique was that we had tried to shape our performance around the stimulus rather than using the stimulus to inspire us. The difference is that the stimulus is meant to inspire us to create a performance that doesn't necessarily exactly follow the stimulus but that uses certain aspects of the stimulus.