This week in rehearsal

This week we work mostly on our movement pieces. So fair we have a total of four movement scenes. These scenes are a knife dance, a movement to represent the emotions of our characters, a snowball fight and the final death scene of Micke, Jonny and Jimmy. I feel confident in three of these movement scenes, the only one that I don't feel 100% on is the knife scene. I always feel like I am slightly off time and I can never remember when the movement ends. It ends when the music during the scene changes but because we have the music looped I always have to listen out for the end of the song and this always makes me feel worried because I think I might mess up the movement. We came up with the movement scenes ourselves as a class. I was mostly involved in the death scene at the end as this scene focuses on only three character, one being my character Micke. The final movement scene takes place in the second to last scene. This scene starts with Oskar washing his hands in a sink, my character Micke walks in and stares at him. after some dialogue Jonny walks in then Jimmy. Jimmy then threatens Oskar saying that if he can hold his breath for three minutes he will only 'knick him' with his knife, and if he cant then Jimmy is going to stab him in the eye. At this point in the play we realize that Micke and Jonny are actually no were near as horrible as we thought. When we compare them to Jonny's older brother Jimmy, we can see that they are actually quite calm and and reasonable characters. The furthest that they have gone is threatening to throw Oskar into a hole in a frozen lake. Because Oskar fights back and stops them before it happens we can't tell if Jonny and Micke were going to go through with this threat but we can guess that they would have because of how they made him eat sand earlier in the play. For the death scene we wanted a mixture of symbolism and realism. We wanted the deaths to look as real as possible but at the same time we wanted Eli to look like a capable killer and to achieve this we needed to break the realism factor of the deaths. We came up with the movements for the scene by thinking logically about what would happen next. At the start we are all standing in a line so naturally Eli would walk in behind us and throw us one by one away from Oskar. Jonny is then in the center so its obvious that Eli would go for him first. She pulls him forward and strangles him. To make this look more convincing, Steve ( Jimmy) and I run towards Danny (Jonny) and lift him by his legs. This creates the effect that Eli is lifting him up by his neck with ease. Next she targets Jimmy. This is because Jimmy is older that Micke and Jonny, so he is the biggest threat. For this movement I bend over and straighten my back. Eli then throws Jimmy and he roles over my back. I then reach out to help Jonny but I'm grabbed by Eli and spun round then thrown into Jimmy. She then attacks Jonny again, Me and Jimmy start to get up and we run towards Eli as we wanted it to look like we want to put up a fight so that when Eli does eventually kill us she looks stronger. We run toward Eli and she throws us both to the ground without even trying. She then throws Jonny over her back and we try to run from her. She causes to fall over and pulls Jimmy then myself and throws us against a wall. I then try to run away again but Jonny is thrown into me. I am then grabbed and once again thrown into Jimmy who jumps over me. Eli then slams Jimmy and Jonny into each other and they fall over. THis is when I see my chance at escape and try to get away again. I run past Eli but she grabs me and pulls me into her. She then grabs me around my necks and snaps it whilst i struggle. I wanted my character to struggle until the very end as I don't think Micke is the type of person to accept death. Also he is only a child, aging around 12-14 so he would be terrified of dying. Also this is the only scene where Micke is completely powerless so as a character he doesn't know how to react to being over powered so easily.