Melissa Mchiney Rehearsal Blog 2: Working As A Team

The video above is evidence of an idea myself and Malachi wanted to contribute to the piece. This would be for the scene where the doctor visits Melissa and emphasises to her that he can fix her 'deformity'. This is an important part of the piece that the audience should pay attention to because the dialect is very manipulative and quite disturbing when modernizing it. We wanted to be very literal and demonstrate this in a very abstract and creative way, with the tech and sound it could've been very powerful. To me it shows Melissa as innocent as she is ;being persuaded and deluded by the doctor (or society) into thinking she's inhuman and so without thinking she runs towards this false hope for change and it traps her and breaks her mentally.

In this rehearsal the class had to work together cohesively to create physical and abstract movement for two whole pages of the script to 'The Tragic Tale Of Melissa Mchiney McNormous McWhale'.What was working well was our drive to get things done, but that was probably our downfall as well. Without Justin's directions, working as a group was challenging, we struggled to work cohesively and choose ideas. We wasn't listening to each other and we weren't processing ideas that were being shared. So people began to feel frustrated because they wanted to have input on what we all will be doing - fairly enough as we get graded individually for our efforts. We had to identify what was hindering us from moving forward and that was we weren't wholly allowing an idea to pan out, so ideas were overlapping and evidently nothing actually was getting done and time was being wasted. The way we approached this problem was by splitting the class in to groups of two and we would then separately come up with a sequence of movement and show it to the rest of the class in ten minutes. This is where myself and Malachi's idea came in (video above) we would then as a company would decide which sequence is best fitted for that scene. After showing everyone's pieces most of the ideas shared were combined to create that scene. Our idea wasn't used because the rest of the class felt not everyone could achieve the lift. We decided to do the movement in unison;for it to work effectively we generalized the characters (implementing Brecht here) making all the girls 'Melissa' and all the boys 'the doctor'. By doing this the audience should be able to follow a story and actually see Melissa being persecuted.

Below is the lines to the scene we created movement for :

CHORUS #2: Then one fateful night, a strange-looking joe

Slipped into her dressing room after a show.

MELISSA: Who are you?

STRANGER: Don’t be frightened. I’ve come to correct

Your terrible monstrous ginormous defect!

MELISSA: My defect?

STRANGER: Your backside! Your deformed hindquarter!

With my skills I can make it considerably shorter!

MELISSA: But people here love me. They built me a statue.

STRANGER: That statue is only intended to mock you!

Can’t you see you’re a monster! A freakish mutation!

MELISSA: Go away!

STRANGER: Not until I have offered salvation!

I can fix you. You see, I’m a world-renowned surgeon.

My name is Dr. Sylvester McPurgeon.

I can take your deformity—cut it just so

And voila! You’ll look just like Bridgette Bardot!

Here’s my card. You may call any time, night or day

The show is supposed to be quite humorous, so this is the reason why we had to highlight this section to the audience, shining light on the darkness within the scene. The Dr is an intruder! He 'slipped into her dressing room'- he's breaking an entering and really the audience should be alarmed. In this scene we see the doctor invading Melissa's personal space and making her feel very uncomfortable which would then make the audience feel uncomfortable. Which is the aim of Brecht, to break the audience out of the illusion and make them face the reality of what is actually being presented.We use the Brechtian technique gestus here, as we wanted to show were not meant to play the character but to represent the type of people we were. We also use Gestus with social comment as the Dr slips into Melissa's room she is silent with fear for more than five seconds;she does not scream - as you might, meeting an intruder. This represents the automatic power the Dr held over Melissa, filling her body with fear as she does not yet know what he is capable of.