Metamorphosis

To ease us in to the style of Berkoff we were given a few pages from "Metamorphosis" to work on, just to get the idea of what Berkoff's work was like.

Summary
Metamorphosis was originally written by Franz Kafka, one of Berkoffs main influences. The piece focuses primarily on the thoughts and feelings of Gregor Samsa. The narrator only describes events that Gregor sees, hears, remembers, or imagines from the actions around him. Gregor is the sole financier of the family and he carries the wait of the world on his shoulders and his family expect him to do so until one day he awakes as a dung beetle! his family mistreat his and completely forget about him throughout the play, Due to a rotting apple his father threw at him, Gregor the beetle starts to rot alive and eventually dies. The themes in this play are; The absurdity of life; the disconnect between mind and body; the limits of sympathy; alienation

Mini-Project
Once we were given the script we were arranged into small groups (Me, Holeigh, Paige, Taylor and George) The first piece we were given was a page and a half, just so we could loosely get the hang and use different techniques such as mime with the rule of three. The next piece was the larger lodgers scene and in it we focused ore on accurate miming and pace of the performance to try and make it fit more into a Berkoff style. Our group tried to focus more on the mime rather than any props used to describe the story as Berkoff would have prefered a more minimalistic looking stage. We found the hardest part which we had to focus on was the lodgers, all three of these were played well by holeigh, we discussed different ways to show how they were different characters being mult-roled. This was whon through gestuures, posture and tone of voice

The next thing we will be working on is a long piece called "Decadence" similar to "Crave" (Inspired by Berkoff) by Sarah Kane that I have previously read and also adore her work