10 Reflection Question

1. What is the stimulus you are using? Describe it.

Our stimulus is a Carrie Underwood song titled “Just a Dream”. When we were brainstorming about doing a scene with a military tragedy theme, this song popped into my head since the music video was about a woman who lost her husband when he went off to war. The lyrics talk about how this woman’s life completely changed when she got the news that her husband had passed with lyrics such as “this can’t be happening to me” and “it’s like I’m looking from a distance, standing in the background, everyone is saying he’s not coming home now”. The lyrics fit perfectly for what we envisioned and helped us do some of our initial exploring exercises.

2. What are/were some of your initial ideas based on the stimulus?

Our initial ideas were to do something that had some historical theme, which brought up the idea for us to do a scene about war. We didn’t know what we wanted the family to exactly be like, but we knew we wanted there to be someone going off to war, but also a loved one who strongly disapproves of him/her going because they’re scared he/she won’t come back home. This was the basic foundational idea for our project.

3. What ideas and themes are you exploring in your performance?

In the beginning, we were exploring how lights could influence our scene and which type of lights would best suit the mood and tone of our project. We found that the colored gels each had a unique effect on the mood that we wanted to portray, so we will likely be using some of those in the final product, as well as a flickering lamp light. We also explored character relationships, changing it from being parents vs child scene to deciding that we want our scene to be a sister vs sister scene. We believed that by choosing this dynamic, the themes of betrayal and sadness would be even more powerful, since sibling ties are one of the highest levels of companionship that we know of.

4. What will your plot be? (beginning, middle, end -- scenes, transitions)

The beginning will be the two sisters, Ellie and Sophia in Ellie’s bedroom while Sophia is packing to go off to military training. Sophia storms out because Ellie still doesn’t support her and then Ellie goes to sleep and begins to dream about all the bad things that can happen to Sophia while she is off at the military base. The middle of our scene is in the dream when Sophia is beginning to train for the military while Ellie writes all the things she wish she said in a letter. The middle also consists of the battle scene where Sophia is finally deployed to fight, but ends up getting killed. The end of our project is when we come back to reality when Ellie is screaming in her sleep because Sophia died, and Sophia comes running back into the bedroom to wake her up and tell her everything is okay. However, she still ends up leaving and Ellie still worries about what is going to happen to her.

5. Who are the characters and how will they grow, change, or stay the same?

Sophia: older sister...stay pretty headstrong and tunnel visioned throughout; mad at Ellie then ends up showing compassion even though she is still leaving

Ellie #1: younger sister...worried and mad about Sophia leaving, anxious

Ellie #2: dream version of Ellie; more worried throughout than mad

6. How might you use theater tech to enhance the story?

We are definitely going to be using different lighting techniques to our advantage. We are going to use the lights to portray a dream is happening (we don’t know exactly how yet, except that we will use flickering lights and purple lights). We will use blackouts during a few moments where we want tension, and bring the lights up and down to symbolize different events in time. 

7. Who is the intended audience and what is the desired effect you want your piece to have on the audience? (reaction, meaning)

The intended audience for our project would probably be anyone who is a teenager or older. This is because younger kids may not get the complete weight and sadness of the situation being portrayed, where as older and more mature audiences will be able to sympathize more with our plot. We want our audience to feel nervous for Ellie, as she wakes up from this nightmare, yet Sophia still leaves her. We want them to feel how hurt Ellie is by her sister leaving and potentially dying, but also feel how much love these sisters have for each other which makes Sophia leaving for the military harder.

8. What are the important moments of tension and emotion?

So far, we have tension in the first scene when Ellie is still trying to convince Sophia not to go, until Sophia finally snaps at her and yells that she needs to stop being selfish as it is not her decision. There is going to be a lot of tension towards the end as well during the battle scene and when Sophia dies in the dream and the lights go out. The ending when Sophia leaves will also be very emotional and intense, but we still need to explore where we think pauses, tension, and emotion would best fit and be effective.

9. Why is this piece important/meaningful to you personally?

This piece that we are making is important to me because of the sibling dynamic. My brother and I are really really close, and I can’t imagine having to let my brother go off to the military and what that would be like. So, in my performance, I sometimes think about how I would react to certain things if I was the one leaving my brother behind and how he would react to me leaving. 

10. What influences are you drawing on or engaging with in your work so far? (In class, for example, someone mentioned doing something similar to Livi's solo performance and someone else references viewpoints and perhaps Moment Work)

Talking about the battle scene specifically, we are going to try and stage that scene similar to what Livi did for her solo performance in terms of having limited dialogue during that time, and using our bodies to tell the story. We also talked about using viewpoint type movements we learned in class to accomplish the same thing.