Medea research

Medea - Euripides 431BC

Characters

Medea
Jason
Kreon ruler of Corinth
Aegeus ruler of Athens
Nurse
Tutor
Servant
Children of Medea and Jason
Chorus of Women

Synopsis

The story follows the life of a woman called Medea who extracts her revenge on her un-loyal husband Jason who has just left her to marry the daughter of King Creon. Medea spends a lot of her time moping around in a pit of despair. Her nurse hears the news that Creon is planning on banishing Medea and her two sons but she keeps this information to herself and lets Medea find out the hard way. This is by King Creon visiting her house and telling her that she had to leave immediately because he is threatened that she might harm him or his daughter. Medea begs and is granted one more day before she has to leave. Jason tells Medea that he is only marrying the princess to help out their family and this sparks and argument between the two and when he leaves Medea decides that she is going to get revenge on him for leaving her. She talks Jason into convincing the princess to let her two sons stay in the palace and decides she will send gifts to bribe her but they would be poisonous to the touch. However before she does this she has an inner conflict on whether to actually go ahead with the plan, knowing that although her enemies will die so will her two sons. She decides to go ahead anyways. She sends her two sons off with some gifts to the princess and she accepts them but when she touches them she feels to effects of the poison and dies, followed by the king because he touched her dead corpse. A messenger comes to Medea telling her the news of the deaths and she is happy but Jason on the other hand is devastated and scared running around looking for his sons. While searching he finds Medea and asks her were his children are and she shows him the two dead corpses of their sons and tells him this was her revenge.

In class we are studying a modern adaptation of the play Medea written by Italian playwright Frank Rame which has been translated into more understandable dialect It was written to be performed by a singular woman but we are creating a piece of work with multiple people as an ensemble.

In our first lessons in with Sharon we started off with some vocal and physical warm ups just making some hums and such as we breathed out adding length and pitch changes to help open up our airways and wake up our chords. we also do this just to become aware of our breathing. we then played a game where we would walk around the space and then watching and playing off each other we would all try and stop as an ensemble. we played this a few times until we managed to do it almost instantly. This exercise really helps you start to work together as a group and not just individuals but relying on each other. Another activity we did is we were put together in groups of between 4-5 and had to pick a movement each, and then put them altogether, copying them in sync with the whole group. This exercise teaches us focus and teamwork as we have to all work together to make sure we are all in time and working as an ensemble.

We got split up into groups and each given a section of the modern adaption of Medea and given time to bring it to life by adding movement to the lines. When we performed it to the class we were given feedback. My groups feedback was that we had a good use of space, with a clear ending and all synchronised well with each other. However we should add more life to the still images at the beginning of our section and think about what our characters intensions are vocally and physically.
When we next rehearse we are going to work on polishing up the ending and making our movement sequences/paths more clear seeing as we only changed it last minute to make better use of the space. In this session I learnt what minor and major is and how it can be used effectively. For example at the end of the session we added two joining scenes together and we stood in the background of their scene and took on the role of minors.