The Oresteia part 2

In order to perform extracts of Greek chorus, we are looking at a version of The Oresteia part 2 of 'the libation Bearers' and adapting the original Greek theatre to a modern interpretation. The Oresteia tells the story of Orestes quest to kill his mother out of revenge for his father's murder. In my groups section of the script, Orestes is being persuaded by the chorus to kill his mother because she murdered his father. When I originally looked at the section I thought that Orestes was the villain of the story as he plans to kill his mother however the chorus piece shows how they sort of pressuring Orestes to do it as they say things like "do it for the house of Atreus". This therefore made me feel that the chorus had the dominance in this scene over the hero and that they have a lot of influence in the play itself.

We as a group started to think about how we could modernise the performance in order to suit our target audience, a group of upper aged school kids. One idea we explored was a mother's meeting. Because the chorus had control over Orestes, we thought that the audience might relate to how they have been controlled by their mothers as well as Orestes. However when we started to develop this idea, found out that we weren't able to create an equal chorus role for all of our group and we were focusing more on our theme then the physical and vocal performance of the piece. Instead we started to pull out key words from our text that could link to physical actions for example our first line is "let all who have prayed for justice". The key word we found was prayed and so we decided to create a tableu of praying using levels and individual images that linked together. I personally felt that this was a better way to create our performance as it meant that we could connect more with the text and it later made it easier to add our context to the movements.

Our contextual style that we have decided to perform our piece in is school kids peer pressure. We felt that this was a good theme as it is relevant to our young teen audience and it would enable us to use chavy ascents to portray our characters. It was easy to add this voice to our piece for example James says "when she wails 'Orestes my child' ". He is able to add manipulative tones and slag to his voice to make this line comical for when he pretends to faint. I feel that this style also makes it more modern as the chavy ascents weren't even created in Ancient Greece and it has only really being used in the late 20th century.

Also adding physical theatre to these ancient texts makes it modern as we are using modern practioners styles of physical theatre. For example we use a lot of berkovian techniques in our piece as we over exsagerted mouth movements when we say the text and we use robotic like clockwork movements when we turn to get into our first tableu. I feel that berkoff was a good practioner to use as this style of theatre questions against complex theme just like in the Oresteia.