Medusa And Dabbing

In the beginning, Medusa was a beautiful young priestess in the temple of Athena, whose actions led to her fall into the hands of various gods. The piece is meant to communicate and explain to the audience the hardship she faced through the good, the bad and the downright tragic leading to her destruction. From losing her love, her friend and even herself.

At the beginning of the short piece, some of the choices that we had chosen to enhance the piece further were Laban’s eight efforts. This was shown through the form of gliding as the two characters of Medusa and Poseidon develop more feelings for each other. You see this in the mirroring of body language which is a way of showing the two characters bond as they begin understanding each other.

Dabbing is shown in the second scene of Medusa and Poseidon as they try to be discreet about being together, so when they are sitting on the bench getting closer to each other as time passes. When some people

walk in passing them, they automatically pull away from each other going back to where they had originally been, repeating the process once more.

The other effort that was used in the piece was slashing when Athena storms in, Walking up to Medusa and Poseidon, her angry and unable to listen to reason. This leads to her slapping Poseidon sanding him over the bench, which was used as symbolism; that even though Poseidon himself is a god her wrath overshadowed that for the moment as it banishes him away.

Working on trying to develop the story had taken more time than was expected which was a downside as it took away from rehearsal time.

Some people in our group had more knowledge of the myth then the others which had resulted in a clash of ideas but was later resolved as the group decided to focus more on the strengths of the members. As the process, we incorporated different ideas. I suggested we incorporated somebody mirroring as it would show their bond grow over time, breaking barriers and giving into temptation which leads to her breaking her vow of celibacy. Since the story talks about how Medusa turn everyone who looks her in the eye to stone, we used freeze frames to convey this in order for the audience to clearly comprehend what is happening. I also thought it would be a clever idea to incorporate some slow motion of the moment when the people are turned to stone but could not due to the absence of some members in the group and it would have been hard to explain all the changes right before the

performance.

The decisions which I think will work well in the performance are the beginning scene of the performance as they are more routined and precise whiles also easily understandable. I do however think that we could have worked more on the ending just so it could tie the whole piece together. It would have been better to have rehearsed it as well because the group had focused more on the elements we required the audience to see we forgot to keep the energy that had solely been in the scene before.

Getting together and agreeing on a myth had most likely been the easiest thing we had to do in the process of working on our piece. It was hard to have to make decisions for those in the group that was unable to make it because we had agreed for everyone to have a say in and to share their thought. This had caused us some difficulties because there was a clash of ideas here and there, so when there were some members missing for a whole week it put us behind leaving no time for rehearsal. I understand that the others were sick most of the time, but I found It was a bit unfair since it was a group assignment and some others had not once looked at the google doc that had been shared with everyone, even when they knew we had a performance on that day. Other than that I do believe some of us worked well together and I would work with them again.