Mock Collaborative Project

For the past week we have started working on our new Mock Collaborative Project assignment, which will count as out June exams this year. My group consists of me, Talah, Rema, and Yara, and the mutual interest in realism along with Theater of Cruelty is what brought us all together. We got together at the beginning of the week to decide on a stimulus for our production and brainstorm ideas for what we wanted to do. It was very difficult to work with groups in creative projects, as I learned previously during Commedia Dell’Arte, as everyone has such different ideas and opinions of what they want to develop. Rema and Talah wished to do something along the lines of a musical, while Yara was going more for Theater of the Opressed. Meanwhile, I wanted to do something related to women’s rights and body image, as I have always been very passionate about this topic and have done a performance of body image recently for my English IOP. The whole class we discussed and argued about our various opinions, and were yet not able to reach a compromise. I left class confused and frustrated, and most importantly, worried that we were again going in the same disastrous direction of last unit concerning working as a team and using class time wisely. The next class, Yara and Talah were absent, so Rema and I had to continue brainstorming on our own. But instead of turning out to be unproductive, this class went far more smoothly as there were only two people so there was less arguing about what we wanted to do and more agreeing. Rema and I both decided we wanted to go in the direction of Theater of Cruelty and the horror genre, and looked up different movies and stories we could use as stimuli. In the end, we decided to create a similar story to that of “The Caller,” which is about a woman who gets creepy phone calls from a woman living in the past. We have to make sure we are not copying the exact story but instead are using this movie as only an inspiration, but this proved difficult, as we couldn’t think of how to create a similar story that didn’t look like we had copied from the movie exactly. Hopefully when Talah and Yara come back we will be able to further this idea and think of ways to create our own original story, and hopefully we will be able to compromise on a story we are all happy with, because it’s definitely hard making decisions in the absence of group members.