Marking the Moment- Train Surfer Still Image:
In the last lesson, we looked at a technique in Drama known as marking the moment where we had to highlight the most important part of a scene that we were acting out. Marking the moment can also be known as grabbing the audience's attention to one particular part of a scene. To mark the moment you can use other skills in Drama such as freeze frames or even just having a moment of silence to show that all the attention has gone towards that one particular area/part. For the past few lessons, we have been learning about the social divide in Brazil and how the slums and rich parts of Brazil are. In the last lesson we had, we had to recreate a scene of Train Surfers in Brazil. Train Surfers are the poor people of Brazil who don't have any ways to entertain themselves or anything worth living for so they decide to have fun and risk their lives by going on top of trains and try to avoid the electric wires, which is one of the main causes of death in Brazil. Sometimes they also do it because of peer pressure or because they want to join a gang. Our scene included the police, the gang members, people walking by and a poor person from the slums who wanted to join the gang and had never done train surfing before. In our scene the gang members told the new person to do train surfing with them and he decided to go with them. He got really scared and did not want to do the train surfing anymore. Before they arrived at the train station, the gang members jumped off which was what they were supposed to do but the new person was to scared to. As he arrived at the train station, the police was there to get him and they started rushing towards the train. The police told him to get on the ground and off the train. Then it came to marking the moment and he said that he was going to touch the wires and kill himself. To mark the moment in the scene we made Yasin increase his voice and he started speaking really loudly saying that he would kill himself if the police did not leave him which grabbed all the audiences attention towards him. The police were speaking over him and kept telling him to get on the ground and leave the wire which built up the tension and it looked very realistic like the scene was happening in real life. Yasin was not only speaking loud but he was also speaking like he was really scared and did not want to die at that point. We also had JP and Amelie who were the gang members as well as the people who walked by the train and stopped there in shock as the did not want to see Yasin die. Their facial expressions showed that they were really shocked and that they had never seen that happen in front of their eyes before. The facial expressions of Aslesha and I showed that we were really serious and angry and we did not want him to kill himself at that point. Yasin also looked very afraid which showed on his face and had never experienced something like that ever before. The police at the part of the scene where they were arriving at the train station showed that they really wanted to catch the train surfer which was Yasin because usually the others would always get away with it and just escape very easily. In the last lesson we also did cross-cutting where we showed a scene from before where Yasin was going to meet the gang to get into it and he said that he would do anything and the gang members accepted him in. When he went outside he told his friends and his friends were happy because they never got in but they also told him about train surfing and he got really shocked an just stood there in silence. I think that we were able to use marking the moment very well in the lesson and it would be a really good technique to use in future performances as it is really effective.
