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Notes: Nosferatu is the original vampire story All read up on the story and decided it was a good starting point The problem we had was that our group was full of girls and obviously Nosferatu is male We did decide to maybe not have a physical body but just lighting and sound to represent him but we felt it took away from our performance We decided to make the main character his daughter and created our own story.

My Visual Journal 

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Bibliography

http://www.academic.muohio.edu/mus189/expressionism/

https://www.wikiart.org/en/amedeo-modigliani/portrait-of-madame-kisling 

https://www.edvardmunch.org/the-scream.jsp 

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Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty.                        

Robert Motherwell 

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My Visual Journal 

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How Would I Improve?

If I were to develop my piece or change it in any way, I think I would have maybe incorporated more dance elements for my own personal character, as I feel like my character could have been a bit more expressionistic throughout the performance. Looking back now I think we could have made the scene where we see my character killing her daughter much bigger and longer. I think adding more stylised movements to that scene would have made it stand out a bit more and made it more recognisable as a key scene, because I do think that it was an important moment but when I watched it back I think it looked quite rushed. I don’t think we realised the potential of the scene until after we had done the final performance. I think if I were to do it again I would have made it more of a struggle and involved more of the characters and created a visual fight scene, using different music and harsher lighting, and choreographed more dance like movements, as I feel it looked quite humanlike compared to some of the other scenes that were much more movement based. I think I would also look into different sets we could have used for the office space, because although at the beginning we decided to keep a contrast between the vampires cave and the hunters office, I felt as though it looked very naturalistic and almost out of place. So I would change the surroundings. 

the hunters office 

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Key Learning Block

I think that the hardest part for me was being able to keep in time with the slides that were playing on the screen behind me as I couldn’t see them when I was acting. It sounds so easy to say count to 10 and then freeze/make 10 seconds of movement depending on what was coming on the next slide. But to actually be completely in sync with a slide on screen proved to be incredibly challenging, especially when you have no beat or movement to use as a guide. I found it difficult to not look up at the screen behind me to check to see whether I was too early or too late or on time. Learning how to trust my instinct became vital and much more challenging than I had previously thought. I had to count 10 seconds in my head and completely trust that it was in sync with the slides on the screen. I found that the best way to overcome this was to practice doing it as much as possible. By the end of the rehearsal process I found I was more confident with this as I was using the expressionistic music and pinpointing certain beats within the music to know how many more movements I had left before the 10 seconds came to an end. I had also choreographed my movements so I knew how long I had to do each one. This all made the process less challenging and easier.  

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The expressionistic art we used in our piece is shown above. we made it into a programme for our audience to physically have and look at when they were first seated, then we played it on the screen while Katarina sang her song explaining it all in her own language.  

“Art is not about beauty, art is an expression.”    ―      Vikram Roy, The Alchemist A Mystery in Three Acts

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We decided that we wanted to incorporate different aspects of expressionism throughout our performance and after researching expressionism it was very apparent that many artists used expressionism throughout their work. Perhaps the most famous paintings in this style is ‘the scream’ by Edvard Munch. We decided that adding this kind of work would enhance the style that was flowing throughout our piece.     

“Man screams from the depths of his soul; the whole era becomes a single, piercing shriek. Art also screams, into the deep darkness, screams for help, screams for the spirit. This is Expressionism.”    ―      Hermann Bahr   

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(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNCIz-_QFrs) 

This type of music inspired me to look into the idea of using a silent film format because it helps to capture the darkness of the story of Nosferatu. Other influences came from people such as Gustav Mahler and Alexander Scriabin. 

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 https://youtu.be/AtLSSuFlJ5c

This is what our finished dance piece looked like. Below the video is a hyperlink,  this was our inspiration for our dance routine. We chose this because we felt that it was expressionistic and showed the concept of Martyna changing from a human into a vampire very clearly as her movements quicky go from humanlike to something almost demonic. We also used the use of costumes to show that she had changed from an innocent human to a vampire by using a reverse dress, using white to symbolise purity and black to show death.  

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Expressionism Through Movement

Nikolina and Katarina speaking through movement rather than words. We felt that it was important to show a clear contrast between how the humans communicate and how the vampires and witch communicate. 

We felt that it was important to make these scenes very different to the scenes between the hunter and her daughter. We made good use of the lights and sound to help create a dingy atmosphere. 

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My Key Learning Point

After re-watching the original Nosferatu film and researching different music linked with expressionism such as Peripetie by Arnold Schoenberg, I started to look into different silent movies like London After Midnight, Way Down East and The Story Of The Kelly Gang, before suggesting to my group that it might be an interesting approach if we did our performance in the style of an old silent movie. I thought this might be a good idea because it would allow us to strip away all of the naturalism and make it completely expressionistic. I liked the idea of creating big over exaggerated movements to bring an old fashioned approach to acting on stage. we looked into it further as a group and decided it was a good idea and developed the script we had created into a power point to have displayed above us playing while we acted out the movements. Going away and researching classic silent movies was a very important part for me and my character development. I wanted to capture the style in which the actors moved and how they used their bodies to express how they’re feeling and to tell a story rather than using expressions using their voices and words. I looked into the styles of Charlie Chaplin, Lillian Gish and Marceline Day. After looking at these different actors, I noticed that facial expressions were as important as big bold movements. I started to take note of different ways in which they used their faces.  When acting onstage I needed to make my movements bigger and less humanlike.  

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The Development Of Our Piece

I think our piece developed really well from our first idea to our final performance. We had decided as a group that we were going to move the focus from Nosferatu and adopt new characters. We gave him a daughter that he raised and a daughter that he wasn't aware of. We also had another storyline that we linked Nosferatu to. We added a vampire hunter and her daughter who was trying to hunt down the whole Nosferatu clan. We wanted to add as much un-naturalistic movement as possible so we decided that the daughter’s would speak through movement rather than words. The hunters daughter got caught up in the two daughters meeting and got bitten. We choreographed a dance routine in an expressionistic way to show the hunters daughter changing from a human into a vampire. We found a ‘witch dance’ on youtube and used that as our inspiration for the routine. In the final scene we see everyone together and the events that unfold are foreshadowed throughout. The Hunter kills her daughter and Nosferatu’s daughter kills the hunter. 

Once we had decided on a storyline we started to explore ways in which to enhance the expressionism throughout. We went back to the original film for inspiration and I decided that the music was one of the strongest elements of expressionism. I decided to research different practitioners and composers that used this type of style. Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator were both influenced by this type of theatre. I found artists and composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg and started looking into their work. I brought this back to my group and we selected different musical elements for different scenes. 

Deciding to make it silent came from watching the original film back and spotting the potential of having all naturalism removed and making it something completely different. 

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The Making Of Our Nosferatu

We had decided previously that we liked the dark dusky feel of the film and the way it looked visually captured how terrifying Nosferatu really was. We made a few freeze frames to try and recreate images that would show just how inhuman this character actually was.

We had a discussion about maybe not using a physical representation of Nosferatu as we were all girls and didn't want one of us portraying him at the risk of it becoming comedic. We thought that using sound and lighting to create dark shadow-like images might be an effective way to have Nosferatu present without actually using a person, but while this did look visually effective as a group we felt that taking Nosferatu away from a physical character felt like a huge loss to our performance, so we asked if Lucas could help us out and pose as our Nosferatu for the very start of our piece and at the end. 

We started thinking about maybe taking the story away from Nosferatu himself and basing the story on other characters such as his daughter who was also a vampire, a daughter that was a witch and a vampire hunter and her daughter. We felt that this was a good idea as it let us bring the story into the 21st century but still having the aspects of the 1920′s. We wanted to keep the expressionistic theme throughout because we wanted to keep the story quite dark. 

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The Original Story

Our rehearsal process started by making sure everyone had watched the Nosferatu film so that we all knew what kind of piece we were going to aim to make. 

https://youtu.be/FC6jFoYm3xs 

Once we had all watched the film we had a conversation to discuss whether we wanted to keep the same style as the original film, or whether we wanted to modernise the story. 

As a group we decided that we’d keep the general expressionistic style of the original the same, but we didn't want to rule out modernising it completely this early on. 

We liked how the original film portrayed Nosferatu and the ways in which it enhanced his features using lighting, sound and movement. 

We decided that these 3 things were key to our kind of performance as we wanted to make it as dark and grungy as possible. 

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Our group consists of Nikolina, Katarina, Toulla, Martyna and myself. When our group first got together we decided to have a chat about our hobbies and interests as it was still quite early on in the term so we didn't really know each other all that well. After listening to everyone talk we discovered that there was a mutual interest in dark mystery films such as Twilight. We started looking into different vampire stories and adaptations. Katarina told us about the original Vampire concept and explained it was all based on a character called Nosferatu. She explained the story and then we each did some individual research and came back to the group with positive feedback. We all felt hooked on the story and decided it was a good idea going forward to focus on this as our classic piece. 

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These are the interests that I wrote down to be put into my group. Some interests that other group members wrote down were:

Serial Killers 

Vampires 

Disney 

Smurfs