That Time That Place

Welcome back to drama 2019. Are you ready for another semester? No? Me either! Unlike last semester, our main goal is to create a film and a stage performance using the script of Ken Mizusawa's 'That Time. That Place.'

The story follows Mel, a young woman who refuses to live in the present and put the past behind her. We watch as the unexplained disappearance of a boy during highschool continues to preoccupy her. Unable to move on, she decides to investigate the case to find meaning in what has happened, only to find herself falling even further into the realm of memory and half-remembered moments.

To prepare for this, we have spent the last two lessons doing a script read and creating a painting that is very important to the story. Said painting isn't really described in much detail, leaving much for the reader/director to imagine. Mel described it in the script as "It was all abstract, big, with flying colours everywhere. Real amazing!" While chorus 2 says "In one corner of the painting, there was this figure in silhouette - a body - with this chalk outline around it like in a crime scene."


So, with that in mind, we got to work. We started with an idea in mind, a reference for our abstract art, pictures to the side. And let me tell you, creating an abstract piece of work isn't the easiest thing ever. Especially when no one in our 7 person Drama class is a Picasso level artist. Luckily, 'abstract' could be a bunch of lines on a canvas and called trees.
Before we even painted anything, we needed to talk colours. In the quotes mentioned above, Mel mentions flying colours. We, as actors, interpreted this as bright, bubbly colours. But we didn't have much paint. So we worked with what we got. We ended up with purple, a light green and blue, pink, yellow, white, and black. Cool. Now we gotta paint. We thought about how the painting was meant to be more uplifting than sad and said, hey, what if we did upwards strokes. While we strayed from that a little, it totally worked out. At the moment I'm writing this, the painting looks like a bus seat cover. But I guess that's what we're going for. Next step is to add the silhouette and start the process of... acting?