Theatrical Creation

I'm currently in Andrew Palermo's Theatrical Creation class. In this class we are given a vague prompt to create a performance around and write and perform it within a limited time period. This week our prompt was "Classics." My group (Sean Deuel, Dalia Anderton, and I) ended up devising a piece on the "Tell Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe. Our piece used a lot of lighting and effects (well very limited resources). We had the lights off the entire time and we played a lot with shadows. For example, Sean was the main character/narrator and we had him start with a flashlight under his face which caused many shadows on his face and on the ceiling. This went with the eerie, spooky mood that we wanted to create. One cool thing that we discovered is that if we had a flashlight behind a piece of paper, the light one the paper looked like an eye, which was perfect since a section of the poem talks about a "milky eye" We discovered Also, at one point, I was sitting in a chair, and Dalia came over and had her hands in front of me and was squeezing them like a human heart. When she did this, I held a red light under her hands to help signify that her hands were supposed to be my heart and also the shadows from the light on her hands and my face were very creepy and kept the suspension high. In our piece we also used varying speeds of strobe light. I found it interesting how the strobe light really amplified the suspense and that the varying speeds gave slightly different affects, but they were all very successful. For example, when Sean was slowly inching toward me to kill me, we had the strobe light at the slowest setting which went with the "clock ticking" and the "heart beating." When he was actually killing me, we had the strobe light on faster to go with the heightened actions that were happening. I wish I has photos or videos of this piece, but unfortunately I do not.