Dancing at Lughnasa Response paper
The play Dancing at Lughnasa is about five sisters,Kate, Maggie, Christina, Rose and Agnes who live in the cottage in the rural Ireland with their old brother Jack. The whole story is told from the perspective of a seven years old boy Michael who is the son of Christina and Gerry.
Gerry is a young man works as a gramophone salesman. The whole story happens during a summer before the festival Lughnasa.
The play is presented at Hemsley Theatre , known as the black box, which forms an intimate actor-audience relationship. Since there is no masking between audiences and stage, audiences get the change to carefully observe every detail of the set. However, on the other hand, the edge of the stage is not very clear to the audience. For instance in Dancing at Lughnasa, there is a kite that is the gift from Kate for little Michael. The kite was lying at downstage left. As the kite was too close to the audience, it becomes very distracting especially for the audiences at the front seat. Besides, there is no actually line that is drawn as the edge of the stage, therefore, audiences can be confused about the identity of the kite: whether or not the kite is a prop. On the contrary, if this show is presented at a proscenium theatre then audiences won’t have the same confusion.
The main parts of the scene is composed of a cottage, a garden outside the cottage and the hills behind the cottage. Inside the cottage there are tables , stools , boxes and a fire place. Most parts of the scene are built by wood like the hills, furnitures and the small house inside the cottage and they form the main structure of the whole set.
I was mainly working on the rock wall in this show. The wall is a wood board that has carved foam rocks stick on it. Before the show begins under the normal lighting condition the wall is in
complete black which is very un-hill like and visually unpleasant. However, when the different
lighting