Scene and Performance Reflection

          Overall, I felt that our group’s dialogue and performance was pretty good, but it did have room for improvements. When my group was brainstorming ideas, I found it hard to choose one specific idea. There were so many different possibilities with the characters and plot lines from Krik? Krak! to choose from. We chose three of the mothers in the stories to explore their relationships with others and explore their characters more than what was given in the book. We chose the mother from Night Women (NWM), the mother from Caroline’s Wedding (CWM), and the mother from New York Day Women (NYDM). I felt that the mothers from Caroline’s Wedding and New York Day Women would have the most common in their roles in their families at that point in their lives. They both have grown daughters who (for the most part) grew up in a foreign country to them. They saw their children change due to their surroundings and it was probably difficult to see that happens in front of their own eyes. I chose to add NWM in there, because her perspective with the new environment may be a little different than the older women. I thought that she might see America as a place of opportunity and even as an escape from her life in Haiti. 
          Another difficulty was finding the relationship between the three characters and establishing that in our scene. We thought about possibly having CWM and NYDM as sisters, so they could talk freely to each, but realized that showing that relationship with its backstory might be difficult. We settled on good friends for the pair, but our feedback from the class after our performance said that it was not clear from our portrayal. With our timing and limited blocking, I think it was hard to find a place to put in that connection. For a longer adaptation, it could be easier to add more dialogue or an introduction of some kind to help the audience understand the relationships. Looking back on our performance, I wish that we had more room to add to NWM’s role in the story. I feel like when she just left after calling out CWM and NYDM on their conversation, it was just an easy way to finish the scene. If there was more time to elaborate, I think adding a real reason why NWM was following them in the first place would be essential. It would help the audience to accept and understand her more. A different ending to the scene could also have been a setup for further follow-up scenes where the three characters could meet again or talk to other characters about their meeting. Overall, I think the two to three-minute limit was effective for the purpose of the exercise, but in our case, caused our group to leave a few gaps that could have been solved with more elaboration.