7 Years – Working Record

We were given the stimulus ‘7 Years’ by Lukas Graham, a song that surrounded the life of a ttroubled young man who grew up to be a successful singer. It gave the story of how his father would push him to interact with the outside world, and expressed his doubts and possibilities of the future.

In conclusion to this, our class came up with potential dramatic performances; basically a beginning improvisation piece that we had thought through for about 2 lessons.

First Improv – Our groups first initial ideas concerning improvisation was to act out every specific age, using different people. At this point, we did not consider the use of lighting or costume, which left it up to us to make it as realistic as possible. This attempt failed as many of us weren’t very focused and did not stay in character. Using this as an example, we decided how we could change this and create a better improvisation performance.

As we all played Lukas, we decided to thoroughly analyse the stages of his life that were mentioned in the empathetic piece of music.

Makai was essentially the narrator, and told the story of each stage before the protagonists began their own. The song begins with an impactful line stating that his mother had told him to ‘go make yourself some friends or you’ll be lonely’ when he was only seven. This already causes quite a lonely atmosphere, suggesting that young, seven year old Lukas had not so many friends or people to socialize with. Jose had played this scene, without using any higher status in his body actions. His state of mind was still young, so this scene was quite easier to react to as Lukas himself.  As he grows up to the age of 11, we see his life begin to deteriorate as he is smoking and drinking at such a young age. Karver acted out this part and was strong in portraying this role, which would be beneficial towards the failed improvisation. At the age of 20, Lukas was lonely, but this didn’t stop him from doing what he wanted to achieve, which was of course becoming successful in the music industry. We understand this as he states in the song; “I only see my goals, I don’t believe in failure, cause I know the smallest voices, they can make it major”. This stage was acted out by myself, in an environment where I already have a few fans asking to interact with me. But although this is the case, my character is still quite humble.

After this initial performance, we decided to split our groups, so we could focus even more on the stages that we wanted to perform. Me and Josh decided to represent two incredibly different ages, young and old. We also decided that our monologue would see the audience experience back to back events of the different stages. There was an easy difference between the moods in both scenes and the audience definitely picked up on this, considering the feedback we received.

Lighting – I had decided to do a lighting presentation, to show the differences and moods that different lights colours could produce. This song ‘7 Years’ was a story that could use many of the lights, as it included time manipulation and alterations of mood (two factors which can affect the lighting around the stage). This would also leave a different impact on the audience, as they would understand where the character was coming from. In our monologue, we only used the white light and dims,so that it was easier for the audience to understand the type of transition that was going on.

Second Improv – Our second improvisation was clearly a success. We were able to compose ourselves, and in the short time we had to prepare before, we were able to come up with a good structured performance that related to the stimulus. We did change it in some aspects. The character Lukas, was changed from being each actor to just one, who was Josh, which we found to be a better option as he was successful in delivering the same type of person each time, through the way he talked and reacted to things. Without the lighting, we could also focus more on how we delivered the scenes as individuals, and how we were relevant towards the scene. We kept the narrator (Makai) the same, as he was strong in providing quite an empathetic voice, especially in the beginning scenes, which saw Lukas’ darkest days where he was lonely at first, but then begin to negatively affect his life by smoking and drinking, common ways to escape life for young people.

We decided to add in

Monologue – My separate monolgue with Josh was also quite a success. It was strong  in showing the two different stages of Lukas’ life and how his mood was. Compared to Aarons group, we were quite different as they decided to create another scene instead of actually acting out the set scene of the song itself.. Also, they didn’t use spoken word like we did, but they were able to focus on the different opinions of the characters in their scene, especially from the old aged Lukas Graham; also signifying the difference in both performances that we did. I believe both performance had positive reactions from the audiences we delivered them too and they had delivered a similar message throughout.

Evaluating my character in the monologue is quite easy to do.  Lukas was young and was not fully aware of what he was going to do in the near future but myself and Josh decided to give him a non quitting mindset, which was thouroughly expressed throughout the performance. Because of his mother and father telling him to go out and find friends, he clearly found himself in situations where it was hard to socialize with many others, excluding his family, also adding onto the lonely atmosphere of the performance. This was vital as the audience were intrigued and empathetic, coming from opinions from other classmates.