Cabaret Group Project

Our first brief is to create a Cabaret performance in groups based on a given story, my group got a story called Mr. & Mrs. Vinegar. The story itself is very interesting to work with, the characters are bold, and there is some great imagery and sounds. I especially want to incorporate the character of the 'magpie', as I interpret the magpie's intervention in the story as a key moment in the story line, and more importantly, as a symbol; Other folk stories/fable's use the character of a magpie as a malicious and greedy character. Knowing this, the fact that the Magpie doesn't use Mr.Vinegar's simplicity to his own benefit, and actually gives advice to the character, albeit with a malicious tone, highlights this characteristic of Mr.Vinegar. Though this is a small part of the actual story line, I think it is key to the message and if there is one thing that I can really influence for the final outcome is how this character is communicated. Another element of the story that I find interesting is the structure, it ends the essentially the same way it begins- with Mr Vinegar gardening and Mrs Vinegar cleaning. To put it simply, the moral of this story seems to be 'just stick to what you know', which is amusing because it is so depressing.

After watching Dr.Caligari I would like the final outcome of this piece to adapt many elements used in a silent film. An essential part in telling this story is including the sounds, I feel that if we have no spoken words this would be enhanced. I also think that it would be visually very effective if we used a slide show to show spoken words, and adopted a black and white color scheme. As this story is a fable/folk story, the characters and the moral are supposed to be timeless (to an extent), and and using only black and white would communicate this. If it were completely up to me, all the characters other then the magpie would be made as life size puppets that we could act in to a soundtrack and text projected onto a wall. The character of the magpie could be a shadow pupped, much like the example I made. This would bring out a eerie mood and show his significance in the story.

So far, we have not managed to do much as a group, there seems to be a slight communication failure. However, as a group we seem to agree on stylistic ideas and once we get working I think we can create a very successful piece.