INTRODUCTION

Our assessment was built and evolved around the stimulus of Alan Kurdi’s death, and effects it had on his fathers life after. Alan Kurdi was fleeing with his family from Syria, (due to danger from ISIS like millions of other Syrians) and was crossing the Mediterranean where he was driven in an unsafe boat steered by an unqualified driver and eventually it capsized. Hours later, he was found dead on a Turkish beach, washed up on the shore and a journalist took a picture of him being picked up by a Turkish officer and the picture went viral. His death was a real wake up call to the world, and now governments are picking up on these smugglers who are charging these vulnerable refuges a lot of money to be taken across these vicious seas, which are sometimes fatal and devastating.

Since we had been discussing frequently about refugees and Alan Kurdi’s death specifically, we decided that it would be interesting if we had done our rehearsed improvisation around that idea. We decided to do it on his his dads life after his death, so that we could give the audience a better idea of how exactly he might have felt, and how he was able to cope with the death of his children and wife on a daily basis.

 

Item 1:

We decided to explore the idea of a day in Alan Kurdi’s dads life after the tragic death of his sons and wife. We got this idea, as we thought that this event that occurred, was a turning point in the importance of what refugees were and still are going through in that specific chapter of their journey to safety, and how we, as people who live in more powerful countries, can help out. In the process of making our little play, we had this scene where we wanted Andre (one of the boys) to walk on his knees so that he was at more of a kids height in proportion to when he acting alongside a adult character in the play. We decided to scrap the idea as we felt it would look a bit strange and unrealistic if we had him walking around on his knees and it wouldn’t be appealing to the audience.

In our scene, we had three main characters who were: Alan Kurdi’s dad, and his two sons who performed in a ghost form throughout the play. We decided to have the kids in a ghost form, as we believed it was more effective in creating the notion that he was going mad, by seeing his sons as ghosts, and how no one else can see them apart from him. In the play, we decided to keep the names of the characters as ours in real life, so that we leave the audience with something closer to home, and not something that the media had given or labelled. We wanted to leave the audience thinking about what this play was related to. We also felt that it was important to leave them with the decision of what THEY thought the scene was revealing/referring to. It was important that we made the ages of our characters to be of Alan Kurdi’s, his dads and his brothers. We aimed to have Alan’s around 4 years of age, his brother 7 and his dad 35-45. It was essential that the audience was able to recognise this, as the play would have been made more realistic, so when the two brothers had lines, we put on a small kids childish voice to portray they’re age and of course by then, it would have been quite clear that his dad was one of the only main adult characters in the scene.