After having our initial meeting and playing with some ideas, we first looked at trying to find a theme for our performance. Do we want to challenge the concept of beauty, or will there be elements of War for instance. There were definitely certain links that bought our texts together; however, we decided it was best to start by looking at one text in particular. The most interesting thing we played around with in our session today was the idea of taking one line of a speech and trying to present it with different emotion. We began by choosing the line ‘I have a dream’ from Martin Luther King’s famous 1963 speech. Not only is it a well known text, but the first line is also a string of words that can be perceived in many other ways. Through playing with this one line we were able to test out performing it in a completely contrasting way. One person quoted it in a hysterical way, the next treated it like a passing thought. There is even a famous ABBA song that is entitled ‘I have a dream’.

In the video above you can see the line ‘I have a dream’ also begins the song, much like the line begins the speech. Through taking this one line we were able to play around and challenge preconceptions and in some ways allow the audience to question if the famous speech is really what inspired the performance that would be occurring, or was it an ABBA song. It’s all about taking something people can familiarise themselves with, even if it may ne in a different form to those sitting next to them and changing it to allow them to inevitably question this. It may not be something that will stick for our future performance but it opened our eyes into seeing that even by taking one line (even half a line) you can change the preconceptions through both vocal quality, imagery and conviction.