Mini Research Presentation

We recently did a mini research presentation to help prepare us for the larger research presentation we will have next semester. I chose to do my presentation over Victorian Melodrama.

What I learned about Victorian Melodrama through this presentation:

It emerged in France but made its way over to Britain and gained popularity quickly there. The Victorian age was a time of peace and prosperity for Britain; it was a global power and was experiencing advancements in every possible area of knowledge. Theater was prospering during this time and there was an increase in demand for entertainment. The working class began to want to see theater; they wanted something easy to follow that was also entertaining. Victorian Melodrama has stereotypical characters and usually follows the same basic plotline. Both the characters and the story are greatly exaggerated. The intention is to portray strong emotions, which is usually done with music, physicality, and elaborate sets. There are 6/7 basic stock characters. I chose movement/gestures to be my convention and focused a lot on how each character would move. These are the notes I took for that part in my presentation.

I modeled each character and the types of movements they would typically use. I really enjoyed figuring out the movement of each character and fitting it to their personality. I found that the heroine typically used more feminine and helpless movements, such as a hand on her heart or kicking her foot up behind her. In contrast to that, the hero moves in a more traditionally masculine way with his hands on his hips and walking in a bold confident manner. After I presented the many different movements possible for the characters, our class did an activity I planned for this presentation.

The activity was for everyone to get on stage and act out one of the characters only using movements and gestures. Then after about a minute of us acting we would go around and guess what stock character each person chose. This was a good exercise to do because it helped us to familiarize ourselves with each character and their movements.

I really enjoyed this style of learning about each of the different world traditions because it allowed us to choose one we were passionate about and learn more in depth about while also being able to learn about some of the others we might not have initially considered.