Lively and Realistic

Every time when I set a play I will always go through the back ground information first. Then I will figure out what I want to achieve through the play. Finally I will make all the details clear, such as costumes lights and blocking. Because of these orders I can build the play step by step. To day I will mainly focus on the four gods in Once On This Island. I will go step by step to tell you my idea of building these gods.

As we all know Once On This Island is the musical vision of the novel My love My love, and this novel is based on Little Mermaid which was a fairy tale written by Andersen. In the novel there are four gods and each one of them represent Earth, Water, Love and Death, and they fight each other over years and years. According to this back ground, I will set each god completely different to show how they fight each other and how they represent who they are.

Then I will discover what I want achieve through this play which is the most important thing because all my setting is depending on my objective. I want to show the relationships between these gods and I also want to show how they influence the main characters’ lives by their powers and their symbol. In order to show their relationship and effect, I will work on giving them a clear personality or power which they use all the time. For example, I want God of Love to be gentle and soft and it always show up when the characters need help; I want God of Earth to always be around people and watch them doing things which can show the close relationship between human and Earth; I want God of Water to be more active and a little naughty because the water is both good and bad to people which is just like kids who are so cute but some times do bad things; last I want to make the god of Death to always hide around people and show up when they are in danger because death is something hide around you all the time and it comes out at the worst time to give you the final judge.

Depends on what I said before I want to give each God a color, and they are Red for Love, Green for Earth, Black for Death and Blue for Water. I don’t want to give them any mask, but I do want them to wear some small things, such as rings, necklaces and head wear. For instance, I want Death to hold a skeleton in the hand all the time; Love can have a loving heart crown on her head; Water should have a container; finally the Earth can have a leaves crown and hold animals on the hand. I want the light always focus on the gods when they are talking and the light should be lighter on the one is speaking when others are quiet.

Those are all my ideas about creating these four gods, and I want to work more details on each one of them when we set the play. I am looking forward to see how these gods fight wach other and influence people who are on the Island. I also hope my ideas can help to build Gods more lively and realistic.