Oral presentation first draft

  My internal assessment performance is based on the novel, "My love, my love, or the peasant girl" which was written by Rosa Guy. The novel illustrates a tragic love story, based on the setting that people are separated by social divisions and economic status. The main character: Desiree is a peasant girl from the poor village who fell in love with a rich young man named Daniel though a car accident. The gap between the rich and the poor peasants is the main argument in the novel. Thoughout the entire plot, Desiree was trapped and stumbled by her love and the story eventually ended up with her death. On contrary, her soul mate - Daniel got to build up a new relationship with another woman and still lived in his rich side of the world. This setting provides such a strong comparison that brings audience different understandings to the book and especially, make them shows sympathy to the main character. Our performance serves to maximize this conflict with different adaptations.
  We made efforts on presenting the difference between rich and poor in several ways. First of all, the staging was what made our performance special. My group set stageright as the "poor area" and stageleft as the "rich area", to show a distinct contradiction between the two social levels. In addition to that, our group used light effect to distinguish the two sides also. When the scene is taken place on the rich side, there will be spotlight focus on that side only and vice versa. This way, the two worlds are no longer existing at the same time. Also, the arrangement of scene orders became a significant factor. The abbreviated scene selection keeps the performance in a fair length  and also, guarantees our performance's understanding to the essence of the original work. Our performance did not change the overall story development but instead, added a few scenes to strengthen the idea of difference. For example, we created three private conversations between Daniel and his father Monsieur Gabriel. Those dialogues did not exist in the original novel, but they serve as contradictions to Desiree and Her father Tonton in our performance.
  My character in the performance is Monsieur Gabriel, Daniel's father. He is an rich man who shows a strong discrimination against the Poors, especially to Tonton. His has both arrogant and didactical character voices depends on who he is talking to. He shows a hard attitude towards Tonton while treating his son with dignity. From hearing that his son got injured to picked him up from the village, Gabriel's character developed a stronger contempt to the Poor side along the scenes. During the process of designing Gabriel's lines, my group tried to add several factors such as classical music and expensive foods to show that Gabriel is a well-educated man.
  In conclusion, our performance needs more work on Character developments and there are several things that I personally need to improve. I utilized a lot of rising tones to indicate Gabriel's aristocratic identity but I still can't make the character more like a father compare to Daniel. More practice and thinking definitely helps and I've been learning how to create a older characteristic by listening to other's instructions.