Oral

       Children of the Sea is a love story between a young couple telling their feelings for each other through letters, but never being sent out. It was one of the most touching stories from the novel Krik Krak by Danticat. Therefore, this is the story I chose to make an adaptation on. To stick more to the origina story, I kept the important and obvious element of the story: the method of writing letters to each other to express love and tell their situations. We used many of the text into our letters but also changing, adding a little bit to make it logical to our settings. Oppositely, what I changed to make it more interesting and into a new version, is the location, I changed Haiti into North Korea to create a similar situation as being isolated, having a strict government, inequality between genders, and difficult to escape. The couple in my adaptation is also married, having a daughter who has already escaped to South Korea, creating a stronger motivation for the married couple to leave North Korea as well. The husband and wife will be escaping through different routes to increase the risks of getting caught, this will create a separation between the lover and then the writing of letters will start to explain what they've been through and what they are feeling in the moment. The father is set to be a very protective, strong and brave man; On the other hand, the wife is set to be a weak, fearful and nervous woman but filled with love for her daughter as well as her husband. James is acting as the husband, and I am acting as the wife. 

       For our blockings, we created a separation through the lighting to shine only on the side while one person is writing his or her letter then darkens when another is starting their part. It is basically lights being altered with the two characters taking turn of their performances on stage. We played the national anthem of North Korea, put up posters of KimJongun and a North Korea flag to show the audience our location for the beginning of the story. In the last scene where the wife successfully arrived at South Korea, we put up a South Korea flag as well as the national anthem of South Korea to again update the audience the situation and location of the characters. Focusing more on the performance, James continued to change his position to show him not being afraid, In my performance, I stayed in the same position sitting down on the bench with curved back to show my fear on the journey alone. This created a visualized, high and low blocking of the two characteristics, strong and weak. 

        Some analysis and details the audience might not recognized in our performance including our emotions being showed through body movements. In the very first scene, when we mentioned our daughter being sent away by the father, I was angry and could not understand wholey to this choice the father has made; To show this anger, I raised my voice up while saying the line"But we will never know if she has the better life or not!" to show how worry and depressed a mother is not seeing her daughter for a long time and not being able to contact her daughter. Also while two of us sat down after the first line, I poured the tea for both of us and hand it to my husband first, this small detail being acted naturally shows a small part of gender role, man first and woman serves as housewives are used to getting things ready like meals, drinks and houseworks. Even though just a small action could be fit in to the scene it is a part we put some attention on while writing the script. The mother is also not as edcuted and well-informed as the father, she asked "what do you think is the safer way" and speaks overall less through their conversation to show her dependent on her husband. Later on in our individual small seperated stage writing our letters, I tried to use facial emotions and an unsure voice to speak many of the lines to show my fear being along on a journey. But to make sure that it isn't boring, I continued to rise up my head and make eye contacts during the process of writing. 

        Some parts I think I did well for the performance was to try to make as much actions within our plot being set with moslty writing letters. My partner also did a great job by changing his position in a small area while writing letters to keep it interesting. A difficult part for me as always was to memorize the script, I missed some parts of the script but continued acting while is a good thing in this flaw I made in my performance of being accurate, sticking to the script.