SO FAR, WE HAVE –
- Questioned different opportunities, ways of thinking and making as a collaborative
- Looked at the attitudes of fanSHEN, and how their styles could inspire us
- Explored music and how that could dictate a score to construct a narrative
We have adopted an idea to use music to produce scenes of a nature which inflict moods of anger, frustration, loss and dreams. We came to a point during the middle of our process towards our performance in how to contextualise these moods, so one of the participants in the collaboration posed the idea of using our current compositional strategies and adapting them to an existing text which fits the criteria of these particular moods. this lead us to begin to explore Arthur Miller’s play ‘The Death of a Salesman’ and particularly its central character, Willy Loman. Arthur Miller was a popular American playwright and a profound figure for his American plays during the 20th century. Written in 1949, ‘The Death of a Salesman’ is a play which follows the fall of salesman Willy Loman. Willy Loman is a husband and father of two sons in the play and is absorbed in being the best he can be and wanting the same for his sons. Willy strives for his sons to be a success because his life hasn’t plotted the way he envisaged.
“Willy Loman is a man who wishes his reality to come into line with his hopes, a man desperate to leave his mark on the world through his own endeavours and through those of his children. Though he seems to seek death, what he fears above all is that he will go before he has justified himself in his own eyes and there are few, from New York to Beijing, who do not understand the urgency of that need.” Bigsby (2005;101).
Throughout the play Willy Loman projected onto his wife and sons (son Biff in particular) his past experiences of failure and the insufficiency to achieve what he once strove for, the American dream. The dream to be the best at what he does and to live comfortably and happily, allowing the highest hopes and aspirations to bring him huge success. Unfortunately, Willy’s life plays out to lead to the tragic downfall of him taking his life as a product of giving his life to pursue the American dream which ended in failure. Willy doesn’t want his children to fail where he did so he projects his dreams onto son Biff, who doesn’t want the same life his father has, as he has seen the deluded and defeated man his father had become.
The play is structured in two acts and a final act ‘Requiem’, requiem meaning a token of remembrance in which the play concludes in Willy’s family he has left behind reflecting on his constant struggle to achieve material and personal success as a salesman, which is the totality of the American dream, being the best, you can be and having the best as a product of tireless work. This play was a perfect platform to deliver the moods we found from our soundtracks we discovered early on in our collaborative process.
As a group we read ‘The Death of a Salesman’ and decided which moments and themes in the play best suit our soundtracks, then we also bared the question of how as three artists we could reinvent Arthur Miller’s original text into short sized-down sequences to speak about times we are living in or how the American dream is just as much a struggle now as it was when Arthur Miller wrote ‘The Death of a Salesman’ in 1949…