The Legend The Zebra Analysis

Zink: The Myth, The Legend, The Zebra is a confronting tale about the reality of childhood cancer. The audience goes through a rollercoaster of emotions as it follows the journey through the imagination of Becky Zaslow as she goes through leukaemia treatment. This uplifting story explores the meaning of true courage with the assistance from her unlikely bunch of guardian angels, The Zebras.

To start the process of getting the production underway, the first element was choosing the right script and production for our cast. The class is made up of 16 students of which four chose to be crew members. To narrow down a production that had 12 equal parts proved to be a challenge. The class read through 4 different scripts briefly and eliminated
For the imaginary characters Laban had a connection with them since he developed the theatrical movement of body, effort, shape and space. Exploring different ways the actor can move around on stage and the way the actor spoke could also be altered by following Laban’s movement. Stanislavski however, connected to the real word characters, as he developed the method of inhabiting authentic emotion while on stage and drawing upon feelings actors have experienced in their own lives. To develop the characters further, the actors tried various techniques to develop our characters personally. The first technique the cast used was to come up with a back story that fitted our characters personality and connect it to one of the theatre movements from Laban or Stanislavski. I was cast as Zilch, one of the zebra characters, whose characteristics were snobby, conceited, vain and pompous. To portray my character I decided to completely and overly emphasis my normal speaking voice to a posh tone that could portray the pretentious character that I acted. In order for my character to develop throughout the process of the production, I aimed to focus on enunciation, projection and overall presence on stage. Before each rehearsal the director took us through vocal warmups that focused on loosing up the muscles in our faces and using our diaphragm to project our voices as much as possible.
The costume designer’s had exceptionally significant job to ensure that the characters we were portraying. For the imaginary characters it was essential to make the zebras somewhat unison with their makeup and hair however still giving them an accessory or prop that differentiated them from the rest. For the character I played, Zilch, the designers chose to dress him in a suit vest and a bow tie. However for example, the character Zuzi wore a bright pink tutu. To create a barrier between each zebras personality was crucial to distinguish the characters clearly. The way the characters interacted with each other also vital for the shows success. The characters personalities had to play off each others body language and their emotions.Another key element to the production was the lighting, set design and sound track. Many of the transitions and cues were dependent on lighting and sound cues for example, the lion roars were cues for lines or transitions and when the characters were going in and out of Africa it was crucial that there was ‘magical’ lighting and sound to distinguish each