BTEC Perfoming Arts - Logs

Antigone is a tragic play: exhibits many saddening events and centres the downfall of one main character. This downfall can be represented with the metaphor of a machine. It shows how after a certain number of actions have been made the consequences of those actions are too large and the play reaches a point of no return in which the machine of tragedy begins to work and not stop, pulling in and ruining the lives of many of the characters, especially the protagonist or 'tragic hero'. In this lesson we created a piece of physical movement with the use of sticks to show this 'Machine of Tragedy'. The way we did this was everyone was to think of a profession and create a short mime for that profession, one that could be looped. We then made this movement larger and more fluid, experimenting with levels and sing different parts of the body. Once we had our short fluid movement we were put in pairs and had to incorporate our two movements without speech, completely impr...

Log for the first part of the residential: Here is the video of the piece my group created, amalgamating the material collected from the morning's exercises. It is an abstract sequence movements that shows Antigone's fight for what she believes in. On the evening of the first day, we took part in an incredibly immersive role play, in which we were all given characters and were to act within those characters for at least 3 and a half hours in the scenario of being locked in a dungeon. This experience was a really interesting way of exploring a character, feeling the true power of their emotions, feeling the way that that influences their actions and how their actions affected the course of the role play. I was given the character of Myriam, a young lesbian muslim from Iran, situated in the dungeon on her search for her lover who was imprisoned for killing the guards that were sent to kill Myriam due to her sexuality. After the role play, I felt I had an incredibly st...

Full vlog:

For the directors challenge at N2C, I have I have been cast in the play Purple by Jon Fosse. This is a play about a teenage boy band, it explores the relationships the members have with each other and a girl. Upon the first read of the script, it's a very interesting play, there is a lot that is not said. It's mainly about the emotions of the characters and the relationships between them, there is a lot of tension and emotion.  It's quite short, I think I'll last under half an hour and it's all in real time as it's all very realistic, in a naturalistic Stanislavsky style.  I'm going to be playing the character of The Girl, I think I'll be able to connect with her character as she is a teenage girl and I'm a teenage girl and being a naturalistic performance I think that will work well, but for the same reasons this might be difficult because I don't want her character to be just like me and without the need to put on an accent or wear a complete...

This lesson was a workshop in the method acting style of Stanislavsky. We started the lesson lying down on our backs with quite angelic instrumental music playing whilst our teacher guided us through a meditation like activity, resulting in a weightless, spacey feeling. There was very little on my mind at this point. Once we were all in this very comfortable, relaxed state we were asked to think of a time in which we felt a very strong emotion, it could have been happy or sad (although, talking from my experience and talking to others afterwards, most people chose an extremely sad/angry experience). Whilst we lay there we were to focus on this time, this experience, this emotion, repeating it in as much detail as we could in our heads. Obviously this already started to evoke very physical reactions within everybody who was in the room, people began to cry uncontrollably as their emotions surfaced and a strange tension in the room was created, everybody focussing so deeply within them...

In this hour long lesson, we explored an abstract, physical way of presenting emotion through sequence. We began the lesson in groups creating a 30 second scene involving three characters: one that felt a need to be close to another particular character, one that felt a strong fear towards a particular character and one that felt fear in regards to the fact that another character was becoming so uncomfortably close to them, breaking boundaries.We thought we would show these relationships in the form of a wedding dress fitting. The bride-to-be on riser, anxiously smoothing out creases on her dress whilst one of the male wedding guests keeps becoming awkwardly close to her, compelled by a need to be with her and then slightly in the background was the seamstress who had a very strong fear of the bride-to-be and an obvious anxiety regarding the dress. Although this scene was initially realistic, the emotions of each character were still incredibly evident through both the dialogue (or l...

In this lesson, we explored the ways an audience can be affected by the acknowledgment of the fact that the characters they are watching are just actors performing on a stage. Discussing whether it detracted from the effect of the drama or added another complex layer to it, as it forces the audience to not only invest themselves into the fictional character in the show but the real life person behind that. We started the lesson by simply creating a 15 second scene with a small group of 3/4 in which we were actors entering a rehearsal spaced preparing for rehearsals, with stretches and light conversation. Each character created was very similar and had similar actions to correspond with that. We were then asked, in our groups, to add another layer to our characters. To think of the actor's emotions , to think of what had happened previously that day, their journey to the space and how that would affect their body language  and general mood as they entered the performance space. ...

We started this lesson by creating a short series of abstract movements with a partner that represented the feeling of falling deeply in love for the first time. Within these movements we had to keep contact with one another as we went from position to position, so as we went from back to back, to face to face (foreheads touching), down to one knee and back up again for the sequence to be repeated continuously. This was interesting because the intimacy between the pairs from the constant touch portrayed an instant idea of romance and intensity. Within my group we were then able to be creative with the facial expressions, pace and tone of the piece to create a more dynamic and interesting piece. After this exercise we were asked to explore a stimulus: a white wedding dress upon a deep red cloth with a knife on top of it. From this we tried to infer the time, setting and brief plot of the play 'Blood Wedding' by Federico Garcia Lorca. Our initial thoughts were that the play w...