N2C - Initial thoughts

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 completely different costume or something definitive like that to change my character, this could prove to be difficult. It could be hard also due to the fact that it's so naturalistic, there is no stereotype so even though she is labelled as a 'slut' in the play that doesn't necessarily affect her characteristics in any way. You still see a variety of different sides to her character throughout the play. Also because there is very little actually said in the play, conveying all the small hidden meanings (that i don't know either) will be a challenge too. However, I think it's an interesting character and script and I think it'll be fun to work with over the weeks at N2C.

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Stephen Berkoff Research

We have started studying the theatre style of Stephen Berkoff in our drama lessons. Berkoff's style is non-naturalistic, he focuses much more on the movement of the actor rather than the voice, he states that the only use for the script is to 'minimalise and physicalise' the story; it enables the story to be told in the simplest, most effective way. His Actor's use techniques such as background movement, repetitive actions and mime. Berkoff said that it was important 'to see how I could bring mime together with the spoken word as its opposite partner, creating the form and structure of the piece'. This very interesting concept provides the core of his work, the mimelike, staccato movements accompanied by vivid, imaginative language. Berkoff studied at L'École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq. Jacques Lecoq was originally a gymnast and athlete who later found physical theatre after becoming aware of the beauty and rhythm in athletic movement

Woman Alone - costume and makeup

For this piece, costume and makeup has been something we have thought about in detail for a few weeks. Because of the very visual style of Berkoff's drama, it is very important to us that these elements perfectly compliment our piece: accentuating our facial expressions and physical movements as well as fitting the character of Susan and helping to define her sub-personalities. Our initial idea was to have the faces of each personality the same and then have different costumes to differentiate the emotion they represent but we then thought that the face is such an expressive part of the body that it would make much more sense for us to do it the other way round. Therefore, the audience can see that we are the same person by our clothes and can clearly see our characteristics by the expressions painted onto our faces. The face paint will act as a mask that represents the emotion. Below are a few different examples of Berkoff style makeup: I think this way of accen

Woman Alone - Working on making the different personalities appear as one complete character

At the beginning of this one hour lesson, our teacher gave us the aim to take a piece of the script we had already worked on and work on it so that it was obvious that each personality is part of the same character. We had a brief chat as a class before trying to physically do it, we spoke about the importance of this element, the way it is so unclear at first glance that all actors are voicing the same character so the way we pass on the voice, communicate, our body language has to make it clear that we are one unit. We also discussed how this could be done with costume and makeup, for example having the same outfit for each personality but adjust it according to what that person represents. Below is the video of this experimentation and improvement process, we spent about half an hour this and tried to try out as many different ways of passing on the voice of spokesperson as possible. We found that things as simple as looking at the person who was speaking were really effective

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