Skip to main content

N2C - 7/12/16

On our final Wednesday rehearsal, we were able to do our script free run through in front of a teacher and  get that feedback that we needed to continue the development of the play before we perform it in a weeks time.  Before our teacher came in to watch the run through, our director spent a long time on the middle section of the script which I'm not a part of and because this section is so big and it has more characters in, it takes longer to perfect lines, ingrain the staging and work out the logistics of each key moment.  When watching this middle scene be directed I focussed mainly on the directions given to the character of The Boy because I think it's really integral for me as an actor to understand the difference between The Boy in the final scene and in the first scene because obviously there's a lot that happens in this middle scene and that definitely affects the way he behaves in the final scene. The Boy gets tantalised and emotionally tortured as well as being quit physically hurt throughout this middle scene and this explains his aggressive violent actions in the final scene.  And although the girl does state that she has talked to the other band members at the cafe she definitely doesn't understand the entirety of what happens and how this has affected him, she acts quite similarly to how she did in the first scene and kind of has a lack of understanding as to what has happened to him.  The boy definitely tries to remain  unconfrontational  throughout this middle scene but he does get severely bullied by the drummer and attempts to hold his ground against him.

 We then did the full run through,  we were able to make it the whole way through and although it wasn't performance ready it was relatively successful and we received notes from our director and our teacher on how to improve it and what to change in our next full day rehearsal on Saturday.  The main thing I took from this feedback was the fact that my character genuinely wants to be with the boy, maybe not in a relationship way but geographically she wants to stay with the boy and she wants to leave with the boy, that's her aim, she  is wanting to continue this conversation as much as possible and that is why the dialogue is so awkward and repetitive.  For example, when I am sat on the floor and we are talking where I say 'it's sad about your grandmother' it's an attempt to make him open up and feel comfortable with her, even though a page later in the script I make another attempt to bring        up the Grandma, as the conversation moves away  from her: 'she was very old your grandmother'. Making an attempt to make him feel reassured, encouraging him to see the fact that it wasn't that tragic she died and that thing would get better. I see this line as something that she intended to sound much nicer than it sounded out loud.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 movemen...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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 effec...
Post a Comment
Read more