BTEC Perfoming Arts - Logs

 On Wednesday's lesson, as well as going over the scene with Nurse, we began to stage the scene with Ismene that follows it. We played around with a few different ideas for the initial position of Antigone and Ismene, one to show both their closeness and their differences, as they are quite opposing from one another. Ismene is a beautiful, well dressed and ladylike woman compared to the younger Antigone who sits in the dirt and cares much less about what's 'lady-like'. So we had Ismene sat on the nurses chair at an angle and Antigone sat below her with her head on Ismene's knee. Almost immediately in the conversation Antigone brings up how pretty Ismene is and it is clear they have had many similar conversations in the past as Ismene goes to stand up whilst saying 'don't make fun', but Antigone places her hand on her leg to stop her and reassures her that it's a 'comfort to me this morning' - which could perhaps be reffering to the fact that ...

On Mondays lesson the actors playing the part of the nurse and I began to lolok over the first scene between Antigone and Nurse. The characters are very close to one another, the Nurse has raised Antigone from childhood so feels a very maternal need to make sure she stays safe and makes the right decision. However, it is also quite a friendly relationship, we decided to show this by starting the scene by making Antigone walk on stage to see the nurse asleep in her chair, pick up some grapes and see an opportunity: she drops one of the grapes into nurses mouth which wakes her up choking, we then go straight into the script. This is not an action Antigone would do to someone like Creon, it shows both the childishness of her character and her fondness for her Nurse.    As is evident in the script, Antigone has obviously just had an incredibly sensory experience with nature - because she knows this is one of her last moments to experience nature in all its beauty so she fully take...

 In this lesson we explored the second half of this huge scene with Creon and Antigone in which he tells her about the true nature of her brothers and explains the fact that neither was really worth the grand memorial but a decision was made and it's meaningless, from this angle, Antigone is almost fully persuaded that her vigorous attempts at justice are pointless and foolish and that maybe it would be better to carry on living. We staged this so that Antigone is sat neutrally upstage whilst Creon wanders around, persuading her to do the right thing, he is animated and passionate about what he believes because he is so desperate for Antigone to see what should be done, once persuaded, Antigone stands up obediently to go to bed quietly. This is until Creon mentions happiness which is a concept so infuriating and ridiculous to Antigone that all Creons best efforts are diminished instantly with the mention of this one word. As this shift in atmosphere occurs, Antigone stops heading t...