Development of Nurse scenes

With the second nurse scene we had some problems with the physical touching of the piece, it was looking very staged and awkward because Antigone was sat down with a tray on her lap while Nurse stood over her trying to cuddle and comfort her. There is also lines in the section which wouldn't make sense if they were staged in a certain way such as: 'hold my hand' 'I'm holding the rough hand' ' rest your hand on my cheek like this', so we sorted this out. At this section of the scene Antigone is quite vulnerable, I feel as though she is trying to take in every memory of her Nurse, who she loves dearly and is scared by thought of her death. I think this scene is summed up by her line 'I'm just a bit small for it all', it is clear that the presence of her Nurse and her Nurses patronising words and behaviour (bringing her coffee and toast and calling her 'little dove,' and 'pigeon') has reminded Antigone of her childhood happiness. Therefore makes sense for Antigone to be sat on the chair with the tray on top of her lap with Nurse behind her cuddling her like she would have when Antigone was younger.

Below is the rehearsal of the first Ismene scene, this was obviouslay before we had set and props and this scene relies quite heavily on those elements, for example we mimed the grape at the beginning and when Antigone sits down she rubs her feet in the dirt and lies down it in to create irony as Nurse talks about her supposed rendezvous when clearly Antigone is still very childish. It also shows how Antigone has just buried her brother and feels very one with the earth and extremely content.

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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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