BTEC Perfoming Arts - Logs

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...

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...

This was the first lesson that we began putting movements and actions to the words of the script. We wanted to have a mixture of ensemble images where we each do something to create a wider image and some unison actions that add to the idea of unity. It took a while for us to start moving through the script but the more we did it, the faster and easier the process became. It is likely that a lot of the content shown in this video will adapt and transform in the future but these are the initial ideas we have for the beginning of this scene - it isn't very fluid and in time at the moment and lacks the pace it will have when we are more comfortable with it and we are able to do it without scripts. 

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...

Woman Alone is a short play written by Franca Rame and Dario Fo. It is the monologue of a woman who has been locked inside the house by her seemingly very abusive and controlling husband who is talking to her neighbour across the gardens. It is a very comedic script: full of sexual innuendos, hilarious anecdotes and clever one-liners. However, this comedic language juxtaposes some very serious and sinister themes: domestic abuse, sexual exploitation, self harm, suicide, mental health and murder. Upon first read, I found the extended monologue to be very confusing as the woman changes train of thought very quickly and jumps from subject to subject very often. The language itself is very simple and the anecdotes can be followed easily but her character as a whole is very hard to understand as her intentions seem to change every second and she is constantly contradicting herself. I immediately thought that it was going to be a very challenging script to work with, however for our perf...