Skip to main content

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 accentuating the natural facial expressions in quite a simple way is really effective and creates a very visually interesting image. It also adds an element of uniformity, so would work well in portraying that we are the same character.  However, in a similar way, each character is not very clearly defined so might be difficult for the audience to differentiate the sub-personalities, especially if we have the same costume. It also makes the face look older so maybe we could use this style for the older, motherly sub-personality.
This is a picture of the makeup from a production of Berkoff's 'Lunch'. I think we could definitely take some of the elements of the males face paint for Holly's character (the angry, psychotic personality), especially the heavy pointed eyebrows and the lined eyes as they suit her emotions. We could also use the woman's face for inspiration when doing the makeup for mine and Charlotte's character's as they are the most feminine. The drawn on eyelashes definitely signify a flirty, feminine aspect to her personality, as do the raised eyebrows and rosy cheeks. 
Here is an image of Susan from a production of Woman Alone and we can see clearly that her depressive, psychotic personality is being shown. The streaks of makeup down her face show how her inner emotions have affected her outward appearance very well so it would be good if we did something similar for the psychotic personality. 

Below are some ideas for costume and hair. In the opening stage directions it states that she is in night wear and both of these examples have stood to that instruction. We are thinking of doing something similar as well. When we were deliberating whether to keep the costume or makeup the same, we were considering having us all wear different styles of pyjamas (so the mother personality would wear fitted flannel pyjamas with all the buttons done up and the sexual one would wear a silky nighty or dressing gown etc). But we didn't think this would be clear enough so we have decided to buy a silky pyjama top/nighty to be worn with leggings. 

In these images, the woman has curlers in her hair, this wouldn't be very practical for our performance of woman alone due to the intense physical aspect of it but it does work very well for her character. It also adds an element of irony as she conforms to the societal norm that women have to spend a lot of time making their appearance 'beautiful' for the outside world yet this woman is locked inside her house so the outside world will never see her. 


Here are some images of us experimenting with different ideas for the psychotic and sexual characters.

  This was our original idea, but it was pointed out to us that Holly's facial expressions will be lost very easily with this makeup and we should probably make lighter tears falling down the face and thinner lines around the eye but accentuate the eyebrows and mouth.
                                                     


 This shows how we took some of the aspects of the makeup from the man in 'Lunch' and added them to our original idea to create a more effective image.






I experimented at home with lipstick and blusher as I didn't have access to face paints.



 This was my initial idea for the sexual character as the pink/red colour clearly symbolises a flirtatious, promiscuous personality. 











I then tried a more realistic version if the blusher and extended the lips as we did with Holly's makeup, this doesn't have the same effect for my character and makes her look more psychotic or even childlike, rather than mature and sexually experienced.




Here is an example of experimenting with the drawn on eyelashes idea from the 'Lunch' image. This element might work better on Charlotte's character as it is more subtle.










Because lengthening the mouth didn't work very well, I tried to make the lips look fuller and thicker which definitely works better.
Here are some images from the performance and beforehand in which you can see exactly how we used makeup, hair and costume to create effect.
























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

Performance review

On Wednesday it was my performance night. Overall, I was very pleased with the way it went, I have never had such a long rehearsal process so the lines and the staging for each section felt like muscle memory. I didn't have to think very hard about what my next line was and where I was supposed to be on the stage because each scene had been thoroughly rehearsed so I could really focus on embodying the character of Antigone and I had never felt so in character as I did on my performance night. Another element that we could only really engage until performance was the metatheatre element of it because when the chorus says 'she's going to have to play her part right through to the end.' I only really understood that line until that night when the audience was there. It blurred the line even further as to what was acted and what was real because I found that I didn't have to act that gut feeling of what I was about to do and each line the chorus said I slowly got more...
Post a Comment
Read more

Woman Alone - first impressions, disecting the script

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...
Post a Comment
Read more