Week 3

Monday 25th September 2023

further improvisation and script reading 

Warm up

As usual the day started off with some warm up games to get us ready to work. My favourite one of which was a game called the alphabet game- were someone will shout out any letter of the alphabet, while the rest of the group will have to make themselves into an object or thing (can't be a person) that starts with the letter shouted out. But if two or more people are trying to be the same object. They are eliminated. Personally this is one of my favourite warm up games we have played so far, because it forces your brain to start thinking quickly- while not troughing you straight into something to complex or tiering. This warm up game is also a really good one to play at the moment while were focusing on improvisation, because it requires you to think quickly- which is a large part of improvisation and a good way to get into the mindset for improvisation. 

gibberish activity 

Alongside improvisation and script reading we also worked on reaction, and the skill of constantly reacting to the situation your in and the other actors around you. To purely just force people to use their face as much to show a reaction we did a gibberish activity- meaning two people would have to have a prompted conversation with one of the people speaking in a made up gibberish language, and the other person would have to react and talk back to them like they understood what the conversation was about. At first I wasn't sure about this task, because I thought it would just result in me laughing instead of focusing on taking in the other persons persona and reacting to it. And to be honest at first I think that was the case, but after me and my partner got over the initial instinct to laugh at one another- we really started to focus on one another's actions/expression, because everything that was being vocalised didn't carry any meaning with it- making you focus more on the situation and not just your character. It also naturally made you add more of a backbone to your actions/emotions just to make up for the fact that you weren't speaking a real language. This activity was also really effective because it put you in the mindset of just naturally trying to support the other actor either way- almost like to make it work you both relied on one another.

Tuesday 26th September 2023

characterisation through song/musical theatre---stage presence  

On a Tuesday as usual we are continuing to work on all things musical theatre, and vocal work to prepare for peter pan due to the fact that its a musical and singing is involved. Because musical theatre acting is different to naturalistic acting, in the way that emotions tend to be exaggerated for dramatic purposes- not actually trying to mirror life itself, but instead represent it (only if that's what the musicals about, for example dear Evan Hansen). So as practise for that we started re creating the song "freak flag" from Shrek the musical- which is something we briefly skimmed over last week, but properly delved into this week by assigning people certain characters/song, and then placing it together bit by bit. I personally did find it difficult at first trying to visually make myself become Humpty Dumpty, seen as there was obviously no costumes or makeup to support me visually, but once I got over that initial hurdle by opening up my body language and showing most of the character through my face, I started to feel a lot more comfortable which allowed me to fully go for it and get into the character. I think that after doing that activity I've realised that splitting things up into sections when it comes to musical theatre is an effective why to get yourself into that mindset- for example starting off with the singing element then the characterisation then facial, and then the physical- because if you try to cram everything together all at the one time everything won't be as well executed. You can also find yourself getting overwhelmed when you don't split up musical theatre performing into sections just because of how much your having to do at once, so I feel like doing this activity has already helped get me in the mind set for peter pan and t
he best ways to approach performing the musical. 

Wednesday the 27th September 2023

duologues and script work technique 

 

Earlier on the Monday leading into all of Wednesday we were randomly paired up and given multiple duologues to pick from to then break down to later perform. Me and phoebe were pared together- which was actually a really good match, because we both had similar ideas on how to approach and perform the duologues, both feeling a certain way about the characters and their relationship to one another, so we off the bat got straight into it. Normally when approaching a piece of script I tend to get over excited and go straight to breaking down each line- trying to act it out and find emotions within each section. The reason this method is not effective is because you don't actually allow yourself to characterise a character and understand them as a person, instead your focusing on YOUR initial emotional response to a sentence and how you would say them- rather then "why is this character reacting like this?" or "what has made them react like this?"-- "is it their background/trauma?" or "is it their relationships/personality?". These are all things that are needed to be taken into accountability, because they massively effect the way you be delivering the lines. For example if your character has a negative relationship with someone else's character, their not going to approach them/talk to them in any manner of overly friendliness, and depending on what kind of person the character is will change how aggressive they are to the character, if even at all. So to make sure we covered this and could fully understand the script, we decided to read it through a couple of times just to get a jest of who we thought the two characters were, and what their overall emotions are throughout the scene. After we had done that we then assigned who would be playing who and then did an initial run through together- just to get a feel of the pacing of the conversation between the two characters before Appling our characterisations of the characters to the run throughs. Personally I feel it's really easy habit to just get a piece of script and assign emotions to it, and read just perform it how it comes- and although that sometimes works depending on how well its performed- you still when acting don't actually understand the character, and then have a visual disconnect to them when performing. I'm really pleased we went over bringing scrips/characters to life, because when in the moment of being given a script to perform on stage its really easy to not take your time and delve into the character, so doing this activity felt like a reminder of how important script analysis is when performing.

Thursday 28th September 2023

Tour of the globe

On Thursday all the year ones and some of the year twos went on a trip to the globe to see what the space was like, because are up coming horror tour is taking place there and we need to start figuring out how we are going to use it, and what historical horror events are going to take place were. The main historical event I'm focusing on is the fire of London, and before going to visit the globe our fire of London group were thinking of ideas that incorporated the Proscenium arch stage and the seating area surrounding it. One of the main ideas that I was thinking of using the stage to hang thin white sheets up, and use them to create an old fashioned projector with paper shapes behind it and a light to create a shadowed image. I thought that this would fit the time and wasn't massively complicated, but when we got in the theatre we noticed the stairs down through the top seating area and straight away thought that their could be actors playing young children running down them towards the stage trying to escape the fire and scare the audience while doing so. They could also have burnt flesh make up on their face just to add to the effect. Personally I'm really happy that we  went to the globe, because it's really hard to plan out ideas without know what the area is going to be or how you might be able to use it.