Week 15

 Monday 15th January 2024 

connections work

We started Monday off by starting the informal audition process for connections, placing people in groups based off what character they were most interested in auditioning for. Because I had interest in the character Viv I sat down with some others who were also thinking of auditioning for her, just discussing who we though she was as a person and how we would characterise her. It was nice to get some other insight into how people were feeling about her as a character and how they personally wanted to approach the character, but overall just breaking down the character a bit more was helpful for me. We then stayed in these same groups and brought the first connections scene onto its feet, building on that idea of a busy school yard with multiple different kinds of people/friend groups. I really liked getting to delve into the kind off generalized school personalities that occur, as they felt like broader versions of some of the main characters and their stereotypes. I felt this also helped put me into the mindset of being back at school and pressures of it, especially when it came to the boxes people were placed in and how that effects you as a person when at school. 

Snowdrop Play work

We then made a start on Alan's play "snowdrop" focusing on scene 2, were the main character Nick is forced to flee his country by getting a train to Poland. The whole point of this scene is to look busy and chaotic- mirroring Alan's real life experience of fleeing Ukraine. Alan described the experience as if it was constantly moving, people everywhere, hot food and drinks being handed out, people looking for family etc. This is something we were trying to embody through individual storylines and emotion, it was important to make sure that if the audience were to focus on any random character in that scene they would be able to follow their experience and empathise with it- we wanted to show their journeys and how it effected them. The character I created was a young adolescent child that had recently lost their parents to an attack on their village- they were then directed to the train station by others who escaped the attack on their village, being told to get the next train to Poland. They meet up with their two cousins at the train station, who have heard about the attack- they are relived, but spend  the rest of the journey trying to digest the fact that they've lost their parents. Because we are re creating real events and real peoples experiences its important that our characters, no matter how small all had a storyline that they were showing and communicating to the audience.   

Tuesday 16th January 2024 

Brecht work with tom practitioner 

In this weeks session with Tom we moved onto a different practitioner called Brecht, who like Stanislavski had a large impact on the evolution of theatre, but instead of focusing on delivering a slice of life to the audience Brecht  was more focused on the  message and meaning behind what the audience were experiencing- creating something called "epic theatre". Epic theatre is a type of political theatre that addresses contemporary issues, although later in Brecht’s life he preferred to call it dialectal theatre. Brecht believed classical approaches to theatre were escapist, and he was more interested in facts and reality rather than escapism. Epic theatre doesn’t attempt to lay down a tidy plot and story, but leaves issues unresolved, confronting the audience with sometimes uncomfortable questions. Brecht's methods stray from that separation of audience and actors, and instead actively creates ways to break the fourth wall whether that be through stage type, actor placement, direct address etc. The whole point is that the audience know their watching theatre, but instead feel more embraced by it- building up a sense of involvement and leaving the audience with a better understanding of the world through entertainment. 

Our practical activity today was all about directing and putting a piece together in Brecht's style, getting given the play Fear and Misery of the third Reich- a play written in a Brecht style with multiple different plot lines. The class ended up getting split into three groups, each of us getting given three different stories from the play to create, my groups one being "the Jewish wife", which follows the phone call of a young women who is trying to flea her country without her husband finding out so he doesn't get put in danger. The way we set it up was so the actors reading for the wife would start sat down in the audience- making their way slowly from the audience to the performance area. This was so the performance could feel more immersive, but if we had done it again I think it would have been more effective to have this immersion carry on throughout the duration of the performance not just the start. I liked how the actor playing the husband was always overlooking the phone call even though he wasn't actually there, but as a whole I personally don't think we delved very far into some of his methods within our performance.        

Wednesday 17th January 2024

connections auditions 

Because the audition process for connections was very fast paced I did feel quite nervous leading up to the audition, purely for the fact I was worried I would forget lines etc. I also felt as if I hadn't had the time to fully understand the character, which although made me feel slightly unsure It forced me to work quicker when preparing which is a really useful skill to build up in preparation for castings outside of collage. 

I Personally feel my audition went okay, although I could of made some improvements especially when it came to physicality at the start of my audition- I felt myself getting a bit nervous which through me off- but once I got into the flow of it, and started to really feel the character my physicality levelled out and I was fine. I don't feel like there's much I could of done different when It came to this audition, mainly because of the time constraint- but I'm happy with this audition experience as I now have a better understanding of how to prepare for last minute/high stress and fast pace auditions.