Week 19

Monday 12th February 2024

Warm up 

We started off Monday with some concentration based warm up games, this was because we had a busy day of shout rehearsals a head of us, and needed to be in the right mindset for productivity. One of which being a game that relied on focus, were someone would have to pretend to eat a type of food, and then pass it on to the next person- asking them if they would like a bite of what ever they were "eating". You had to mimic exactly what the original person was doing, until it went all the way round the circle and back to the person who initiated the action. Once it came back to the original person we all collectively had to figure out what food was getting passed around. As the game progressed we started adding more foods into the circle meaning you had to pay attention to multiple actions at once- this was a true test of focus and memory, it also required no distractions which stopped us from distracting each other and talking, and instead making us work as one in a focused manner. This was an especially helpful warm up for today as we we're re tackling some trickier movement scenes in "shout" that required a large amount of focus to execute. 

"SHOUT" rehearsals  

Rehearsals of shout are progressing nicely, although as a company we are collectively struggling with some of the main ensemble scenes, especially a more recent one we've been trying to tackle- I feel this is because it requires an element of synchronisation to perfect and with such a large amount of people, it's really difficult to get right. This coursed quite a lot of stress within the group, as the main element of the scene required passing books around to each other in a large circle- making the circle smaller on certain que lines whilst still passing the books. To help us out we collectively started testing new ways of passing the books so the movement would be more fluent. This helped to an extent, but still people were ending up with multiple books in their hands at once, meaning things would get clogged up and books would end up getting dopped. After re analysing the situation and problems with the movement I realised that an element of it was to do with the time stamp, and the tempo at which we were passing the books not so much the way the books were getting passed. I then recommended following a 2/4 count so that we all kept within the  same time signature- the only issue with this is that understanding time signatures can be difficult if you don't have a musical background, so instead I tapped my foot in a 2/4 count- telling people to pass their books in the rhythm of my tapping, instead of telling people to keep a 2/4 count in their head. Although we still need to practise and go over this sequence to make sure we have it down 100% we made a good amount of progress- working well as a team whilst using initiative to make things easier for ourselves.

Tuesday 13th February 2024 

Practitioner work

Tuesdays are currently being spent working on our practitioner assignment, but because we've already gone through the main session surrounding our practitioner research we're now left to do independent study for the project so spent almost all the session doing that. Currently my group are further behind than we should be, this is because we've had to choose a new practitioner as our previous one focuses on methods that didn't include a very efficient practical element, so we decided to research into others as we thought they would be more effective. We did a large amount of skim research into multiple practitioners but kept running into the same issues of their methods focusing on directing instead of acting- which meant we had to seek support from our tutor tom, who helped us find a practitioner that would be good enough to do our assignment around. The research element should be a lot more enjoyable and go a lot smoother now we're sourcing and learning about more beneficial methods, so hopefully the assignment goes smoothly from here.

Thursday 15th February 2024 

We spent Thursday working on some more "shout" scenes- focusing on the teachers scenes, starting with the classic teachers lesson. My character isn't in this scene, but the actress who plays Dana wasn't in, and her understudy was busy working on a play called "stuff" that some of the other students are currently doing- so I filled in for Dana in that scene. The actress who plays Danas understudy had some free time so she took over from me, as I then filled in for the actor playing the classics teacher as he had an audition. Because I play the Therapist I've been doing a lot of improvised mindfulness sessions, so was also told to add an improvised element to the classics teachers scene. I feel I'm at a point with improvisation were it now helps me become more fluent in scenes- using it as a way to fully understand a character, so although I wont actually be in this scene, doing more improvised lessons and filling in as the classics teacher has helped me just get more into the mindset of being in that school environment and the reality of that- something that I've only ever experienced from a student perspective, which is why these lesson setting are so helpful to me as I'm then put into the teachers perspective.