Final Monologue Rehearsals this week!

Monday 2nd November

Today I finally finalised my costume, and what did I do? Forget my shoes… nice one! Never mind, I just about did without them ;)

Once again we knuckled  down to rehearsing our monologues today, I am finally coming to terms with my lines, which are slowly becoming more natural.

After rehearsing individually inside our “little bubbles”, we performed a group rehearsal activity which proved to be a break through moment in my rehearsal process.

The activity involved performing the our monologues in three different ways:

• Singing was the first, and the idea behind it was that emotion is often unlocked through singing. I found this the least useful, mainly because my rubbish singing ability put me off, causing me to loose my place in the monologue.
• Overacting, this proved very useful as I came to realise how the tone of my voice was very similar, and noticed that there was no change in vocal expression throughout. I was unable to overact much more than I had already been performing.
• Speechless, this was a very difficult activity, I got completely lost. This was virtually impossible, I found that I had no planned movements to support my monologue what so ever. This meant that if I was to make a mistake with lines, I would be likely to come out of character and therefore loose the believability of my monologue.

The lecture today was rather hard hitting, but left me with a few rather large points to work on next lesson. A rather daunting prospect considering we are due to perform a finalised piece on Monday :(

IB Theatre – No Lectures :(

Thursday 15th October and Friday 16th

No Theatre for these two days, leaving less time for monologue rehearsals, gutted :(

On the brighter side, we had IB residential which was awesome! we also found out that Cara was on a course and so wouldnt have been in the lectures anyways, so no worries! :D

IB Theatre – To the Costume store

Thursday 23rd October

I arrived today to find myself a little behind schedule, thanks to my illness on Monday, with most of the group starting to feel the staging of their pieces coming together.

After wasting the first ten or fifteen minutes of the lecture (trying to find a copy of Look Back In Anger, after forgetting mine!) I sat down for a proper read through of my lines, while trying to add meaning to them, and getting to know my character.

In order for us to feel that we new our character better we performed the following activity:

Character imagination – Everyone lay down on the floor and closed their eyes Cara then asked us to imagine the character, as if they were standing in front of us. We were then told to build a visual image of our character's first impressions, e.g. their stance, posture, clothing, facial expression, clothing etc. We then ‘jumped into our character, getting up into the same figure we had imagined, then went around the room greeting all the other characters in the room. This was a very useful activity as we were able to gain an idea of how the character would act being in their shoes in relation to others. To finish we shared ideas and opinions on everyone’s character and explained our first impressions of each other.

IB Theatre – Autumn Half Term

Monday 26th – Friday 30th October

No Theatre for a whole week!

Never mind, Half Term :)

IB Theatre – The senses

Friday 24th October 2009

To start the lecture everyone started with a little run through of our pieces, trying to understand what exact mood the character was following for my chosen section.

Once we had established the general mood, for me I found that my character Jimmy is very agitated and annoyed with his wife’s behaviour at the time, we did another imagination type activity:

Senseless – This activity is very much linked to the works and ideas of Stanislavski, and his ideas behind naturalism. Everyone took a space within the room and lay down, relaxed on the floor. The leader of the activity then went through various senses, with us using our imagination in order to relate these to experiences etc.. For example, A strawberry, this would trigger the participants’ imagination to the smell of a strawberry. Feelings and emotions were also used, in order to trigger are memory of certain emotions and feelings and the idea is to recreate this within our pieces, and the emotions portrayed by our characters.

This for me was a very useful activity, I could see Stanislavski’s theory behind this activity; being able to place your emotions and feelings into another characters shoes.

IB Theatre – Not another lesson missed!

Monday 19th October

Dang… I hate stomach bugs, no Theatre for me today :(

IB Theatre – Monologue Analysis

Monday 12th October 09 -

  IB Theatre is awesome, even if we did do paperwork for virtually the whole one hour and twenty minute session.

Today, now that we had all decided on our monologues, for our first assessed performance we set about analysing the character that we were to play. As a guide we used the following points, in relation to our character:

• Identifying the given circumstances -
• Prior scenes, characters mind state
• Facts by the character, portrayed by the playwright -
• Setting and location etc.
• Stage directions
• Other present characters and their speech etc.
• Character Objectives (what the character is trying to achieve)
• Units of action – splitting the monologue down analysing where the character experiences a change of thought or the overall atmosphere in a piece, and naming each unit.

All of these points are shown in relation to my character in note form below!

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

I really enjoyed today's lesson, as I have never before studied a character that I have been given to perform in such an in depth way. The techniques have inspired me and I will use them in the future for my CAS project; a production that I hope to direct with a group ok KS4 students from my old secondary school… bring on next lesson, which unfortunately won’t be until next Wednesday, due to IB Residential fun, fun, fun… :)