Tale 8:Lesson-13/11/2014

Tale 8

Lesson-13/11/2014

Mr. Worden instructed us to get in to groups of 5 and read through tale 8. We were then instructed to create a performance of the piece, however the piece would not contain any form of speech but only sound effects and movement. This was another task that I found initially strange and wondered how we were to create a piece without the speech in the text and yet still manage to give the performance an element of story to it. We were told that the entire purpose of this creating this piece was to further the depth of our understandings of the sounds, location and atmosphere of our performances.

We did not forget time to perform our pieces to each other however I spent some time analyzing how my own group utilized our sound effects and spatial positioning. We began to look through the entire piece and base our actions and sounds on the individual text itself rather than looking at the piece as a whole. For example, when the piece mentioned thunder we would all clap and move as if thunder was affecting us. I think that we took the piece's content quite literally and purposefully and I believe that we could have taken a different approach to it such as looking at the overall location and atmosphere of the entire piece and not just its individual locations and atmospheres.

I feel that this exercise helped enable us to gain a far deeper understanding of our performances and it helped us to understand the key underlying elements that make it up. The audience will always be able to see the face of the performance and feel its underlying elements, but I believe that as an actor it is of the utmost importance for us to be able to not only clearly see a performances underlying elements, but also to fully comprehend and understand them as they are what makes up the base of the performance.  

Although I felt that through our own rehearsals this style of performing had powerful effects in its own way and that it allowed us as actors to see deeper in to our performances and the elements that make them up, I still feel that the performance would have been more enjoyable and entertaining for a normal audience as well as other fellow actors if we had used the lines included in our pieces. I have concluded that from an actor's point of view, the type of performance that we did would have been far more beneficial than the one we intended to do and most would expect. Despite this I think that a performance with lines and speech would have been far more entertaining and enjoyable.