Feedback from teacher:Lesson-27/11/2014

Feedback from Teacher

Lesson-27/11/2014

During this lesson we independently devised our own monologues for our characters and performed it to the class. After all performances were finished, my teacher for the lesson gave me the following feedback:

"Perfect staging to be set for a taxi driver (sitting in a chair). I need to look up from my monologue (script) more in order to make eye contact with the audience. The line "be the best of who you are and what you do" was good. My voice was clear and easy to hear."

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.

Group Exercise Audit:Lesson-13/11/2014

Group Exercise Audit

Lesson-13/11/2014

Our first task this lesson was to slightly alter and the perform the prologue of the play. I found this task initially challenging because (in our pairs) we were instructed to perform certain extracts from the prologue, however we had to perform our lines in strange positions on stage and in levels and spatial coordination that did not match the extract from the scene. My partner and I had to perform an extract which was a passenger and a man driving a taxi while talking about how early his day was and what he'd prefer to be doing at that point. We decided to have me (the taxi driver) stand on top of a chair and my partner sitting on a chair while facing my back while I look directly at the audience. I found this strange because my initial perception of our positions on the stage were in the spatial positions of a normal vehicle-like position, with the driver sitting in the front seat and the passenger siting in the back one. 

After some discussion, we decided that I would not only stand but that my partner would still be behind me sitting and looking through the gap of the stacked chairs in front of him. We concluded that it would make the positioning in the scene more effective by although being in positions that most would consider strange to the setting of our scene, we would still include elements of what would be considered a "traditional taxi scene".

Having the chance to watch other pairs perform their extracts , one performance that stood out to me was Roseb's group's. Her group had peculiar positioning on-stage and yet their method in performing it made it seem almost absolutely natural and her group's positioning, levels and spatial status's managed to match the desired tone and setting of the scene. Roseb's group had one actor positioned on the floor another standing elevated on a box and one standing at normal ground height. Their scene was a girl talking about events in her day and Roseb and her group each said a set of lines all in different tones and variations, almost like the girl was having a multi-sided conflict within herself. I believe that the different levels and positioning strengthened the effects of her groups perception of how their piece should be performed.