Unit 15 Performing Scripted Plays Rehearsal Self Observation:Lesson-15/1/2014

Unit 15 Performing Scripted Plays Rehearsal Self Observation

Lesson-15/1/2015

My three main targets this lesson were to be sure to write about and reflect on my rehearsals and class discussions, to completely understand the structure of the performance and to fully learn my lines. I feel that I have effectively completed my first target and will ensure I continue to achieve it in all future lessons. I feel that by the very end this lesson I had successfully achieved my second target and am even now expanding and reflecting on this target. I am still working on my third target but believe that I will by next weeks lesson have effectively achieved it. I would grade myself a solid merit for this lesson and will ensure to make sure all of my future lessons are at distinction standard.  

Unit 15 Performing Scripted Plays Self Observation: Lesson-8/1/2015

Unit 15 Performing Scripted Plays Self Observation

Lesson-8/1/2015

My three main targets this lesson were to effectively reflect about this lesson, maintain a high level of consistency during rehearsals and to fully understand the story and underlying story of the entire performance. I feel that I achieved my first two targets, however I have come to the conclusion that it will take more performing/rehearsals and far more character exploration before I can achieve my third target. I believe that achieving my third target will be a definitive way in which I can further strengthen my final performance as completely understanding all of my own and everyone else's character's thoughts and feeling will help me better understand how to convey and connect with them during rehearsals or my final performance which will automatically influence the physical element of my performance. 

Character Exploration-Asylum Seekers

Character Exploration-Asylum Seekers 

My character is the father of a Syrian asylum seeking family who is struggling to stay together and remember who they all are as people and more importantly who they all are to each other throughout their journey through the crisis. Pre-crisis, my character is trusting, energetic and always hoping for the best of life with his family, however the violence, destruction and most of all struggle to keep his family alive and together has what I feel to have "worn" him out and made him very distrusting and made him keep himself to himself, even from his won family who he still wants nothing but the best for but has almost lost his emotional connection with. I believe that one of the functions of the crisis is that is reveals who the characters within it truly are, and I feel that my character has been revealed to be nothing but completely selfless at his core as time and time again in my performances and exercises (especially in our assessment in which the year 14's took part) he sacrifices his own well-being and what would be his own natural selfish desires to protect his family. However I believe that the crisis has also revealed him to be cold and possibly even cruel when it comes to the well-being and preservation of his family, even towards people of his own situation. I look forward to further exploring him and seeing where his journey takes him.   

Character Exploration-East End Tales

Character Exploration- East End Tales

My character in the "East End Tales" play, the father, is a very dismissive character who seems to only be concerned with his own affairs and is shown to result to anger and almost threatening methods like shouting, in order to stop anyone in his family (mainly his wife) from even trying to meddle in the affairs of others (others being their next door neighbors who every night show signs of domestic abuse taking place in their home). I feel that my character may very possibly not be intentionally selfish or cruel, but may simply want to keep to himself to avoid bringing trouble into his own home. I feel that this may be the result of a previous occurrence in his life that had him trying to help someone else or "dig" into the business of someone else he felt needed help. This occurrence must have resulted in him being hurt or scorned by either the person he was trying to help or by someone else who has power/control in his life such as a parent or perhaps even a court judge (as it is very possible he may have even got into legal trouble for his "interference").  

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.