12 October 2016
Today, in our lesson we also learnt some stage fighting. I really liked today's lesson and hope to improve in my stage fighting in the future!
Here is a video of what we came up with (to hear the commentary sound must be on):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHS3EVkbGBM
Wednesday 16 November 2016
Friday 11 November 2016
Multiplex Rehearsal #1 N2C
12 October 2016
N2C is King Ecgbert School's personal theatre company, founded by my teacher, Mr.Chipp himself. Attending N2C has a variety of benefits, my favourite thing about N2C is being able to work with younger and older actors. I've found that learning from the examples of older actors, and even trying your hand at directing younger actors, really improves my own acting. From watching the older years, I've learnt what a good preformace is and from their direction, I believe I've improved immensely over the past two years that I've been an N2C member.
This Autumn, I am taking part in a student directed play called Mulitplex with N2C; it's being directed by a friend of mine, Emin, who is in Y13. I was given the part of Dillion in this play, who is basically the narrator.
Dillion is a different character than I'm used to playing because in the regular scenes she doesn't say a thing. Her interactions with other characters -verbally at least- are kept at a minimum until the end of the play. Although I do have quite a bit of lines, it seems that usually the lines come at the beginning or the end of the scenes. Additionally, whenever I speak, the rest of the cast freezes.
However, while the interaction I have with other characters is relatively small, as a narrator, my job is to connect directly with the audience. This has proven to be a bit nerve racking for me because I'm used to just turning off the fact that the audience is there and getting immersed in the character I was playing. But as the narrator, I'm constantly looking into audience member's eyes and trying to keep them engaged in the story. I think that this character will be a challenge for me, but it will be a good challenge.
This was the outcome of our first rehearsal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQCvx-qu4pM&authuser=0
N2C is King Ecgbert School's personal theatre company, founded by my teacher, Mr.Chipp himself. Attending N2C has a variety of benefits, my favourite thing about N2C is being able to work with younger and older actors. I've found that learning from the examples of older actors, and even trying your hand at directing younger actors, really improves my own acting. From watching the older years, I've learnt what a good preformace is and from their direction, I believe I've improved immensely over the past two years that I've been an N2C member.
This Autumn, I am taking part in a student directed play called Mulitplex with N2C; it's being directed by a friend of mine, Emin, who is in Y13. I was given the part of Dillion in this play, who is basically the narrator.
Dillion is a different character than I'm used to playing because in the regular scenes she doesn't say a thing. Her interactions with other characters -verbally at least- are kept at a minimum until the end of the play. Although I do have quite a bit of lines, it seems that usually the lines come at the beginning or the end of the scenes. Additionally, whenever I speak, the rest of the cast freezes.
However, while the interaction I have with other characters is relatively small, as a narrator, my job is to connect directly with the audience. This has proven to be a bit nerve racking for me because I'm used to just turning off the fact that the audience is there and getting immersed in the character I was playing. But as the narrator, I'm constantly looking into audience member's eyes and trying to keep them engaged in the story. I think that this character will be a challenge for me, but it will be a good challenge.
This was the outcome of our first rehearsal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQCvx-qu4pM&authuser=0
Antigone Response #3
10 October 2016
Today we explored the relationship between Antigone's brothers, Eteocles and Polynices. Mr. Chipp instructed us in one way of constructing unique physical theatre pieces concerning these two characters or otherwise.
This was the method we learned:
1. Stand in a circle and start to describe the person standing to your left using spoken language -"she is wearing a necklace". The point in doing this as a warm up for the actual activity was to notice the more obscure things about the person you're describing that you would ignore in day to day life.
2. Next, translate these descriptions into hand gestures. For example, if the person was wearing shoes, I would bend down and create an imaginary shoe shape around my own foot. Another example, is if the person was wearing a hood, you would mime a hood over your own head.
3. Other areas that you can explore are: speed, breath, and the physical depth and width of your gestures. We discussed the fact that once these gestures and movements were created, we could make them more fluid and loop them.
I think that this type of physical theatre would be extremely effective in creating a sort of sign language. I felt like every move I made had a meaning behind it because it linked directly to the person I was describing. It was almost as if I became that person in a sense because I was "clothing" myself in their physical appearance. It also was an incredibly effective way of creating gestures that you may not have otherwise come up with on the top of your head.
Today we explored the relationship between Antigone's brothers, Eteocles and Polynices. Mr. Chipp instructed us in one way of constructing unique physical theatre pieces concerning these two characters or otherwise.
This was the method we learned:
1. Stand in a circle and start to describe the person standing to your left using spoken language -"she is wearing a necklace". The point in doing this as a warm up for the actual activity was to notice the more obscure things about the person you're describing that you would ignore in day to day life.
2. Next, translate these descriptions into hand gestures. For example, if the person was wearing shoes, I would bend down and create an imaginary shoe shape around my own foot. Another example, is if the person was wearing a hood, you would mime a hood over your own head.
3. Other areas that you can explore are: speed, breath, and the physical depth and width of your gestures. We discussed the fact that once these gestures and movements were created, we could make them more fluid and loop them.
I think that this type of physical theatre would be extremely effective in creating a sort of sign language. I felt like every move I made had a meaning behind it because it linked directly to the person I was describing. It was almost as if I became that person in a sense because I was "clothing" myself in their physical appearance. It also was an incredibly effective way of creating gestures that you may not have otherwise come up with on the top of your head.
Friday 4 November 2016
Antigone Response #2 (Exploring Method Acting)
3 October 2016
Actors are constantly trying to find ways to improving the realistic value of their acting; method acting is an extremely effective and controversial way of doing so. ‘The System’, developed by Russian director and actor Konstantin Stanislavski in 1909, was the result of deep contemplation and analytic reference to the inner workings and psychology of an actor. His ‘System’ was what he called “the art of experiencing” and he contrasted this to the traditional way of acting, “the art of representation”. Stanislavski suggested that instead of faking or putting on emotions, actors should surface and harness their own inner emotions. As an actor trying out ‘The System’ you would revisit your most horrible and beautiful memories, times when you experienced authentic emotions, and use these emotions to better portray the adjacent emotions of the character you were playing. Stanislavski, however, soon realised that, despite the consistent realism of ‘The System’, if actors recalled these personal memories over and over again in detail, he would psychologically damage them. He concluded that the best way to use ‘The System’ was in moderation and that merely recalling the feelings of general emotions, perhaps associated with memories but never going into too much detail surrounding such a memory.
‘The System’ was, a bit later, further developed and coined Method Acting by many directors in the USA in the 1930’s. Method Acting uses much of the same techniques and involves the actors having complete emotional identification with their character. The main aim of Method Acting is to create sincere and profound performances that increase the verisimilitude of the play. I personally think that Method Acting is an amazingly good way of portraying genuine emotions during performance and engaging the audience. The goal of an actor is to immerse the audience and I feel that I achieve this better if I associate the actions, thoughts, and feelings of my character with my own.
Today in Drama, we explored the idea of Method Acting ourselves. For the first hour of our class, our teacher, Mr. Chipp, asked us to lay down on a mat in the darkness of our performance space. He then proceeded to talk us through digging into our pasts and coming up with memories that invoked extremely strong emotions of sadness, happiness, and even, anger. The entire time, our eyes were closed and we were in silence, completely focused on the details of that one memory in order to create accurate responses. I personally, had a happy memory initially. This made it a bit harder for me to focus at the beginning of this task because many of the people around me were crying and incredibly unhappy and I was concerned for them, rather than focusing on my own response.
The next thing that Mr. Chipp asked us to do is to write an imaginary letter, using an imaginary pen, on an actual sheet of paper to the other person involved in our memory ( he had us choose memories that were not memories with us alone in them). After writing our imaginary letters, he had us walk into a yellow spotlight in the middle of the room. He then would ask another member of the class to come up to you and interact with you in whatever way he told them to. Mr. Chipp came up to me himself and took my letter. He held it for a few moments before giving me a very patronising and smug look. He then ripped it up and threw it at my feet. I immediately felt a surge of anger and was overly angry for the next hour. When Mr. Chipp asked me to interact with another member of my class, Kieran, and told me to “let all my anger out on him”, I actually slapped Kieran across the face.
This experience of Method Acting was very effective in creating pure emotion however, as Stanislavski noted, it cannot be used effectively on a regular basis. I saw most of my class in tears and very, very, upset. If we were to do the exact same exercise of Method Acting before a big performance or even once a week, they would be emotionally exhausted and unable to act at all. I think that this lesson in Method Acting was necessary in order to understand the intensity of the technique and was effective in helping us grow as actors. After doing it, I felt incredibly open to portraying feelings because I had just experienced them in full.
After dabbling in Method Acting, the last hour of our class was devoted to improvisation based on the play Antigone. Our instructions were to use the emotions we had just experienced in method acting in our responses to our ‘brothers’ dying, as Antigone’s brothers died in the play.
After harnessing the energy and feelings that surfaced through our Method Acting, improvisation came as second nature. In those moments, I was Antigone, the dirt inside that sweet box was my rejected brother, and the horrible man with the ax was Creon. This lesson was exceptionally brilliant in helping me unravel my emotions, making them easier to access, but not uncontrollable. In the future, I plan on using what I have learnt today to further my improvement in the dramatic arts.
Here are some pictures taken during this improvisation:
Above is the sweet box that was carrying the 'ashes' of my brother^
The fact that it was a sweet box suggests my original feelings surrounding the death of my brothers and my childlike view on the situation.
Above is me, caressing the box that was holding my brother's ashes^
Here is my class, reacting to the box in unision ^
This is when Mr. Chipp entered the room, playing Creon -the King in Antigone ^
Creon's reaction to my brother's ashes was to dump them out of the box^
The proxemics of this image suggest Creon's power over the situation.
Here is me, gathering the ashes of my brother^
Here is me trying to repair the sweet box that Creon axed ^
Antigone Response #1
26 September 2016
Task 1 was to “enter a space of rehearsal” and preparation before a play; we were embodying a paradox of us as actors, playing actors, that were preparing to play characters in an unnamed play. Mr. Chipp then instructed us to take on specific emotions, as we did this, that reflected our lives outside the acting world (being the actors). I personally tried to portray the emotions associated with a contented exhaustion…so, I was happy but, tired. Mr. Chipp also noticed after a few minutes of doing this task that we were not interacting with each other even though we were supposedly in the same space as each other. We were further instructed to slowly add physical interaction between our characters -the actors- and some dialogue as well.
I think that the purpose of us doing this task was for us to start thinking outside the box and questioning ‘what is real?’. This task forced us to contemplate how the audience would react to seeing actors essentially, playing themselves. I think that the audience could feel a sense of confusion because it’s not something typically common. However, after talking it through with the class, we decided that this could create a sense of exclusiveness with the audience and make the play seem more personal. Additionally, this task was basically a prefix to us exploring the prologue from the play Antigone.
Jean Anouilh’s play, Antigone, is a tragedy inspired by Greek mythology and the original play: Antigone, that is believed to have been written around 441 b.c. by the Greek tragedian, Sophocles. The original version was written and produced in Greece, whilst Jean Anouilh’s Antigone was first performed on February 6, 1944 in French. Jean Anouilh’s Antigone was written in the height of Nazi occupation in Paris -the protagonist, Antigone, is said to metaphorically depict the struggles of the French people at that time.
Blood Wedding Lesson
14 September 2016
Today in our drama lesson we explored an extract from the rural tragedy Blood Wedding, written by Federico Lorca in 1932. It was written and performed originally in Spanish and uses many metaphors and other figurative language that English speakers may find odd. However, the language directly reflects the time and setting of the play -early 20th century, in Southern Spain.
Before we were even given an extract of the play our teacher, Mr. Chipp, instructed us in some abstract physical theatre to warm up and get into character. He told us a generic story of two people, who met and fell in love, before he paired us up and gave us three movements to play around with. He had us face each other, standing with our foreheads touching; he had us kneel down, continuing to keep our foreheads together; and finally, he had us stand up and face away from each other -without losing contact between us. After showing us these movements, he asked us to act like we were in love with our partner as the people in the story were in love with each other. The only restrictions in this movement were that we had to do these three positions but Mr. Chipp encouraged us to play about with the usage of our hands and gesture, facial expressions, and posture.
This was a very useful exercise because it got us into the mood we needed to be in order to read the extract from Blood Wedding. We needed to understand the emotions that coincided between the ourselves and the lovers in the play to grasp the weight of the situation.
Task two of our drama lesson was to read Act One of Blood Wedding. This is a scene that occurs in the house -we thought perhaps in the kitchen- of the bridegroom, between the bridegroom and his mother. It’s an important scene because it allows the audience to see the how the anxiety of mother affects the decisions of the bridegroom: although he is a grown man, he still must ask permission from his mother to marry and even to borrow a knife. We were asked to create a moment of orientation, about 30 seconds long, that showed the dynamic between mother and son. We were asked not to speak, but only to imply the emotions and mime the actions that were going on.
One pair that volunteered I thought did an excellent job of doing this task. The mother was positioned stage left and towards the front, closer to the audience and was busily doing some sort of housework. The son entered on stage right and started quietly searching for a knife in the imaginary cupboards, without acknowledging his mother. His mother notices that he is there and they make eye contact; she then walks over and simply folds her arms…just daring him to ask her for the knife he’s looking for. The son then stops, looking very sheepish.
It seems that this would be a worthy moment of orientation for this play because it clearly showed the power that the mother had over the son, despite his age. It would be a good start to the play because you could really show the back and forth, the rebellion, and the annoyance of the son that builds slowly over Act One.
Our last task was to create another movement, based on the emotions that we had experienced from the bridegroom and from the lovers, the bride and Leonardo, and also what little we knew of the story of Blood Wedding. We were also given an eerie monologue that personifies the Moon in this story. The lines from this monologue were the only lines we were allowed to use in this movement.
Before we started, Mr. Chipp had us observe a lighting change that he had put together. It started with a full, white, moonlike light that cast shadows of a forest on the wall. There was then a blue spotlight that came on that slowly shifted to a dark, blood, red. In total, it lasted about 60 seconds.
When my group approached this task, we decided to use some of the elements that we had been learning over the past few hours. We used exactly the same movements as in our warm up to show the love and affection between the bride and the bridegroom and Leonardo and his wife. However, it turned out only to be an illusion, when Leonardo and the bride leaned towards each other and away from their rightful partners. As the lighting shifted to a blue, Leonardo and the bride stole away together. The lighting seemed suggest their rebellion and the desperation of the situation as they ran into the forest. Our ‘Moon’ was then cast in blue light as the bridegroom and Leonardo’s wife, fell to the ground and Leonardo and the bride ran into the growing red light. They then did the same exact movement as before to signify their passion before the bridegroom came and tried to take the bride back again. Both the bridegroom and Leonardo end up on the ground, shrouded in the crimson light to imply that they had each died for the bride. Finally the bride was left standing, alone, with the moon.
It seems that my group did a fairly good job of telling the story of Blood Wedding through this abstract movement; we tried to make each movement signify a moment in the play and tried our best to mirror the emotions of the characters. However, if we were to improve on this particular movement then I think we could have improved on the timing of our kneeling- we could have been doing it at the same time. This means that we could have had better communication within the group and perhaps, I could have had better communication with my partner who could see the other pair and she could have slowed us down (we descended quicker than the other pair).
This lesson I learnt and practiced a lot: learned that subtlety in body language can reflect a more realistic perception of a character and go a very long way and that emotion can easily be expressed through movement. It was very helpful to be reminded of these key acting techniques and methods and I shall continue to apply them to my dramatic career.
Today in our drama lesson we explored an extract from the rural tragedy Blood Wedding, written by Federico Lorca in 1932. It was written and performed originally in Spanish and uses many metaphors and other figurative language that English speakers may find odd. However, the language directly reflects the time and setting of the play -early 20th century, in Southern Spain.
Before we were even given an extract of the play our teacher, Mr. Chipp, instructed us in some abstract physical theatre to warm up and get into character. He told us a generic story of two people, who met and fell in love, before he paired us up and gave us three movements to play around with. He had us face each other, standing with our foreheads touching; he had us kneel down, continuing to keep our foreheads together; and finally, he had us stand up and face away from each other -without losing contact between us. After showing us these movements, he asked us to act like we were in love with our partner as the people in the story were in love with each other. The only restrictions in this movement were that we had to do these three positions but Mr. Chipp encouraged us to play about with the usage of our hands and gesture, facial expressions, and posture.
This was a very useful exercise because it got us into the mood we needed to be in order to read the extract from Blood Wedding. We needed to understand the emotions that coincided between the ourselves and the lovers in the play to grasp the weight of the situation.
Task two of our drama lesson was to read Act One of Blood Wedding. This is a scene that occurs in the house -we thought perhaps in the kitchen- of the bridegroom, between the bridegroom and his mother. It’s an important scene because it allows the audience to see the how the anxiety of mother affects the decisions of the bridegroom: although he is a grown man, he still must ask permission from his mother to marry and even to borrow a knife. We were asked to create a moment of orientation, about 30 seconds long, that showed the dynamic between mother and son. We were asked not to speak, but only to imply the emotions and mime the actions that were going on.
One pair that volunteered I thought did an excellent job of doing this task. The mother was positioned stage left and towards the front, closer to the audience and was busily doing some sort of housework. The son entered on stage right and started quietly searching for a knife in the imaginary cupboards, without acknowledging his mother. His mother notices that he is there and they make eye contact; she then walks over and simply folds her arms…just daring him to ask her for the knife he’s looking for. The son then stops, looking very sheepish.
It seems that this would be a worthy moment of orientation for this play because it clearly showed the power that the mother had over the son, despite his age. It would be a good start to the play because you could really show the back and forth, the rebellion, and the annoyance of the son that builds slowly over Act One.
Our last task was to create another movement, based on the emotions that we had experienced from the bridegroom and from the lovers, the bride and Leonardo, and also what little we knew of the story of Blood Wedding. We were also given an eerie monologue that personifies the Moon in this story. The lines from this monologue were the only lines we were allowed to use in this movement.
Before we started, Mr. Chipp had us observe a lighting change that he had put together. It started with a full, white, moonlike light that cast shadows of a forest on the wall. There was then a blue spotlight that came on that slowly shifted to a dark, blood, red. In total, it lasted about 60 seconds.
When my group approached this task, we decided to use some of the elements that we had been learning over the past few hours. We used exactly the same movements as in our warm up to show the love and affection between the bride and the bridegroom and Leonardo and his wife. However, it turned out only to be an illusion, when Leonardo and the bride leaned towards each other and away from their rightful partners. As the lighting shifted to a blue, Leonardo and the bride stole away together. The lighting seemed suggest their rebellion and the desperation of the situation as they ran into the forest. Our ‘Moon’ was then cast in blue light as the bridegroom and Leonardo’s wife, fell to the ground and Leonardo and the bride ran into the growing red light. They then did the same exact movement as before to signify their passion before the bridegroom came and tried to take the bride back again. Both the bridegroom and Leonardo end up on the ground, shrouded in the crimson light to imply that they had each died for the bride. Finally the bride was left standing, alone, with the moon.
It seems that my group did a fairly good job of telling the story of Blood Wedding through this abstract movement; we tried to make each movement signify a moment in the play and tried our best to mirror the emotions of the characters. However, if we were to improve on this particular movement then I think we could have improved on the timing of our kneeling- we could have been doing it at the same time. This means that we could have had better communication within the group and perhaps, I could have had better communication with my partner who could see the other pair and she could have slowed us down (we descended quicker than the other pair).
This lesson I learnt and practiced a lot: learned that subtlety in body language can reflect a more realistic perception of a character and go a very long way and that emotion can easily be expressed through movement. It was very helpful to be reminded of these key acting techniques and methods and I shall continue to apply them to my dramatic career.
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