30/01/17
Today, we peeled off into a few different groups to work on Antigone more effectively. Mr. Chipp had Miss Starbuck, a student drama teacher, help me with my first chorus speech because it needs alot of improvement! I now know the speech by heart, but I've been learning how to say it correctly -to act it- now.
Some things I've had to work on are:
Tone- I haven't really been portraying my character's temperment exactly right. Tone has to do with the strength of my voice, and to be honest it hasn't been the strongest persay. I have to work on using my diaphram consistently to make sure I don't run out of breath and my voice stays strong. As the narrator, my voice requires a certain quality of strength that I haven't been completely used to in the past, but practicing has made it easier for me to implement what Antigone requires from this character. As the first speaker, and the Chorus -who sets Antigone into motion- my job is very important because the tone I set at the beggining, sets the tone for the rest of the play and the other characters.
Pitch- The natural pitch of my voice is higher than what has been required of me for this part. I've had to lower my voice quite a bit to fit my character and add that sense of power over the entire play. To help me get used to lowering my voice, I had my dad, who also has an American accent read the first part of the speech out to me yesterday, before today's lesson. This was really helpful because I could hear how he says things and try and copy his example.
Pace- One of the worst problems I've had with this speech is pace because I take breaths in weird places. I needed to speed up in some places and slow down in others. I'll still need to focus on pace a bit more as I practice this speech to perfect it, but today I think it inproved alot. Miss Starbuck helped me out by having me indicate where I should take breaths in the speech and where I shouldn't as a guideline. Here are some pictures of my script that I took (all of the triangles are where breaths must be taken):
The first picture is of the beginning of my monologue and the second one is of the end, I've circled all of the annotation that I made this week. However, the annotation that is circled in red in annotation that this week, I've had to override. The pace I was speaking in before was way too fast, adn Mr. Chipp decided that a slower pace with longer pauses would be much more effective. Notice, that in the beginning of my monologue, there are 14 triangles and at the end there are 10 triangles for a much smaller section of the speech. These pauses I've added in will definitely slow down the pace.
Overall, I'm quite pleased where this speech is going and whilst it still needs attention, I've made a lot of progress over these past few days by focusing a lot on this.
06/02/17
This lesson, came up with the start of a physical theatre movement from the stimulus, "...they'll seize us in their thousand arms...", which is a line in Ismene's speech where she expresses her fear to Antigone about helping bury her brother and the consequences of doing so.
We've experimented with a few different types of lifts and ways of spinning and dropping our two Ismenes, Hannah and Connie. Over the next few lessons we'll be completing this movement.
