Berkoff / A Woman Alone -Week 5

Monday 

We had a class discussion today before we started to devise more of our piece about how we are going to create that balance of being juxtaposing elements of the same Woman and all at once, being The Woman together. We also talked about how we are going to distinguish who is the mouthpiece of The Woman and how we are going to pass that from element to element.

The 'voice' of The Woman, we decided, should have control of the stage and the body of The Woman and therefore, this should be completely clear to the audience when it is passed from one element to the next. The transferal of the voice from one element to the next is important to distinguish because we want the audience's attention to be on that person.

Costume/Makeup 

Costume and makeup, it seems, could be one way to distinguish between each element and their personalities. In the stage directions of A Woman alone it says: "she is wearing a low cut negligee", which is basically a thin, sexy, nightgown. However, a) we can't wear such a thing at school, and b) all wearing the same thing may not help our situation.

We came up with some ideas of what we could do:

• all wear the same thing, but with different variations. For example, we could all wear a night dress but in different colours or black trousers and white dress shirt with different variations of tying the shirt or wearing different accessories. However, we thought that this might be too distracting for the audience and also make us differ from each other too much.
• another suggestion was that we all wear pajamas, but different types. For example, sexy could wear a more of a night dress and the housewife could wear a more conservative type of nightwear. 
• if we went with the different variations of the same outfit concept, then we could have the differences defined by colour rather than how the costume is worn. This way, we thought, we could use colour to represent the personality and emotions of the characters we were playing. If we went with this concept, we could essentially use common colours metaphorically (eg/ red representing anger -psycho, or love -sexy) as to manipulate the elements of The Woman into these stereotyped metaphors. However, colours can often be represented in multiple ways, the colour red being interpreted as being both angry and sexy...so perhaps this would make things confusing to the audience. 
• the Berkoff style of makeup is a take on the common makeup of a mime artist. Essentially how he would do his actors' makeup is by having them manipulate their own faces into the most extreme facial expression that defined the main emotions of the said character. After applying a white base, he would draw the extreme facial expressions that they were making over the top of them in black; he overcompensated for that emotion through makeup. I think that this style of makeup works well to designate the feelings of the character and since we are all elements of personality within The Woman, streamlining our facial expressions would really help to define who we are. Matching our faces, shading wise, will allow for us to look similar, but the different emotions will help us juxtapose. 
• we also discussed perhaps doing 'normal' makeup, but, for example, the housewife hardly wearing any...but sexy wearing a lot. This would force the audience to stereotype the elements using the standard cues of everyday life and would expose how one stereotypes women by their makeup choices everyday. I think that this however, may be better for a play drawing inspiration from practitioners of realism or adjacent types of drama.  

Example of Berkoff's style of makeup^

Unity of Lines/Movements

We also discussed how saying lines in unison and doing synchronised actions will help establish that we are the same character. I've also been thinking that it's not necessarily about only saying lines in unison but about picking the lines that will establish that we are The Woman. For example, saying lines such as "my husband", "me" and other pronouns referring to "myself", and anything having directly to do with us as The Woman would be good lines to isolate and say together. Movement also, as I've established before, are also a huge part of the Berkoff style, and synchronising them will without a doubt define the fact that we are all the same Woman. It will establish that the 'voice' we have is all coming from the same mouth.

A combination of these things will both establish that we are The Woman, together, as well as help us juxtapose. This is because we can choose to make the movements and lines that we do synchronised, but how we do these movements and lines slightly different according to our characters. For example, when we say "a kiss, on the lips?", we've actually decided to all say "a kiss", but in cannon, and all do a similar movement, but change it slightly according to our particular characters. For instance, my character says "a kiss" and I cover my mouth and giggle because my character is embarrassed and the representation of the ideal innocence desired by men. Unity of lines and movements can establish that we are the same Woman, but can also help us juxtapose as separate elements when we are saying our lines by ourselves.

Physical Contact

We also analysed the idea that physical contact could be an excellent way of passing the 'voice' of The Woman and shifting the attention of the audience from element of The Woman to another. Essentially we just need to experiment with different ways of transferring the voice... For example, we could touch the shoulder of the person who is going to speak next, all turn our heads or bodies towards that person, or have that person push to the front and centre of the stage -taking the voice rather than being given it. We could also pass an imaginary object between us in order to pass the voice. For example, another group in my class came up with the idea to pretend to throw a thread from one element to another in their piece in order to pass the voice. I think that this idea is a brilliant way of passing the voice because it easily establishes who is about to speak next.