Berkoff / A Woman Alone -Week 7

Monday 

Since we blocked out our whole section of the monologue, we decided to start trying to do full run through of the piece without our scripts in hand. We really need to focus on upping our pace and slicking down the movements that we have already devised. Once our pace has increased, it will be easier to improve upon where we have gaps in our lines and add in reactions and movements to keep everything that we are doing fast and interesting.

Onomatopoeic words/sound effects
We discussed today how onomatopoeic words and sound effects could possibly help us speed up our pace and help us establish the Berkoff style even further. We did this a lot in our versions of East and Lunch and I thought that it was really effective in engaging all the senses of the viewer and establishing the scene. Thinking about it, removing all sound effects from the Berkoff plays would be really odd to watch and quite boring when it comes to sounds... it'd just be us talking at the audience really fast. However, with sound effects you can enforce an emotion or action and make things so much more compelling.

One example of where we're added in some sound effects is when I say, "watch out! I'm going to stab you with this spoon...don't believe me?".  When I say, "watch out!", the rest of the cast runs and hides from me, gasping and ducking as they go. After I say, "...with this spoon", they bring the riser up behind me and I sit on it as they make a whoosh sound. These sound effects, although small, add another layer of complexity to the scene, that could be easily overlooked, but really help define the pace and style we are going for with Berkoff.

Defined movements/ flashes of facial expressions
Another way of keeping up the pace will be to keep our movements exceedingly tight and sharp. The Berkoff style uses defined movements and it's something that we really need to get right. At the moment we're too slow to keep up with the staccato pace, but movements can easily define the staccato beat if we hit the 'notes' correctly. If we think about what staccato means in music, it means short and quick and separated from the others. Several of these movements in succession will make a beat that is consistently staccato in pace, which would be ideal.

One way that we've attempted to do this is by using cannon lines and movements...echoing each other. Not only does speaking in cannon help establish that we are the same person, but it will help for us to be more staccato because we're saying everything in succession and doing similar movements right after another. Additionally, they are small, short and quick, lines and actions that are over in an instant. So we decided to add in some more moments when we say lines in cannon, including the time when we say, "what will I do?!". I think that this is a perfect line to use in cannon because a) it has the word 'I' in it, which helps establish that we are all The Woman, and b) it's short, but can also be said in may different ways (eg/ Melody, who is the psycho says it in a disinterested voice...whilst I say it in a momentarily concerned voice).

Wednesday 

Today, since we've finished blocking our whole piece, we decided to focus on doing some run throughs and identifying where we might have any problems with the blocking not being 'Berkoff enough', or where it generally may just not being going well. We've timed our piece and it is about 9 mins at the moment, so we may need to add some more time onto the piece somehow.

In order to cut down time we may be spending on one section of the play a time and also, to help us keep organised as we revise ourselves, we sectioned the monologue up into eight sections. We've figured that we can start referring to the monologue in sections and spend about 15 mins on each section at least. This will help us to focus on the bigger problems with our extract rather than small ones we may encounter throughout each run through.

We also decided that filming each section and watching it back might help us to identify the problems from the perspective of the audience. It will also help us sharpen up our movements if we can see for ourselves where we are falling behind or not doing something right and immediately fix the problem.

When sectioning them, we thought that dividing them up by topic and where there is a natural break in the scripting would be a good idea. For the most part, when I remember the running order of plays, there are natural breaks in scripts and staging that are clearly evident and help as cues for the actors -so we tried to abide by these particular breaks when sectioning them up.

Here are the sections we chose to divide the monologue into, (these are the last lines of the sections):

• Section 1 - "now then sweetie pie, I'll get you something to eat"
• Section 2 - "Oh that hurts"
• Section 3 - "And a grope for the groper"
• Section 4 - "He called me a tart"
• Section 5 - "Oh the penny's dropped at long last has it"
• Section 6 - "Well I'll show you"
• Section 7 - "That's it, that's enough"
• Section 8 - "Very calmly"

After doing a run through, Mr. Chipp also talked to me about my voice, and how because of the accent that I have been using the intonation of my voice has all been the same for the most part. Since I've been trying to match my accent with my character, who is bubbly and quite vacant (when it comes to her making decisions -she typically just responds to everything in the same way- happiness). So, using this accent has limited my range of voice and what he was trying to say is that I don't necessarily change it completely but try and unlock ways that I can use a range of tone within this accent. I shouldn't become to attached to the way that I say lines because then it's making it hard for me to experiment with different tones and ranges.

Also, the other thing that my group talked about our set and how we haven't tried blocking it within the drama space. Recently, because of exams, the drama space has been being used for other purposes, so we haven't actually gotten to practice our piece in the space it's meant to be performed in. The only reason why we're slightly concerned is because the performance and our staging may not fit into the space as well as it has in the classroom we've been practicing in. We're thinking that we'll have to think about how far we travel as a group when we're doing this piece, and about where we will be at the end of the piece because we want to try and centre Melody at the end. I suppose we just realised that we need to keep this more in mind than we have been doing.