Today in lesson we decided to implement our action plan regarding our extract and going through each section at a time...changing things as we go. We began with section 1 of our extract of A Woman Alone, and determined that we would do a run-through and film it, then look at the video and see more closely what we needed to change.
Here is the unchanged version of section 1:
After watching this back and discussing things that perhaps we should change, we realised that the beginning of our piece starts off incredibly slow, and is kind of misrepresenting what is going on at the time that our extract of the monologue starts. Since the Berkoff style of movement is often motivated by speech, we needed the beginning of our piece to suggest that there was an unwanted person outside our door...trying to get in, "get out of my house with that hand yours".
We also need a beginning that would suggest that we are all the same person. This is why at first, we went with this original freeze frame at the beginning -because we are all in the same place, and Emily's hand represented the hand of the man in the door. However, we think that a) it looks weird and misrepresents the man, and Emily, as the character of Sexy and b) it makes it hard for the pace of our piece to be established.
So we started from the beginning, and tried to think up an entirely new beginning. We think also tried to remember to incorporate the riser more in our piece and use the riser as an implication of things that are going on...for example, using the riser as a representation of the door or of the brother-in-law. We were also trying to think of ways that we could use the riser to help indicate the voice or the mouthpiece of The Woman from the very beginning of the piece. We've experimented with pushing and pulling the riser between us before, and it seemed to work as a good indication...
Here is what we came up with as what we think would be a good idea for the beginning of the piece because a) it is fast paced, but simple, b) it shows a clear indication to the audience from the very beginning of the piece of where to look, c) if we all got into the riser, it would also indicate that we were the same person, fighting for a chance to speak, and d) it could represent the sporadic nature of The Woman.
Video of our riser experimentation for the beginning of the play:
Over this week as well, I did a little bit of analysis and kind of went over the latter part of the piece by writing it down. We didn't end up having time to do anything more than go over the beginning bit of our monologue, and do some run throughs of the entire thing, but it still helped me to think of some things to consider for the whole monologue -not just the end. For example, one thing that I think we should consider doing more of is making more of an emphasis on the words like "I" and "My", the pronouns referring to The Woman. This is because it further reminds the audience that we are all the same person. The other suggestions include places that would be good to add in onomatopoeia, other ways we could incorporate the riser, and slicker and bigger movements that are still motivated by the speech. For example when Megan (as the Housewife) says, "I'm getting to the end of my tether", instead of doing the small hand movement that we are currently doing, we could hold onto each other's hands and extend our entire bodies across the stage and pull out.
We've been changing so much lately and I wanted to make sure that I'm up to date with what is happening. I also wanted to start writing it down so that I could think up some suggestions for the problems we've been having with staging, so we could save some time in our rehearsals. Here are some pictures of the notes that I made, with the ideas that I had (all ideas are in pencil, kind of hard to see unfortunately):
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