Silvana and I went through our piece again and decided to re-record. We have been trying so hard to get it done without stopping so we are trying it again. We had to do it quite a few times and then realised that in our last video we missed a few lines so we made sure we knew what we were doing before recording. We managed to get it done in the best way we've done it yet so I'm very happy.
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Today, Silvana and I attempted to re-record our East piece. We were so much more effective with our lines and movements this time than last time. Our filming went really well besides the fact that we had to film in the bathroom as we couldn't find any other room that was free to film in. Someone walked in mid-performance which was very frustrating so we might attempt to re-record it again.
Today we looked back at our piece we attempted to finish over the weekend. It looked way too choppy and we were not happy with how it turned out so we will be filming it again. In the afternoon, we re-filmed 4.48 Psychosis as we thought the vibe wasn't correct in the last one. To help change that, we filmed in the auditorium with louder music and different, eerie lighting. This one went so much better for us and then we recorded our post-performance discussion.
Today, Silvana, Louis and Tristan came over to mine to finish our East performance. Our aim for today was to completely finish learning our lines and movements for each line and then get it filmed. Silvana was already very familiar with her lines whereas I wasn't as much. She helped me learn all my lines and then together we created movements for specific lines and words. After that, we went downstairs to film. It didn't go massively to plan as we didn't manage to swiftly go through without any awkward silences or without forgetting our lines. We thought we would be able to just edit these pauses out but it didn't turn out the way we wanted to.
We began today's rehearsal with a quick reminder of our lines. This went a lot better than yesterday but each of us have a few lines that we continuously get stuck on. After that, we looked at the different music choices for the different parts of the piece. We then went to a bigger space to do some more physical aspects. Silvana mentioned that she wasn't too certain on a part of her chair duet with Tristan as she was planning on crossing one leg over the other but the bed is quite low so it's difficult and doesn't look very smooth. We managed to figure out a different routine for that specific part of the chair duet and it looked a lot better. After that, we discussed the issue with our Swindon 5. We were previously walking over the bed and then stopping in the middle of the bed and saying our lines. This was an issue as it slowed down our piece a lot and the bed is quite creaky and distracting. We tried a few different ways but ended up coming to the conclusion that we would scrap the Swindon 5 and instead stand in 4 spots and create levels as we stand up when we say our line. I think it looks a lot more put together and clean now. Then we wanted to do an exaggerated run through, but Tristan wasn't in the mood and so it didn't really go to plan. We also managed to completely forget all of our lines which was a disaster. For the last two minutes we added a more concluded ending to the piece and decided that we were going to have our last run through at lunch time tomorrow.
We had a small discussion period at the start of todays rehearsals on our goals for today and our goals for the week. We then went to the common room to repeat what we did on Friday's rehearsal with the chair duets. We've managed to fully secure what we wanted to do with this section of the piece. For the start of our rehearsals after lunch, we went through our lines and learnt the order of them. As 4.48 Psychosis is very abstract, the lines are quite difficult to learn and the order is even more difficult to remember. We has to go through these for quite a long time to get everything engraved in our heads. After we learnt the order of the lines, we continued with finishing the rest of the piece. We then blocked where we would say our lines and the emotion each of us would say it in. I am happy, Louis is angry, Silvana is sad and Tristan is emotionless. We really looked into pacing and volume today, especially with the numbers section.
We were meant to have a rehearsal yesterday but Tristan wasn't feeling well so we changed it to today. We wanted to focus on East today as our aim was to get it filmed and done with. As we had planned to rehearse the day before but weren't able to, we didn't have as much time to rehearse today and didn't manage to fit what we wanted to get in and reach our target. We have rescheduled the filming to next weekend and we will be a lot more prepared by then.
In today's rehearsal we decided that we should try figure out what we would be doing for our chair duet. We struggled to figure out what to do as a four so we split up into two pairs. I went with Louis and Silvana and Tristan went together. Then we initially attempted to improvise some movements with some music. We started off by seeing how it would work when Louis does one move and then I do one move. We managed to create a small piece of theatre but we thought that it wasn't good enough, so we took inspiration from another chair duet piece that we created at the start of last year. This helped us massively and we managed to get it all done. Then we switched the pairs so I went with Silvana and Tristan and Louis went together. We went through the same process again and ended up with 4 different chair duets. Then we decided to figure out how we would link all of these pieces together and it went really well.
During our rehearsal in the small room today, we decided to really focus on learning our lines. We collectively decided to focus on the lines for East as we struggle more with them rather than 4.48 Psychosis.
After school, we stayed to do another rehearsal where our aim was to completely block 4.48 Psychosis. I think we were being a bit optimistic with this goal, but we still managed to get a fair bit done. We now know what we're doing after the first part of physical theatre. We also decided that after the line "don't let me forget", we would have a chair duet style of movements whilst sitting on the bed, but we didn't particularly want to focus on doing physical theatre today as we needed to block everything else. We included in a Swindon 5, which I think could look really good if we polish it up a bit. This is footage of a little run through we did in our rehearsal.
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Today we want to focus on 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane. This is because we have figured out what we want to do for our other piece and we think it's a lot easier to finish so we want to get this one sorted out. First we're going to figure out the blocking for our lines as we already know the opening physical theatre. We struggled to decide which pieces of texts we wanted to use, but we figured out more of the lines and the order we wanted to do them in. Because we were in the small space, we weren't able to get on our feet to figure it out. We also figured out our aim for today was to complete our blocking entirely for this piece so we just have to polish it up afterwards.
Unfortunately, we were all exhausted and hit a wall today so we weren't able to hit the goal. It's quite frustrating but it will push us to work harder next rehearsal.
In today's rehearsal, Louis and Tristan and Silvana and I split off into separate groups and started to look through our second script, East by Steven Berkoff. Silvana and I started off this rehearsal by watching two different videos of people performing East.
We looked at this video to get a better idea of the way East is performed using Berkoff's style:
During this rehearsal, we didn't have a lot of space to work with, so we decided that it would be a good time to discuss our second piece. We all decided that we weren't happy with the piece Noises Off by Michael Frayn, so we spent some time looking and exploring other scripts. We researched some scripts online, which were quite good, but either too short or had one main character and the other characters were much smaller. Then we went the route of looking at texts we have already looked at or studied. We looked at Gagging for it by Danny Sturrock, which we used for our GCSE piece and East by Steven Berkoff, which we briefly looked at when studying practitioners this year. We all agreed that Gagging for it was a bit too easy and boring and then we looked at East. East looked like a great option for us as Steven Berkoff is a practitioner that we would like to explore and there are segments of text which are long enough and work with the genders and amount of people in our group. We decided that Louis and Tristan would do the opening scene together, with Louis being Les and Tristan being Mike. Silvana and I will both be playing Sylv and we will be performing scene 7 together.
We were still struggling on what second text we want to do. During these rehearsals we looked through the text Noises Off by Michael Frayn to try find some pieces of text where there are duologues or for 4 actors. We found this quite difficult as there were many different characters or one was very prominent compared to the rest and didn't allow enough time for the other characters. We decided for our time in the auditorium, we would continue to focus on 4.48 as we still haven't gotten much further than just the physical theatre at the start. I began the lesson by leading a warm up, as I felt we didn't have a lot of energy. After this, we moved onto 4.48 but I felt like we were quite stuck on what we wanted to do to proceed in this piece but we managed to figure out which pieces of text we wanted to do. It may still be a bit too long, but it's better to have it too long, rather than too short. I feel like we were also very focussed on our It's not you, it's me piece by Don Zolidis, as we are performing it on Thursday.
POSITIONING
Scene 1
