15.10.2020 - Principles of Acting - Mrs Williams

 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.

14.10.2020 - Principles of Acting - Mrs Williams

 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.  

...

...

12.10.2020 - Principles of Acting - Mrs Williams

 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.

08.10.2020 - Principles of Acting - Mrs Williams

 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:

This was very insightful and showed us that Berkoff's style is very exaggerated, explicit and quite literal.  

Then we looked at this video to see how the actress played Sylv in scene 7:

We used this to figure out the accent as well.

Then Silvana and I spent the entire rehearsal going through the script and deciding who would say each line and the movements we wanted to add to each line.  I feel like we were being pretty reserved and holding back, so we thought we needed to not hold back and that we should be more explicit, like how Sylv is in the video we watched.

07.10.2020 - Principles of Acting - Mrs Williams

 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.  

05.10.2020 - Principles of Acting - Mrs Williams

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.

01.10.2020 - Performance Workshop - Mr Lemon

POSITIONING

Scene 1 

• Left wing
• Come out on Jack's line "Okay, so the first thing... Like a restaurant."
• As server 
• Exit to right wing

Scene 2

• Stay in right wing

Scene 4

• Walk on as Amelie is walking off
• Scene with James
• Stay sitting down by James

Scene 8

• Eating & drinking with Blagoj
• Storm off to right wing

Scene 7

Scene 10

Scene 11

• 
  

Scene 12