28.09.2020 - Principles of Acting - Mrs Williams

 For the first lesson today we carried on looking through scripts to decide which one we wanted to use for our second piece.  We looked through a range of different texts and found some really good ones.  We decided by the end of the lesson that we would use the text Noises Off by Michael Frayn.  We found it really entertaining and funny which is a good contrast to our other piece 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane.  The only problem we saw arise was the issue with characters.  There are too many characters for just the four of us so we will need to find out good sections of text. 

Later on in the day we continued on with our 4.48 Psychosis rehearsals.  Our group focussed on the pacing of our physical theatre sequence as we wanted to put the song COPYCAT by Billie Eilish.

After figuring out the pacing, we voice recorded a discussion on what our plans were for our future rehearsals.  Then we performed for the other group and got some feedback on what they think.  This was our performance:

28.09.20 - Performance Workshop - Mr Lemon

 Today James and I did a short rehearsal for our scene as Mazie and Jacob.  We had Louis there to give some audience feedback and help direct us a bit.  We didn't have a proper performance place so we had to go in a small classroom.  I felt that I couldn't fully characterise as I had to be more quiet and we didn't have enough space.  This is the recording of the rehearsal:

Louis gave very good feedback and the second time felt so much better than the first.  I'm glad we had this small rehearsal as it helped a lot.  

23.09.2020 - Principles of Acting - Mrs Williams

I wasn't here in this lesson as I was ill but I believe that the rest of the group helped out the Year 12's again so I didn't miss anything.  

21.09.2020 - Principles of Acting - Mrs Williams

Today we looked at more scripts and decided one of them we were going to use for our final performance in front of the Year 11s and Year 12s.  We made two separate groups being Louis, Tristan, Silvana and I and James, Seth, Hugo and Amelie.  We both really enjoyed the play 4.48 Psychosis that we previously looked at and decided to both do the text, however we would need different practitioners.  Our group liked the idea of Artaud, but we wanted to add a bit more to it, so we chose Frantic Assembly as our practitioner.  Frantic Assembly uses physical theatre which we thought could be different and interesting.  We then looked at the Bed Scene from Frantic Assembly's Ignition:

After deciding our first piece, we set a timetable for rehearsals which were on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school.

17.09.2020 - Principles of Acting - Mrs Williams

 Today we looked through more texts to find out which ones we could do for our performances.  We looked at the play 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane specifically.  We all found this text very interesting as it is so abstract and doesn't have any specific characters or stage directions.  The context behind this piece is that Sarah Kane wrote it as at 4:48am every morning, she woke up in a depressed state.  The play is very dark and sinister which we were initially trying to avoid, however we liked the creepy aspect to it and had many ideas we wanted to explore.  We split into two separate groups to perform the first section of the text in the most creative way possible, using the practitioner, Artaud's style.  This was really fun to explore and I think both groups came up with very innovative pieces.  This was ours:

16.09.2020 - Principles of Acting - Mrs Williams

 We were helping out the Year 12 BTEC group with their improvisation unit as their show is coming up on the 1st October.  As we did this unit last year we had a lot of advice and fun helping them.

14.09.2020 - Principles of Acting - Mrs Williams

PRACTITIONERS

Today we went through the different practitioners that each individual had done a fact file on.  The practitioners we discussed were Peter Brook, Antoine Artaud, Dario Fo, Harold Pinter, Konstanin Stanislavski, Edward Craig, Jerzy Grotoski and Brecht.   After that we got into two groups of four and spoke about the three previous scripts we had looked at and chose one to apply a specific practitioner to.  The three scripts we looked at were It's not you, it's me by Don Zollidos, DNA by Dennis Kelly and East by Steven Berkoff.  Our group chose to do DNA by Dennis Kelly as it was quite dark and we wanted to switch it up a bit.  We looked mostly at the practitioner Dario Fo who used comedy as one of his key features of performance.  We wanted to keep the underlying message of DNA to stay depressing but we would take influence from Dario Fo to give it a comedic twist.  I like looking at different ways to interpret texts as they can make the moral or story become so different.  I am very interested in looking into Antoine Artaud as I find the theatre of cruelty so interesting as it's uncomfortable yet it's hard to look away.

 Dario Fo