09/10/15
Today we decided to change our blocking; instead of having one spot (centre stage) which we would move into whenever we had dialogue, we now have three spots. By having three spots, people can prepare themselves and be in the correct place ready rather than having to keep moving. Not only does this new stage make it easier for us as actors, but it looks more natural too. We ran the whole of act one with the new staging, and adding notes to our scripts as we went.
13/10/15
In this lesson, we did some more work on character building and understanding. We were split into groups that our characters would work well with/be interesting. I (Mary) formed a group of three with Ollie (Narrator) and Robert (Herod). We were told to improvise a short scene as these characters - the only rules were to keep in character and keep the ages the same. Ollie, Robert and I created a scene around the three of them drawing Nativity pictures. Our scene began with Mary mocking the narrator's drawing, belittling him. Herod disrupts the peace by singing the Question of Sport theme tune, which angers and frustrates Mary; she makes him aware of this and also puts him in his place, telling him what he should be doing. Our scene ended with the narrator asking Mary as to why she didn't draw Gabriel in her Nativity scene. My characters response was that the character of Gabriel was not important and was not pretty enough for her picture. In our mini improvised scene I tried to portray my character's bossy nature, her authority, her hatred for the character Ashley, and her desire for perfection. After we had all performed our mini scenes, we sat down as a class and read from the beginning of act two of our play, until the adult section.
15/10/15
Today we did more character exercises. To get into the mind set of little children, we began our lesson sitting on the floor with our teacher on a chair. Miss Cordell read us a children's story as if we were at primary school. After this, we were put into small groups and were told to play "Mums and Dads"; however, in this game, we had to be our character pretending to be or character's parent (for example, I had to play the game as Mary pretending to be Mary's mum). I was put with Rhiannon (Gabriel) and Ollie (Narrator) for this activity. The entire class found this quite challenging. Before we performed our little scene to the rest of the class, we had a rough idea on how we wanted our piece to go.... however, our piece ended up being completely different to how we had practiced it, meaning we had to improvise the majority of it. We think we managed to portray our characters feelings for their parents okay whilst remembering our feelings for each other's characters as children. Although we did struggle with the concept we did manage to create a short piece which fit the requirements and entertained the rest of the class.
