Realism & Naturalism (5) - Scenes & Monologue

In this lesson we looked at proxemics. Proxemics is to do with the distance between you and someone else - this space (or lack of it) says a lot about the characters relationship, their intentions and their feelings. We re-visited our scenes to put what we had learned about proxemics into practice. Ollie and I used the same bit of script that we performed to the class a few lessons ago, as we knew this section quite well.

Ollie and I began this task by looking at our scripts and working out when his character would be seated next to mine, when he would move closer and when I would pull away. For example, I lean towards Ollie when I say "I've got your number" as to attempt to reassure him, but he backs away a little when he says "What?" as this suggests that he thinks Louise is on his case. However, when he realises what she means, he comes over and sits with her. We went through the script for this section and did the same for every line. Once we had worked out where we wanted to be positioned throughout the scene, we ran this scene without any dialogue. This was quite interesting as it made us see if our body language and proxemics were strong enough to convey what was going on in this scene. However, we did find this exercise quite challenging as we were often on different lines and we couldn't confirm with each other as we couldn't speak! We then did this again but with the dialogue put back in. We found that when we considered our proxemics, the scene seemed more intense and looked more interesting. The audience could then begin to understand our character's objectives.

After working on our scenes, we then looked at our monologues. We looked at our character's intentions and objectives in our monologue. I decided that my character's intentions are to be accepted by her mum, to be loved and to gain control over her past and future. When we began looking at our characters objectives we all struggled a bit because our characters are so unusual and complicated. To make this task a little easier, we decided to look at what our characters emotions were throughout the monologue.
By doing this we would then be able to vary our emotion throughout the monologue - this would then avoid the monologue becoming too repetitive and boring. My main emotions throughout the monologue are as follows:

• reflection - (pg 1, para 1)(pg 4, para 3)
• depression - (pg 1, para 1)(pg 3, para 1)
• disappointment - (pg 1, para 1 & 2)
• admiration - (pg 1, para 3)
• excitement - (pg 2, para 1)(pg 3,para 1)
• anger - (pg 2, para 1)(pg 4, para 4 & 5)
• reminiscing - (pg 2, para 3)
• in awe - (pg 2, para 4)(pg 3, para 3)
• lust - (pg  3, para 2)(pg 3, para 4)
• exhaustion - (pg 4, para 1)
• disgust - (pg 4, para 2)(pg 4, para 5)