Realism & Naturalism (7) - Viewpoints & Monologues

In this lesson we had an ex-student, Tom, come in and do some workshops with us. He has recently completed a course at National Theatre and is now on their books. We spent the first half of the lesson exploring Viewpoints and the second half working on a smaller monologue of our choice.

Viewpoints are to do with voice and spatial relationships:

• Voice:
  -- Tone:   How you say something, and the personality we communicate it with
  -- Pitch:   How high or low you speak
  -- Pace:   The speed at which we say something
  -- Accent:   The dialect you speak with
  -- Volume:   How loud or quiet you say something
  -- Gesture:   This includes stutters and pauses
• Spatial relationships:-- Proxemics:   The distance between you and others
  -- Time:   The duration you spend away from / near others
  -- Patterns:   How you use the space and what it looks like from above
  -- Gesture:   Hand gestures (e.g. a wave)
  -- Touch:   The physical contact you have with others
  -- Architecture:   The physical props you use and physical objects
  -- Repetition:   How often you repeat a gesture or how long you maintain a certain relationship
  -- Audience:   You have to consider what it looks like from the audience's perspective
  -- Shape:   The physical shape you make with your body
  -- Eye contact:   How long you maintain you eye contact with certain people

Tom got Ollie, Lewis and I to line up in a diagonal line across the room. He then swapped places with us one at a time, so we could step out and do what we thought was underlining / highlighting the shape. We really struggled with this, but Ollie accidently did this right. He moved from USL to stand with Lewis DSR. This made another interesting shape as Ollie was standing close to Lewis facing him, whilst I was far away from them - this shape in itself could suggest many different things (for example, they could have been fighting over my character, or they could be in a relationship and I was jealous). We moved around a few more times to see if we could all try highlighting and to see if we could get used to this new concept.

Once we understood this, we tried "adding architecture". For this exercise, we had to do the same thing, but this time, use objects in the room. My first individual movement was going to press the fire alarm. The other two did something individually, and without realising it, we had managed to form an interesting pattern. Another one of my movements was reaching as high as I could to try and touch the projector. Tom then wanted us to add the technique of "touch". This time, Lewis gave me a piggy back, and I stretched up and managed to touch the projector. We were also given scenarios which changed our facial expressions (thus including another viewpoint) - for example, Tom then told me that the wires of the projector that I was touching were in fact wires to a bomb which I was trying to disable.

After doing a few workshops to explore viewpoints, we began working on our monologues. We were told to use monologues that we knew off by heart, so we used the monologues we used in the previous double lesson for our audition unit (I used my monologue from "Assassins"). Below are the comments Tom made about my first attempt:

• "Awesome!" // Loved the laugh at the beginning as it was really believable and caught his attention straight away // good use of tone, tempo and pitch
• Perhaps use more hand gestures // focus on someone else so he could watch the entire performance and my body language instead of looking into my eyes (as I was staring him out during this monologue) // include more vocal gestures // elongate the entire speech - drag out phrases to show that I am high

Below are the comments Tom gave me after my second performance:

• Good and convincing use of pace // good use of hand gestures // liked the vocal gestures // still held his attention, despite focussing the entire monologue on Ollie
• lost accent a little bit in places due to speed but this was "understandable" and expected // maybe let my eye contact completely vary next time to show that I was high (I found this point interesting as it was the opposite to what my double teacher wanted)