AAS (2) - "Antigone"

In this lesson we completed our staging of our scene from "Antigone". Although our staging was good, we needed to work on how we said our lines and our intentions. To do this, we translated our lines and then performed our scene with everyone saying their translated lines, as opposed to the actual script. My section was as follows:

"But now in the beautiful morning of victory
Let Thebes of the many chariots sing for joy!
With hearts for dancing we'll take leave of war.
Our temples shall be sweet with hymns of praise,
And the long night shall echo with our chorus."

I translated this paragraph to the following:

"Yeah enough about death, thanks!
We won! We should be celebrating!
Let's forget about war. It's done.
Let them hear the drinking song we'll sing!"

 This was a really helpful exercise, as not only did we understand what our characters were saying, but we also understood everybody else's lines and characters. By working out what our characters were saying, we could then say our lines more naturally. Initially, we sounded like we were attempting Shakespeare for the first time, but after doing this exercise, we said our lines more naturally and convincingly.

To make our characters even more different from each other, we experimented a little bit with accents and dialects. This also helped to demolish the idea of the chorus members sounding as one.

I enjoyed this acting style as I learned that the chorus doesn't have to be in unison. I found it quite challenging to change what I previously thought about Greek thatre, but that's what made this more interesting for me - for example, we didn't do the typical thing of wearing masks just because we were doing Greek theatre.