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)

Realism & Naturalism (6) - Character Profile & Monologue

In today's lesson we discussed how to do a successful monologue. Our main focus was how to begin a monologue - you need to capture the audience's attention from the beginning and make them believe in your character from the very start. To be able to do this, you should take as much time as you need to ensure that you are in character from the beginning. You should also use eye contact (if appropriate) and really consider your body language. Most importantly, you need to know your character inside out. Even if you are only doing a tiny monologue, it is important to know what has previously happened to your character, what situation they are in now and what they are like. Therefore, we spent a long time today doing character profiles...

• Appearance & Body language:
  • In her late teens - 18/19
  • Short
  • Mild pregnancy bump
  • Dark hair worn down, framing her face
• Backstory:
  • Abused by her father when she was six
  • Mother takes all doors off of the house in an attempt to protect Mona
  • "Raised" by her mother
  • Her home is filled by random men thanks to her mum
• Relationships (MUM):
  
  • Strong, wild laugh
  • Spoilt, young, beautiful, honest, trying
  • Loves her daughter but finds her strange
• Relationships ("HIM"):
  
  • Powerful, strong, scars, broad, unusual
  • Exciting and sexual
  • Mysterious, generous, welcoming
  • Left her on a cold stone
• Personality & Other notes:
  • Has many secrets
  • Vulnerable, excitable, childish and pregnant
  • Gone through a lot
  • Doesn't blame "him"
  • Disgusted / angered by her mother
  • Very confused and messed up mind set

After doing our character profiles, we quickly learned the first line or two of our monologues. As we understood our characters a lot better, we could then begin characterising them. We only focussed on the first couple of lines of our monologues as our aim this lesson was to create an engaging beginning. I wanted to do mine sitting down at the beginning and quite inwards, as I think Mona is reflecting at this point - she is trying to put everything into perspective and get things straight in her messed up and confused mind. My first two lines are "This is the house that my mother built. This is the house that lets the outside in and keeps the inside out". When I first did this I sat perfectly still and just said the lines. I took a little pause between the two sentences to show my character thinking and giving herself time to get everything straight in her head. The fact that she begins both sentences the same way shows that she is having to take her time and really go over every detail so she can make it make sense to herself. Also, the first time I did this, I kind of jumped straight into it - I didn't give myself that long to prepare. At first I thought I wanted to show my character's honesty and willingness to share her story, but I decided against it as I wanted to give myself more time before.

The second time I performed these two lines was completely different. I still sat with my legs crossed on a chair (like a child in an assembly, to show my characters innocence and to emphasise the fact that she has been through a lot although she is still quite young), but this time I didn't sit still. I took about ten seconds before I started speaking just to fiddle with a hairband. The purpose of this was not only to give me more time to get into character, but to draw the audience in to what I was doing. I said both of my lines in a similar manner but I didn't look at the audience at all. I wanted to keep it quite internal to suggest that my character is preparing herself before openly sharing her life story. On the next line I was going to look up, as Mona then goes into detail about what her house is like. This would be an ideal time to look up, as it fits well with the character's confidence and willingness to share, and also avoids me looking down for too long.

By next lesson, we have to read through the monologue several times and really familiarise ourselves with it.

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)

Realism & Naturalism (4) - Intention & Objection

• Intention: Overall arc. What your character's intention is in general?
• Objective: Scene by scene. What your character's purpose is in different places? This can change halfway through a sentence. Purpose of the objective is to bounce off other characters.

In one of Stanislavski's lessons he looked worried so his class asked him what was wrong. He told them that he had lost his keys, so the class started looking for them. After a while, he revealed that he hadn't lost his keys and so his students were confused as to why he had "wasted" their time. He told them to look at how they were when looking for the keys, thinking they were actually missing, compared to how they would have acted looking for keys - he was demonstrating naturalism.

We then got our scripts out from the first lesson ("After the End") and worked out what our characters intention was and what their objectives were at different points. I think my character's intentions were to stay safe, find out what was going on and to not upset Mark. I then looked at the short section that Ollie and I performed in the first lesson, and worked out what my characters objectives were throughout the scene. My first objective in this scene was to clear my name and also to convince Mark that she wasn't going to leave without saying goodbye and that she would have called him. When they were talking about whether she had the chance to "talk to [him] properly last night" or not, her objection changes to trying to remember what happened. When the conversation changes to whether they argued or not, her objective is to find out the truth. For the rest of this scene her objective is to clear everything up and sort out the issues between them - she does not want to upset him. We shall be performing these scenes against next lesson with objectives in mind, and we shall also be learning about proxemics.

As Lewis wasn't in, so we Charlie didn't have his partner to do his scene with, we moved on to monologues. We will be using these monologues in lessons to come, but for now we just read through them. The monologue I have is from "Eight" by Ella Hickson. The character who performs my monologue is called Mona, and she has been abused by her father, her mother has removed all of the doors in her house and filled the place with men and Mona runs away. Whilst she is on the run, she meets a guy in he graveyard and has sex with him. When she wakes up, he is gone. She is pregnant.

Realism & Naturalism (3) - Meanings & Creating a scene

To begin today's lesson we discussed and learned the differences between realism and naturalism. We discovered the following:

• Realism: Real situations // Real characters // Audience isn't aware they are watching a performance // An example would be social experiments (e.g. to see how the public would react to seeing domestic abuse with a male abusing a female, compared to the female abusing a male)
• Naturalism: Acting // Believable characters and dialogue // Asks the audience to suspend their disbelief

After establishing this, our task was to create a short naturalistic scene. We decided on our characters first. We knew that we wanted to be either 17 or 18, as this would be believable as they are our actual ages. We then decided that we all wanted to know each other from school as to keep the bonds we have between us the same and therefore believable. However, when it came to deciding what we should do our scene about, we began to struggle. We thought we could set it in school (as that is how we all know each other) and be chatting about something (similar to the play "Punk Rock" by Simon Stephens). We said we could have a debate about the EU referendum or discuss the new uniform rules but decided against these as it seemed too much like realism as opposed to naturalism. We realised we needed quite a big and shocking situation but we would react to it in a naturalistic way. We decided on having a dead body in the house. We tried scripting the scene, as we all like working with scripts, but found this really difficult so ended up improvising the scene.


Our setting changed to a living room at one of our homes. We set the situation at a party at the house (as we have all been to a party together and is stereotypical for people our ages) and we found the body on the floor of the living room. When improvising, we just reacted to how we thought we would react if we actually saw a body lying there. On the right is the video of us improvising this scene. We were anxious about improvising (me especially!), but realised that we had to completely commit to it to make it work. Once we got into it, we felt more natural.

What went well:

• We all reacted how we thought we would actually react if we saw a dead body
• When we were speaking, we all overlapped and sometimes didn't finish our sentences
• We reacted in a few different ways (which was accurate as not everybody would react the same) 
• We used the space quite well
• We had a lots of moments of people talking over each other as well as moments of silence

What could have gone better:

• As Ollie and Charlie entered by walking round and through the chairs, Lewis and I had to do the same - which didn't look realistic as Ollie technically called us from inside the house
• My name ended up changing from "Lorna" at the beginning of the scene to "Sandra" by the end, as we didn't actually agree on names!

Realism & Naturalism (2) - "After the End"

• Play title:   After the End
• Playwright:   Dennis Kelly
• Premiered:   August 2005
• Setting:   Mark's 1980s nuclear fallout shelter
• Characters:   Mark and Louise
• Blurb:  "They were all in the pub when the explosion happened. Louise wakes up to find herself trapped with Mark, who has saved her life. Mark, who has always been prepared for the worst, has everything he thinks they will need to survive; tinned chilli, Dungeons and Dragons and a knife – now all they need to do is to wait until it's safe to go outside. Can they survive the attack? Can they survive each other?" - https://www.bushtheatre.co.uk/event/after-the-end/

The play is described as an "intense psychological drama", in which Mark longs to spend "his enforced captivity with the woman of his dreams by playing Dungeons and Dragons, so much so that when she resists, he begins restricting her food supply." - http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/20/theater/reviews/20afte.html

Brief synopsis:
An atomic bomb has gone off, and Louise comes to in Mark's 1980s nuclear fallout shelter (which he has always kept topped up with supplies!)... or that is what Louise thinks. Louise and Mark have worked together in London, and it is clear that Mark has strong feelings for Louise. The audience later learns that there was not an atomic bomb explosion and Mark had in fact kidnapped Louise, his teenage fantasy. At first she is appreciative of him for "saving" her, until he then insists on playing Dungeons and Dragons - when she resists he begins to deprive her of food. "Free of the social pecking order that defined him as the workplace misfit and her as the alpha female, he tries to strong-arm Louise into showing him respect" (https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/may/24/after-the-end-theatre-review). Mark uses the situation to exert his power and dominance and rapes her and snaps the key to the shelter. Eventually, she manages to escape and he gets sent to prison.

Realism & Naturalism (1) - Stanislavski & "After the End"

In today's lesson we started work on naturalistic drama. We discussed Stanislavski and what we all know about him so far; having learned a little bit about him for GCSE and doing a research blog for previous units (http://lornaclarkra.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/stanislavski.html) I already knew quite a lot about him. I really like realism in plays, as the audience becomes engrossed in the performance and feels a connection with the characters (as the characters are believable). I personally think that method acting is not for me, but I do find it helps me to create thorough back stories and assign colours to characters (for example, if the character I am playing is very innocent and naive I may choose white or pale pink, whereas if I was playing a provocative yet mysterious character I may choose a deep red). By assigning colours to characters, I find it easier to snap into role by imaging (or even looking at) this colour before the performance begins (as well as thinking about what has just happened to my character).

We also discussed Stanislavski's three key words to becoming a character:

• Mind: refers to what is going on in the characters mind. To understand this the actor will have to do research - discover (or create) their background, consider relationships and consider what has just happened to them and how it will affect their state of mind. 
• Feelings: refers to what emotions they are experiencing. To make the characters emotions convincing, an actor will have to immerse themselves within the emotion. An actor can tap into their own emotional memory, as it were - for example, if a character has to feel grief, then they can think to when they experienced a loss
• Will: requires you to think objectively. For this, an actor could use Stanislavski's method of "the magic if" - for this, an actor asks themselves a series of questions regarding what their character would do/feel in different scenarios and what would have happened to them had they got to this location sooner/later.

I found this discussion very useful as I will now use these methods, as well as my own colour method and writing exercises (i.e. creating a back story and writing in role), when creating and then developing a role.

We then split into pairs to put what we have learned into practice. Ollie and I were given the first 12 pages of "After the End" by Dennis Kelly. We did a quick read-through and then wrote down the first things that came to mind. We knew the location by reading the stage directions, but we then tried to establish the relationship between the two characters, Mark (M in my notes) and Louise (L in my notes). We then added a little bit of staging (sitting on the floor and making natural movements as and when - i.e. not acting while acting to look as natural and therefore believable as possible).

 At first, we admired Mark for saving Louise and felt sympathy for both of the characters due to the horrific situation they are in. However, when reading it again, we felt a little bit suspicious of Mark due to him avoiding answering questions with a definite answer, seeming worried when Louise states that she remembers "pieces" and that a pub wall "sheltered" them from the atomic bomb explosion... This then lead us to believe that maybe there wasn't an explosion, and Mark had in fact spiked her drink at the pub and kidnapped her. To see if we were right in thinking this, we quickly looked up a brief synopsis of the play, and discovered that our suspicions were in fact true. When we then performed a section of our extract to the others it felt really uncomfortable for us, as we knew what was really happening. However, despite the scene now feeling creepy, I had to play my role in a naive and trusting way (as at this point my character believed Mark) as the audience had to believe Mark as well at this point.

I enjoyed performing this scene, as I enjoy naturalistic drama (though I find it a little bit tricky as I'm used to Musical Theatre and "theatrical" drama!). I enjoyed the challenge of having so many lines that overlap in one scene and having to make each line audible and believable at the same time. I also liked the challenge of having to make my movements naturalistic, whilst having difficult lines to focus on. I was conscious of my movements, as I wanted them to look natural, but consciously thinking about my movement was the worst thing I could do - as I should have just moved without conscious thought and therefore just reacted naturally! I am looking forward to continuing with this script and learning to act as naturalistically as possible.