16/10/15
To get in to the mind set of seven year olds again, we began our lesson by doing a Show-and-Tell. Each of us, as our child characters, had to bring in something and tell the rest of the class about it. I brought in my Les Misérables jumper and spoke about it (making my teacher laugh as Les Mis is our next school show), saying how "when I grow up, I'd like to play the part of older Cossette because she's a soprano and my singing teacher said I'm a soprano" (also making my teacher laugh as auditions for the show are being held in a couple of weeks).
After we all showed our items and spoke about them, we went back to our scripts. We had already read the beginning of act two, up until the adult section, so we decided that we would get this section up on its feet.
20/10/15
We began this lesson by sitting down and reading through the adult section. We decided to do this first as to ensure we all understood our characters, and to clear up any possible problems. Next, we got the adult section up on its feet. We initially tried this scene with a long table (a line of chairs) at the front of our performance space, whilst still using the three spot lights. However, we found that the long table was not effective, as we all ended in a straight line as well and we weren't sure on what to do, making the section rather static. To rectify this, we changed the one long table into three square tables. One table (DSL) was where we imaged the wine to be, so whenever anyone had a line involving wine (for example, my line: "Not yet, not yet. Mulled wine first"), they would go over to that table. Another table (DSR) was where we imagined mince pies to be, as to establish where certain characters should be positioned. Our final table was positioned in the centre, but slightly further back than the other two tables. This table was for characters who are having conversations that are NOT connected to mince pies or wine. We thought this was needed because otherwise all movement would be around two points, so adding a table in the middle allowed constant movement across the stage more naturally.
22/10/15
Today we ran our adult section again to get a better understanding of our adult characters (as we have spent a lot of time working on our children characters). We then did an exercise to understand the sub-text in this section. This exercise involved us running the scene again but clapping to pause the action, so we could say what our character is really thinking at that moment in time, and then we clapped again to start the action from where we left off. This exercise was particularly useful as not only did we get a better understanding of our characters thoughts and feelings, but we got an insight to what other characters were "really thinking".
