The Wardrobe - Week 5

3rd February

This week we looked at Brecht and how he uses Epic Theatre, we looked at his life and how he used theatre to shock people not just blind them with some story for a few hours which they would soon forget the moral of, he wanted it to be real and memorable. To look at this we got into politics and how that would be a possible thing that Brecht might have looked at had he been alive today and sectioned off into groups and were told to come up with a song or rap of some sort on politics and our ideas on what we were annoyed about and in this we used education as our base coming up with a rap and ending it with a quote from

Einstein - If you judge a fish on it's ability to climb a tree it will spend it's whole life thinking it's stupid.

This was our way of trying to say that not everyone is an academic and that a lot of us as actors in training are more suited to the arts but the way that the education department in the government is going is taking us away from what we are good at because they are blinded by academic success when not everyone is going to be good at it.

In the afternoon we came back and worked in voice we again partook in a few of the groups personal vocal warmups that they had come up with and provided backing evidence to. This week was also my turn to present and so I did, I used a few techniques that I had found from going to different places of drama training and others I had found from the internet and from my singing teacher and combined which ones I found the most useful and after leading and partaking in the vocal warm ups I felt much more ready for the day.

The Wardrobe - Week 4

29th January

- The Wardrobe

• Today we began by looking at our scenes and how we were going to start working at them and seeing how they could start to come together, it was also the first opportunity to start working on our scenes using the system of Stanislavsky.
• Looking into what we were doing we found that working on a bit of staging was key because we were quite literally just making small steps to show a stage and that didn't seem right at all.
• Second we looked at how the character might be feeling in the scene and what would be going on behind the facade of the actual character such as where do they come from and what effect does their background have on it.
• The back story also came to light when we realised it was set in liverpool and needed to think about accents to which both Alicia and i were a bit taken aback as our accents weren't necessarily up to par but being it the beginning of the rehearsal process we decided that could wait until later.
• We started to also work on Beats and used them in our scene we went through our entire scene and worked out when we thought there ought to be a beat and put them in, after this we then sat across from each other and read our lines with the beats, just saying the lines within the beats and read them to find the underlying signs.
• When we performed these to the class we found that we were far too fast with delivering the lines with the beats and meant that we were also rushing the scene when we were actually performing it normally, it gave us a lot of food for thought.

30th January

• Today I came into the Drama Studio and didn't quite know what to expect, I knew as a group we were going to do a workshop with Karen but I was still undecided as to what we would be doing. As soon as Karen walked into the room we were asked to put away our things and stand in a space within the studio, then to lie down on the floor and work on the first state.

1. Awakening - Slight movements such as waking up in the morning. (Impatience, Agitation, Boredom). I led down on the floor and the lights were dimmed, lying down like this in a relaxed state with little light really brought on the effect of sluggishness and a reluctance to want to create much movement or at all to get up. 
2. Drunk - Heavy un supported body. (Drunk, after a fight, drugged, zombie). Moving up from the awakening state to the drunk state took a lot of energy as you had adjusted yourself to lying on the floor in a quiet and calm state with almost no movement. The heavy un supported feeling was quite easy for me to obtain as i just took on the state of mind of only having just woken up and not wanting to actually be up.
3. Toddler - upright and free and a curious energy. (upright up but still wobbly and un supported). In this state i felt as though i was lower than everyone else because i felt in-superior being unable to move as freely and easily as i usually would do and in my opinion not only gave the appearance of being a lot younger but the personal feeling of that as well which made the transition a lot easier because i could feel the atmosphere that went with it.
4. Neutral - A reserved and private/professional state. (no story or hidden agenda). This state had almost no effect on me as i didn't feel any specific mind set that went it the actions and atmosphere and to me that achieved the neutral state i was in a neutral position as an actor.
5. Someone's watching you - The first possible stages of paranoia. (Paranoia, Waiting). In this state i began to become more aware of my surroundings and actually noticed a few things about the studio that i hadn't before such as that there is an eye drawn on the floor and that the mirror had been put back onto the vanity that we used in the orestia. i found that this state really quite dramatically changed the atmosphere of the room to a heightened sense and that also affected my own personal reactions.
6. Definitely someone is watching you - Real paranoia and fear set in. (Fear, Paranoia). In this state i felt quite shaken and actually began to shake i could feel the raw emotion that was coming from this unseeable atmosphere that the group was creating and i didn't like it and out of instinct i became the same and my emotions heightened and were on death con level 10, my breathing became more shallow and actually made me feel slightly dizzy, they were quite extreme actions.
7. About to catch the ball - The hang in the air moment. (Anticipation). This was the moment when there was a very high level of anticipation and waiting and that made you rock on the balls of your feet ready to move at the slightest thing that was going to happen it was a lovely moment and kept you quite literally on you toes.
8. There i a bomb in the room - A tense moment of the unknown. (Stillness, Mania). This moment i felt was overplayed by the group and was a bit more like a cartoon than real life. I felt that this moment would have been portrayed with complete stillness and tranquility as i didn't feel it was realistic for everyone to majorly panic a few people in the group including myself edged to the corners of the room and tried to keep themselves to themselves and tried to deal with the news alone.
9. The bomb has gone off - A moment of helplessness. (Helplessness, emotionless). In this moment there was almost utter panic within the room and again i didn't feel it was necessary it was almost like a circus. Again i wanted virtually no emotions just sheer panic and with sheer panic comes absolute quiet for at least a long time it's never complete panic in a real situation, i felt that the panic needed a few minutes minimum to set in and realise the actual situation and then to act upon what was actually happening within the space.

• To end the day we worked on the Dido scene with Yaz as she is doing the monologue of Dido and we sat in a semi circle around her so that she could interact with us but also so that we could see all sides of what was happening. Yaz used the words and their possible meanings and attached specific words to each of us so that she could use us as  focus points. Then as her focus points we were to nod if we honestly believed what she was saying and that we could feel what she was trying to convey through her monologue to us. Through doing this i felt it helped with the scene because it gave Yaz a chance to see how she could make things believable within the monologue.