Commedia - Parts 1,2 and 3

Part 1: 
In the beginning of Commedia I found the stock characters to be more overly exaggerated than I had even dared to imagine and in a way it put me off wanting to learn and perform Commedia. My initial responses were that it wasn't for me as I don't think of my self as very comedic or possibly being good at any of that type of theatre and Commedia isn't just a comedic play it is Commedia and it's the beginnings of all theatre which also makes it even more daunting. Beginning to improvise Commedia made things seem even more confusing as I found it so easy to watch some of the others performing their little snippets of Commedia that they had come up with in less than ten minuets, and then it was my turn to come up with some piece of theatre in a foreign area to me. Things became a bit clearer to me when Kaz our team leader gave us a sheet with dialogue on it and asked us in pairs to make it into a form of Commedia, most of the group had already sussed out what it took to perform and create their own types of Commedia and I hadn't, this made me even more reluctant to even try, but I did. With Paige we did this piece of dialogue together about Perkins and Sir and trying out Commedia with a set script seemed to set things into action for me and I figured out somewhat, what I needed to do even though Kaz said there was more I needed to it was like lightening had struck my brain and even though I knew it wasn't a brilliant piece of theatre I had just performed it was a start and that was all I needed. Then we moved onto looking thoroughly at trying out the traditional stock characters and that was when I became apprehensive again as I was worried I was going to fall flat on my face, instead of falling on my face I began to find ways of performing the characters and having researched more of Commedia I found out why some of the characters are how they are and that made things easier to understand it was liking suddenly being given the back story to your character and I had my backbone. The characters I liked the most and connected best with were the following three: Harlequin, Columbina and Punch, these characters were all like my own personality in a way except for punch and it was only when I found out Punch's back story that I began to see some resemblance's and those were that Punch is weighed down by society and that's sometimes how I can feel and I can understand why Punch is so mean and condescending because it can sometimes be the only way to keep yourself going even if it isn't the best way.

Part 2:
In the beginning we had so many ideas about what our Commedia setting would be that we had filled the entire white board and we had to whittle it all down to one and that seemed like the biggest challenge we had faced so far. In the end we had the two groups one was doing Buckingham Palace and the other my group was between choosing a Beauty Salon and a Dating Agency and other than interviews for the Dating Agency we couldn't come up with any other ideas and that really held us back and really put our hopes for a good show down. Being a group of sixteen we thought why couldn't the two groups of eight just join together and all work together on one show of the Buckingham Palace idea. We then as one big group used the ideas that the others had come up with when it was just them doing the Buckingham Palace idea and then brainstormed ideas that we had come up with using and idea of kaz's doing almost speed dating but more speed idea making. We all came up with ideas for each character working on a scene with ours which meant we ended up with so many ideas and that gave the group a lot of breadth. In different groups we tried out different ideas my group consisted of the servants and that meant it was Charlotte, Paige and myself and we did a scene where we found out information about the Royals that they wouldn't want to be shared and that made things rather interesting, the strengths of this scene were that we managed to create some sophisticated comedy and made our classmates laugh which to us was a success the con was that we had no way to add to it and we ended up changing the entire scene the next day. The next day the outcome of the scene was that we all ended up jumping for the evidence of the Royal's indiscretion and then Bradly a Royal walks in and takes the evidence stating "I've been looking for that" and then we all look at the audience in horror.

Part 3:
We got to our final decision of Buckingham Palace by working through all the ideas that everyone had accumulated and shared between the group it was finalised when as a group we all decided to merge as one big group and became the cast of Commedia's Buckingham Palace. The characters are based on the members of the Royal family and typical house servants that the Royal family would have, we then assigned the stock characters to who we felt were similar to the actual real life people and worked on it from there, it was also a choice of which characters it was that we ourselves wanted to play and adhering them to the character and developing it further to make the two connect. We finalised the plot by as a group sitting around the whiteboard and writing the scenes down in numerical order and working on it from there, we then came up with other ideas and optioned them by using the base ideas we had come up with such as that Charles is missing or that the Queen's jewels are missing, each of these ideas gave us a lot of space to create sub plots underneath what was there. Problems were that we had so many ideas and bringing them down to our total of around twenty four but still finding new ideas. We found breakthroughs when we were experimenting with the scenes we had and were able to change and mould the scenes to what we found on our journey to the final cut of those scenes and it was even more amazing when people came up with these little ideas and those little ideas made the scene what it is. Overall the creative purpose has been challenging but also worth it and has brought us as a group closer together and also allowed us to share ideas and inklings in a much more relaxed way.