My contemporary piece is from the play Bronte by Polly Teale it was written in 2005 and follows the lives of the Bronte sisters and how they felt about their own situation and lives as women in the 19th Century. I chose this speech because I found that what Anne Bronte questions is exactly what she needs to question as a writer and as a woman in a society that disagree's with a woman thinking this way. I loved the way that she is passionate about the smallest of things and takes note of the insignificant things and turns them into something that means a lot to her and to how she sees life.
I began characterisation with looking at reading some of the Bronte's novels such as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and finding how the characters within the stories are possibly related to either how the sisters themselves felt or how they saw other women and men of the time. I also used materiel from the history books and historical clothing to see how the clothing of the time would affect how they would have walked, sat and stood. Finding that a corset would of course restrict a lot of their movement and how they would have spoken as well, the corset causing constriction of the chest and only allowing a small amount of movement. To practice how I would stage this monologue I began with the research above and then practiced my own movement and how I could adapt my own self to embody Anne Bronte and how her movement would also reflect how she was feeling and how those feelings would come out on her body. I also read up on Anne and watched documentaries about her life and how it would have been, what her daily life consisted of and what events had happened in her life to shape how she is in this monologue and her ideas on how we as human beings act and what in life we refuse to acknowledge and try our best to prove wrong.
In the performance I undertook in the mock audition I felt quite connected to Anne as a character and as a person I could almost feel her influence rubbing off on me as I was delivering the lines. I also felt that I managed to keep the movement to a minimum as would be expected of Anne with the restriction of the clothing of the time and yet still portray the emotions and ideas that are running through Anne's head and that she has to confess to her sister Charlotte. Overall I felt that the performance itself gave over what I wanted it to but could still be added to by a little more variation in movement.
Anne
Name: Anne Bronte
Age: 28
Family: Charlotte Bronte (Sister) Emily Bronte (Sister) Branwell Bronte (Brother) Patrick Bronte (Father) Maria Bronte (Mother) Elizabeth Bronte (Sister) Maria Bronte (Sister)
Anne was born into a large family as the youngest of seven siblings the two oldest having died very early and her mother passing away when anne was only one. She and her siblings were then brought up by their father Patrick Bronte who kept them all close to home in the parsonage of the church where he was the curate, from there Anne and her siblings all began to write their own stories to escape from the lack of interaction of other children their age they had, this was due to the lack of hygiene of the area and a lot of the children carrying disease and after Patrick Bronte had lost two children to disease before he was unwilling to loose another. The Bronte sisters also wrote under pseudonyms to get their work published as it was uncommon to have a woman's novel published in that era, not just because it was written by a woman but also because it wasn't seen as decent for a woman to be writing stories as it could put ideas into their heads.
No comments:
Post a Comment