The Wardrobe - Post Performance 3

This week we came back and got stuck straight in, over the easter holidays I had been watching the film version of Henry the fourth part one by william shakespeare and from this I remembered how Prince Hal was publicly humilliated by his father for his actions and was then slapped by his father and this drew my attention back to the script in a new way I saw genevieve in a new light and maybe she was upset coming into the scene because the same turn of events that had happened between prince hal and henry the fourth had happened between genevieve and her father and that he had slapped her for disobeying his orders to accept a marriage proposal that would aid him in his social standing. I then thought in the fight scene that genevieve would go to slap whinnie because she was influenced byt her fathers actions.

The Wardrobe - Post Performance 2

This week began with looking at other schools versions of The Wardrobe and how our production differed from theirs, through looking we found that our version of the production was a lot more grounded than the others. The other productions useds a lot of modern ideas within the realms of theatre, using ideas such as clear lighting or just lighting to represent the main parts of the wardrobe itself. There was also a consistency of people wearing solid colours such as simply just white or black, there were a distinct lack of costumes in many of the plays which helped to determine which eras they were from and gave them character. I prefered our production because I felt it had a sense of realism to it and that to me makes it more of a beliviable performance and show.

Today began with receving our grades for our overall sections, I wasn't pleased with the grade I got because I wanted the top grade and I felt a little down about it untill Karen our team leader said we had a chance to raise our grades if we did the work this week and the week after easter when we are performing at the capitol theatre in Horsham, this in a way hit me quite hard and I felt that I had to work harder because i'm determined to get the top grades even if that  means gving up my free time. In  working through the list of five things karen wanted us to try I found that I wasn't giving enough emotion to Genevieve and that I needed to tap into how she would be feeling and convey that more clearly to the audience. I used personal experience and a dash of stanislavsky to acheive this objective and I could feel the difference as the character and I was almost in tears with the amount of emotion this was evoking from me, it made the scene feel more real and made Genevive expose her vulnerable side and how she is acttually feeling about Arthur and how much he means to her.

The Wardrobe - Post Performance 1

This week began the discussions as to what we were going to with the show when we tour it to Horsham on the 25th of April. Theses discussions included which scenes we would cut to save time as we are only allowed  to perform for 45 minitues there, the first thoughts I had were to cut the Dido scene because it wouldnt effect any of the other scenes but not many people agreed with this because it was such a good scene, I could understand this because it was such a powerful scene. We then looked at getting rid of scenes three or nine and I felt they couldn't take either of these brilliaant scenes because they were so tense and yet so poignant and gave you a lot to think about. I then suggested scene two to be cut because I felt that it made the beginning of the play sometimes drag with scene on before it there wasn't any tense moments to it and it wasn't as directly effective as the others, the scene also wouldn't  effect any of the other scenes with continuity. We are now on our final decisions about what we are going to do with our play. As a group we went through the play taking off senes two and three to see how the play look without those scenes and how we felt about the play without them. Karen our team leader chose to cut scene three because it wasn't suitable for the staging because when caryl is  struggling there is too much space for it to be beliviably small enough for her to panic in. I was dissapointed that we would loose scene three because I felt that it was such a serious and tense scene and I love a tense and dramatic scene, I also felt that it was brilliant to have right before scene four because it goes from tense and dramatic and being unable to breathe to a happy and laughing scene and I felt it threw off the audience but in a good way, in that it didn't give them a chance to really evaluate and keeps them immersed in the play and slightly shocked.

The Wardrobe - Week 7

This week we came back from half term and were all quite tired and relaxed, this had a negative effect on the entire group as a whole, we began the day by all sitting in a group circle and having to take some paper and pens from the centre (pens and paper were a multitude of colours) we had to draw five images that represented what we found most stood out to us personaly in the play. I chose the wardrobe itself because to me it represents a stillness to the play and that although it moves around through time and the country, all the stories still take place in the wardrobe and I find that amazing, to me it's as if walls could talk this is how it would be. I then chose the dagger in scene one because Cecily wants to kill her sister because she gets to have what she could never have and in a way with a sibling I can relate to the reason that she nearly did this because there are times when we do want to dispose of our siblings, but in the end when it comes down to it at the end of the day we would never hurt them. Thirdly I chose the candles in scene nine because in a way I felt that they represented hope and saftey, this scene is completley lit by the boys candles and they seem to radiate the hope of their fears and saftey from the way they hold them close and find their way to the saftey of the wardrobe with the candles, they are beacons and guiders. The fourth thing I chose was the Bannana in scene two because I found that it represented the exploration of young people and that we have to explore a lot of things in our lives before we do anything big and in this case the wardrobe helps them to acheieve this objective. Lastly I chose the snow because snow is so pure and white and innocent and it's also very magical just like Narnia, it is a place for people to escape to just like the Wardrobe is for the children.

Looking more into our charcters I enjoyed using the stances technique because it allows you to take three solid states of your character, and find how it feels to be in that state as the character, I enjoyed it as a new way to help me find my character. We also began to look into Ennegram's as a way to look into your character, it gives the nine states of who we could be and certain numbers link to others in both good ways and bad ways, to me this was a bit like horoscopes just without the specific dates added to it. These methods helped me to finally find my character and to find her innermost feelings, and how to show those hidden feelings through subtle but also showable emotions, such as her status. Genevieve is a higher status not only because she is higher born but because she has had a hard life, she has never really felt freedom and this is why she seeks out Arthur Scott, because she needs that outlet and having that outlet jeopardised really challenges her to keep her status and she uses her hard mannerisms that she has accumulated through her life to do this.

The Wardrobe - Week 6

This week we worked on trying to find our character more, in the case of my scene I needed to work on where she came from and how that would affect her in this case she was from liverpool, so working on a liverpool accent was key. We worked (Alicia and myself) on the accents with Bradley from the year above and he helped us to nail this accent. I found this very difficult and kept going from a liverpool accent to french to italian to irish which didn't really help my cause. Instead we decided to keep my character in an RP accent and to make it seem as though they had only recently moved to the area and she still had her original accent.

Later in the week we worked on looking into how to stage the scene and found that keeping within the wardrobe wasn't as easy as was previously thought. We ended up working on trying to keep it in the singular place and that helped a lot and then with Karen's guidance we worked it out together.

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.