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.

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.